Reviews

Football Manager was the first soccer management game I ever played. And what a game!

Understanding the game in the time and age it was designed is fundamental in order to appreciate it. But even today (2008) I take great pleasure in playing this game, 26 years after release.

The game is entirely text based with only the highlights of each match being drawn in glorious BASIC. The player takes the role of a 4th division club coach/manager and is their task to... well, win matches.

The player chooses a team to start with and in each season they play the League and FA Cup matches. If the club finishes the season in the top places it will be promoted to the next division, all the way up to the first. Naturally a club can also be demoted.

Players can manage their team; buying, selling and choosing which players will play each match. A rather simply, yet effective score mechanism based on Skill, Energy and Morale, gives the player an overview of his team and its elements abilities and provides the needed strategic elements.

As the game progresses the player will face matches against all types of teams. A good deal of the strategic thinking comes from knowing what players to choose for each match based on their skills, current league position of his team and the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing team.

While on the lower difficulty levels the game plays rather easily, it's on the higher difficulty levels Football Manager really shines and where the player has to put much more thinking into each match and accept the inevitable loses. It's much, much, more fun and exhilarating to play this game starting at difficulty level 4. But definitely you should try levels 5(Expert) to 7 (Genius). You'll see your progression will not be so easy. But then... that's soccer.

Football Manager is a 4!

Most text-oriented strategy games have failed to see off the sands of time and Football Manager is no exception. It is tedious and lacks any real depth.
It was one of my favourite games in 1983 and took up hours of my time. The nostalgia buzz is undeniable - and the game can take a bow for all of the lookalikes that followed.

A win for iconic bearded icons.

Back in 1982 this game marked the birth of a new genre, of sports management games, that's still going strong to this day in a recognizably similar fashion.

As you'd expect, Football Manager is relatively primitive, written entirely in BASIC and with only a scant handful of options that allow you to pick your team and manage the club finances. The mechanics are fairly simple; try to pick a mix of defenders, midfielders and strikers, keep up your overall stamina by rotating the squad where necessary and deal with injuries as best you can. All in all, it strikes a pretty good balance between demanding too much micromanagement and giving enough options to keep your interest up.

One of the features of the game is match highlighs, which are animated with UDG stickmen. You'll see a player in a scoring position and they'll take a shot either to score, miss or get it blocked. Crazy though this might sound it actually works and you find yourself willing your players on. Whilst this part of the game is essentially random, you do get a lot more scoring opportunities by making good management decisions and building up a good squad.

Of course, this is far from a perfect game and fans of later examples of the genre will find it all a bit on the simple side. It's also tediously slow in parts, particularly sorting the tables after the results are in, due to its BASIC nature.

I used to play this in its Spanish version and I enjoyed it a lot ...

Try to promote from 4th division to the 1st was quite a challenge !!!

Lots of fun with this game especially if you are a patient player. Patience will get the best from this game.

I have played many football management games and this one keeps its value and quality.

What else to say about Football Manager ??? A true classic ! ;)

1982 - Addictive games (UK)
written by Keith Toms

For today's standards this game may appear to be very limited (well it is, of course!), but for a long time this was the undisputed king of football managing.
Than came 'Football Director', 'Tracksuit Manager', 'The Double', 'Professional Soccer', etc, all with some novelty to it and Football Manager was left behind.
Nonetheless it maintained a cult status and it's still visited and venerated today by lots of speccy lovers.
It was magical I may add, even though that word may not suit a soccer game. But any kid who played this in 1982/3 will know what I mean.

I still find the action scenes and the championship winner screen very funny today.
A spectrum classic and a genre creator.

Peak of zx spectrum basic programming.

I remember playing this game with my best friend, and having fun all day long. Then I got old and I begin to understand how to play properly :)

It's a simple game, but they got the balance very well. Everything in this game makes sense.

Balanced, clean, playable game play, and animated(!) graphics too.. What else do you want from a managing game?

a Solid 5.

Football Manager is an excellent game. If it can get someone like me (who's not really a football fan) completely addicted over the course of several weeks, then it's got to be doing something right.

It's just so completely absorbing and back in the day I would be up until the early hours, just having to complete the current "season". I could not go to bed until I'd found out whether my team had managed to get promoted or not, of course making me quite tired the following day.

The only reason I don't give it a five though is that I'm completely partisan. I grew up with Acorn Electron version which I absolutely loved. And now in 2012, I choose the BBC version, and I've got a snapshot of a game I'm playing right now under the BBC emulator.

I just prefer the neat, professional-looking presentation of the textual data on the BBC/Electron versions.

This is not to take anything away from the speccy version which is undoubtedly excellent - it's just a case of whatever version you were brought up on, I'm sure!

No doubt if I'd have had a speccy at the time, I'd have given this one a five. So I have to admit it, I'm slightly biased in this case in favour of the Acorn machine versions.

When you think of Football Manager you think of the match highlights featuring udg matchstick men lurching around the screen. Despite the crude graphics it was a great feature and made for some tense and exciting games. Another feature I like is the players energy levels which decrease with each game they play. Let it get too low and they risk picking up injuries. This adds a level of strategy as you decide whether to play your best team every game or rest key players against lesser opposition.
Kevin Toms masterpiece created a new genre and there soon followed hundreds of football management games. But none could match the brilliance and fun of this game.

When it comes to football manager games, this is widely considered to be the mack daddy of them all, and it really isn't hard to see why. It does look primitive and it definitely hasn't aged particularly well, the menus have a very basic look and you have to type 99 to continue and the match highlights feature little stickmen with rubbish goalkeepers. However, this is 1982 after all and back in 1982 this was an impressive piece of coding, especially the match highlights. Others have tried to emulate Football Manager over the years but very few have come close to matching it.

The cream of the crop! The first of its kind and still one of the very best of all-time.