Football Manager Live

Football Manager Live

Put your money where your mouth is in this online football management simulation that puts you exclusively head-to-head with human rivals.

There’s a big difference, we feel, between what you might call a football nerd – or ‘Statto’ – and somebody who knows football and enjoys talking squads and tactics. The latter probably won’t see the point of sitting in front of a computer, experimenting with the minutiae of football management, admiring how clever it all is in simulation. Real world football is better. You’d rather read the paper, everything from Non-League Football to the Monday round-ups in the broadsheets or tabloids.

But what if your precious know-how could be put to the test? You don’t even need to be the guy at the keyboard to begin with, just sitting nearby making the calls. Football Manager Live combines the most exciting aspects of its ‘Football Manager 20XX’ series on PC with eBay-style player auctions and Instant Messenger ease of communication to create a football-fanatic’s virtual playground. You get to name your team, and select your squad from real-world players. It shouldn’t matter that you can’t masquerade as existing clubs, because this all becomes very personal very quickly!

Before moving on to talk about the Football Manager Live experience, as it were, it’s worth pointing out that FML is a game made entirely by football fans for football fans and – in recent months – tested to within an inch of its life by football fans. We think it’s fair to say that Football Manager Live qualifies as state-of-the-art. The reason such a thing has not existed until now is that nobody other than creators Sports Interactive have been committed nor experienced enough to try.

Shortcomings? Well, if you’re expecting a game that looks like FIFA 09 and trots along faster than Theo Walcott (when he’s not injured) online, you’ll need to be a little more forgiving. We’ve been booted off the server twice already during a match, which isn’t ideal but something we’re prepared to live with in the short term. This will be sorted as the service gets settled. As for visuals, this is all about tactics and transfers and football banter between like-minded individuals, and as such is a thing of beauty.

The game includes a thorough but not too tiring tutorial that can be accessed easily at any time from a drop-down menu. Naming your team, choosing the home and away kits, then selecting players is straightforward – the latter can be done automatically for you if your knowledge doesn’t extend to players on the very far reaches of non-league football. Before the season gets underway you can decide what kind of manager you’d like to be: Tracksuit Manager (a great coach), Strictly Business (wages based on performance), Blackboard Manager (professor) and so on. These effect the development of your team as skills are unlocked over time.

After that you’re in business, pretty much, and finding a match is easy. You can tell the Match Finder whether you’d like to take part in a ranked game (recording your great success or dismal failure) or just a friendly. You can tell it how confident you are about tackling managers whose reputation is far greater than yours or about the same. A ‘Season’ in Football Manager Live lasts just four weeks, the first of which is pre-season finding-out time for novice and experienced managers alike. When you enter the three-week season proper though the gloves are off – if you want your team to survive you need to make money one way or the other. The fascinating thing here is that you could deliberately start off with training a strong youth team, and then selling off those with potential to bring in big-name players. Or you can bank on stronger players to begin with and aim for trophies. Either way, the two main addictive qualities of Football Manager Live are the live matches and the transfer market. Both have never seemed more alive… because they weren’t basically!

The potential of Football Manager is massive, especially considering that most countries in the world are currently taking part with more to be added (mostly from Asia). When we logged on this morning there were hundreds of managers already online with 2439748 all time matches played. That’s some community for day one!

What’s the catch? Well, you have to subscribe and this costs £22.99 for three months, £43.99 for six, or £72.99 for the year. That said you do get four months free out of the box. You’ll have a pretty solid idea as to whether or not this is for you by the end of all that (most online games only give you a month gratis).

Okay this is still very much Geeks-ville Arizona, but only if you can’t see beyond the application itself. Otherwise Football Manager Live is as honest as a meat pie at half time. We’ll leave you to discuss the health benefits…

4 out of 5