Club Football - The Manager
British are very proud of their football teams, to the point in which they made manager games more or less only about their own league. Club Football - The Manager was one of them, not the best, not the worst, just one of many.
While it was understandable that British companies were making mostly football manager games about their own clubs (after all it was their prime market), the number of games that were similar to each other and offered similar options made it difficult for new titles to breakthrough in the 1990s, especially if they were not on the same level as Championship Manager. Club Football - The Manager wasn’t on the same level, what is more it was in some aspects below its competitors.
First of all the graphic side of the game was its strong point - neat interface, clear icons, decent animations during the game. When you take a look at the available options it still looks quite good - you took control of the team, player contracts, transfers, club staff, even ticket prices and the stadium expansion. But when you play even a single match the overall outlook of the game changes completely - while the players have quite few parameters that describe their skills there is one thing that is completely missing and it is important thing in soccer management game. Imagine you play a game, your team had several opportunities to score a goal, you lost some goals and after the game you want to know what exactly happened and... you can’t. There are no individual statistics of the players (apart from number of games played and goals scored), so you have no idea who did well or who should not play in next match. There is summary at the end of each match, but the player performance is shown as a bar. Sounds good, but the problem is that value of the bar is not stored anywhere, so either you need a great memory or be clairvoyant to know who to choose for the next game. To make things even worse the bars are presented not next to players names, but next to their shirt numbers. Confusing enough? Nope, to confuse you even more creators decided that the shirt numbers are for single game only and are not individual, so in one match number 7 could be midfielder or forward, but will you remember which one?
Overall a not bad game, but lack of statistics made it a below average production that has no atmosphere and no basic data so you could make up your mind.
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