Reviews

Overshadowed somewhat by the more familiar named but much simpler football manager , The boss never seemed to get the credit it deserved or the fame it should have had.

Released in 1984 two years after Kevin Toms more famous football manager , the boss took the game to a whole new level , it introduced a lot more depth and features to the management genre , such as actual weekly events which affected your squad or cashflow , goalscoring charts , you could even view other sides and actualy poach their star striker if you so desired !

You chose your team and were plopped down into division 4 , fighting all the way through to the 1st division and then if you were good enough to win it , europe beckoned for your superstars (however it was only a tiny bonus as you just saw the results , no actual gameplay). It was this kind of attention to detail and it always felt the programmers went the extra mile to make this game better than FM .

Although there were no match highlights , it is a very tense affair with the timer counting up to 90 minutes and goals for either side popping up alongside whichever player had notched it.

You could also check how other divsions were doing as well , quite a lot of calculations whizzed away inside the speccys CPU and it wasn't a slow game to play by any standard.

Perfectly enjoyable , great fun , deep and probably the best Football management game on the spectrum .

1984 - Peaksoft (UK)
by Harry Whitehouse

Probably the best football strategy game until 'Football Director' came to light.

With lots of new features that 'Football Manager' didnt suport in 1982 or even 'The Boss' first incarnation as 'Champions' in 1983.

Like with 'Football Director' there is no action scenes. And who needs them?
The only letdown the game had in my opinion, was the number of teams in each division, just 5.

Still very worthwhile even after the 'Football Director' explosion who spawned dozens of similar games.

It's a funny old game. Never more so than in Soccer Boss where it is not uncommon to win 3-0 and then lose 4-0 to the same team the very next week! Football was a rougher game in the eighties and you can expect to pick up 2-3 injuries a week, more if your opponents are Leeds United. Not to worry cos you can always dabble in the transfer market. Or should that be stock market? A player's form can change quite dramatically in the space of a few weeks so it can be quite profitable to snap up free players and wait for their value to increase before selling them on a few weeks later.
Soccer Boss is a fun game that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Judging from its average score on WOS I was hoping this would be really good, but in the end I felt underwhelmed with it. There's isn't a lot of usual wait loading to deal with which makes this different to most football manager games, but it just lacks that spark of greatness for me. Five teams in a league is a bit poor and I've played eight matches and haven't won a game yet, scored only three goals and one of my top players was transferred without my consent, and the transfer market isn't helping one bit as it mostly contains goalkeepers. It isn't really bad, it's just not the good football manager game I hoped for.