As I child I bought countless football management games. Every week there seemed to be a new one released, most of them at a bargain £2.99 price. And like a sucker I would buy them, race home to play them and be bitterly disappointed at how terrible they were. Every now and again there'd be a half decent one, and World Soccer League was one of them. Although written in BASIC there's not too much waiting about. And this helps to keep your interest. The match screen features an asterisk which moves about the screen depicting the position of the ball, and there's also some goal mouth commentary. It's nothing earth shattering but it's a hell of a lot better than what a lot of similar games offered. Like most management games on the spectrum, there's not a huge amount of depth to it, but it's reasonably fun while it lasts.
1989 E&J Software (UK)
by Scott Gardner and Alan Clayton
Not bad at all, but a bit outdated for 1989. Could have been a serious competitor to Football Director if it had been released at the same time.
3,5 points
World Soccer League is another football management game which this time has teams from around the world compete in a league format of two divisions with 16 teams each. The top two teams in Division 2 are promoted to Division 1 and the bottom two teams in Division 1 are relegated to Division 2. There is also the World Club Cup to compete in as well.
The game begins with six British teams to choose from to manage, Arsenal, Celtic, Liverpool, Man Utd, Rangers and Tottenham, for curiosity's sake I selected Rangers for absolutely no reason whatsoever, you can alter your team name anyway, so if you're upset Kidderminster Harriers weren't selected, here's your chance to do something about that. After this your squad is shown, the problem though is there seems to be a shortage of names, for instance I have three Giles', three Grifiths' and two Smiths in my team. Regardless of who you select you always start at Division 2.
Now to the main menu. Here we can check our team to change the starting 11 as well as alter the position of one of your players, meaning you may change one of your midfielder to a defender, when i did this the player's form altered from 8.6 to 8.1 which isn't too bad but they can get a lot worse. Edit names edits the player names and the team names, so your Giles brothers could be seperated or you can name all your players Giles, choice is yours. As for the teams you can choose to update the list by replacing Dynamo Dresden to Schalke for instance. The bank shows your balance and allows you to get a loan, the fixture list shows your matches, the league table shows the current table after many minutes of calulating league data, opponents data shows the stats of your opponenets where you can compare them to yours, sell a player allows you to sell any player to another club, where after you enter their number a team will make a bid and you can accept or reject it, and transfer market allows you to search for a goalkeeper, defender, midfielder or attacker to try and buy. When you select your position you are given information about a player where you decide if you wish to bid for him, if yes you enter a fee and the club may turn it down but if they accept it you are redirected to the main menu. You can only visit the market three times in a week. Just like the old days you may only field up to three foreign players for a match.
So now it's on to the match which you go to via Play Game. Here we get the match screen, which is mostly green with a meter in the middle with the two teams on each side and an asterix to determine possession. The game features commentary which mentions who has possession and who is shooting. When your team is shooting it displays the player who is shooting, if it's your opponents it just displays the team name. At half-time you are redirected to your squad where you can make substitutions which you can do at anytime. Strangely you can also alter positsions here as well, so you may choose to turn a defender into an extra attacker and watch his form deplete spectacularly in the process.
So the match is over and we won 3-2 thanks to an 89th minute winner. After we're done with the match we are shown the player performances which tracks the good points and errors of each player, after which they are given a rating and the one with the highest rating is the man of the match. We are then shown the other results of the division, followed by the weekly finances, then occasionly you will get some news regarding your team in terms of injuries or suspension.
And that's all there is to it for World Soccer League. It's hardly the most exciting game in the world and no sound doesn't support its cause one bit, but it's still a good football management game, even if it seems quite limited with what it can do. But one of the best things I like about this game is there is little waiting in this game despite it being written in BASIC. Most football management games written in BASIC had you wait almost endlessly for menus to loads, but here the only one long period of waiting you have is when it calculates league data for the league data, apart from that everything runs quite quickly.
This is quite a unique game, in parts it looks like it is very cleverly programmed and in other parts it doesn't, but it does play quite well enough to get into it. It's not the most amusing game out there but it sure beats quite a number of other football management games.
