Soccer management

The sheer number of leagues makes for some interesting compromises, both within the game itself and in the real world. It’s almost electronic murder to attempt to force your computer to run every nation, every league, every cup – all at full detail with the largest database size selected for all. A more reasonable option is to set the database size to normal, select your favorite nation and set it to run at full fidelity, select the majors and run them at normal, and some other respectable soccer nations at low detail. The player also gets to choose which leagues each nation runs – you do not, for example, have to run anything but Premier League in England or you can select them all. It is a tiered format however, so you cannot select just Premier and League Two – you’d need the leagues in-between as well.

The real-life consequences of having so many teams and leagues and nations playing the world’s most popular sport is that players are quite literally commodities. Trades, big or small, as often involve money as actual exchanges of players. A team pays for the right to negotiate with a player, and then it has to convince that player to sign with it for a new contract. Consequently, if you are running say – Real Madrid, a Spanish team that tends to dominate its league – and are unhappy with the performance and contract of newly-acquired David Beckham – you may permit Arsenal to try to sign Beckham, but unless you asked for a player all you’ll get is money in return. Of course, what your compensation will be if Beckham leaves is set up in advance and negotiated between yourself and Arsenal, but given the nature of European football clubs, money seems to be the dominant theme. Then again, the sheer abundance of soccer talent and the apparent willingness of clubs to part with great players for nothing but money seems to make the system work.

It’s therefore quite a shock, as someone used to the North American system, to constantly try to evaluate the worth of offers made to me. It’s very difficult to part with a player getting essentially nothing in return, especially given that most clubs have healthy profits regardless. As with Eastside Hockey Manager, those profits can be spent on upgrading your practice facilities. Improved facilities will permit you to get more out of your players, both young and old. Poor facilities can also turn off potential new players from joining your club. If your team is also the owner of its arena, its capacity can also be expanded. All this depends on the good will of the board of directors, however.

An odd omission from WSM is the ability to delegate the actual running of the games to your assistants. They’ll do so in friendly matches but it seems that you must manage the regular and cup games yourself. This is even more befuddling since there is clearly such an option in Eastside. Fortunately, despite my lack of familiarity with soccer as it’s played at higher levels, it is not too difficult to find a decent tactic. Another plus in the handling of the games is the attractiveness of the simulation. It’s not EA’s FIFA in 3D – in fact it’s just a flat map of a field with circles representing the players, referees, and linesmen – but it plays out very realistically at all levels and all it takes is some imagination and experience in watching matches to imagine what’s going on. Though I do wish that the text description would stop calling out-of-bounds “row z”.