Soccer Manager (Review)

Soccer Manager is a free to everyone, online football management simulator. Members can choose from a huge selection of teams, from playing in a traditional real life English league or managing a team in Spain, Italy etc. 2 New setups per day are created which usually involve a rush of people trying to get in straight away to get Man U, Chelsea and the other top teams. If your patient with this and try each day you'll get a big team sooner or later. There are other member's leagues from people who have become Gold Members (more in a second) and can feature all sorts of different league layouts and mixtures of teams.

It's simple to register with little difference from any other websites about. You can pay £10 for a Gold Membership which will allow you to manage up to 10 teams at once (free membership goes up to 3 at once depending on length of membership), and get to be the moderator for their own league, but this review is about the free section of the game.

Matches are played twice a week (usually saturday and wednesday nights) with the user selecting his team, formation, subs and tactics. Once the match has been played you can them go into a match report and see exactly what happened in your match in text format. Everything from possession, amount of shots on target, formations, line ups etc are included in here.

Player skill ratings are based on real life player performances (with ratings going from 60-99 generally, with 90 and above generally being international quality players), with the SM moderators reviewing different leagues and players on a week to week basis. A great tactic for your team is to buy young players that are doing well in real life but may not be very good in SM. You can purchase them cheap then if your guess is right they may get better and have a large sell on value.

There are many extra features such as player shortlists, a newspaper you can write your own articles for, top 20's for transfers etc, club and set up histories, and much more.

The game has a built in cheat prevention system to try and prevent people signing up to multiple accounts and taking more than one team in the same setup, or trying to buy/sell players between themselves. Occasionally a transfer that has nothing wrong with it will get blocked which can be frustrating. I just lost out on Benzema because of this.

The interface is easy to look at and even easier to navigate with all sections across the top of the screen with drop down menus for each one.

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