Sports management games have been an industry classic since the days of 8-bit micro-computers. Although the genre experienced its greatest moment of popularity years ago, nowadays it’s still in great shape thanks to Sega and its Football Manager franchise. If you love soccer and everything about it, on and off the field, with Online Soccer Manager you can feel all the power, joy and misery of managing the best teams on the planet, from the offices to the coach’s bench.
Analyze your team’s potential
The first thing you’ll have to do is to choose your favorite team and take a good look at its lineup. You’ll need to distribute your players on the field taking into account their experience and potential, decide the lineup, how you want them to play (counterattacking, using the “tiki-taka” method or playing defensively), and decide who’s going to be in charge of taking free kicks, corners and penalty shots.
Prepare for each match and don’t forget to visit your medical team to keep an eye on injuries and the recovery of players who have fallen in combat. You’ll also need to manage the team’s finances, redirecting part of your budget to the bank to collect interest. Buy and sell players through an ever-changing transfer market and have your legal team contest penalties they receive on the field.
Online Soccer Manager focuses on management, pure and simple
In Online Soccer Manager you’ll use a succession of menus to control everything. It may look simple at first glance but it’s endowed with a surprising depth for a free-to-play game (although it also offers in-app purchases). That said, you can forget about playing soccer or watching matches because this is pure and simple management.
Teams without official logos
Of course, this creation from Gamebasics includes the most renowned leagues, but due to licensing issues, it’s a little strange to see how some teams, like Real Madrid, do show their official logo, while other clubs only show their colors and name. This also affects the representation of the players themselves, since Online Soccer Manager displays their real names, but not their faces, except in some cases.
If you can overlook this detail —as well as the decision to make players wait in real-time for the next match— and you enjoy pure sports management, in the style of the classics of the early days of the genre, with OSM you’ll feel the thrill of taking your favorite team to the top of the leaderboards.
Translated by Sarah Odebralski
