What is an online football manager game and how do you play?

If you’ve ever shouted “I’d have taken that donkey off!” at a match, you already understand half the genre. An online football manager game is a game where you don’t control the players with a joystick: you manage the club. You’re the manager and the chief executive rolled into one — you build the squad, sign players, train them, handle the money — and the matches are simulated from what you’ve put in place. Your skill isn’t in your thumbs: it’s in your decisions.

The difference between FIFA and fantasy

In a traditional football game you play the matches; here you prepare them. And unlike fantasy — where you pick teams made up of real players and score points based on what they do in real life — in a manager the universe is its own: the players exist inside the game, develop according to how you train them, and are worth whatever the internal market says they’re worth. Your good calls and your blunders are one hundred per cent yours.

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The key word: online

Classic PC managers were played against the machine. Online managers changed the game with one idea: every club is run by a real person. That changes everything — the market has real supply and demand, the table measures people against people, and beating the league leaders means beating someone who’s thought about their team just as hard as you have. In ELDT, for example, every club in the competition has a human manager, and the matches are commentated live on Thursdays and Saturdays at 21.

What you do day to day

• The transfer market: buying and selling players in auctions against other managers.
• The line-up and tactics: formation, mentality and who plays where.
• Training: choosing what to develop each week — youngsters grow, veterans don’t.
• The academy: finding youngsters and deciding when to promote them.
• The finances and stadium: making the money stretch, and making the pitch pay its way.

All of that leads to the matches, and the matches lead to the table, and the table leads to the big prize in the genre: promotion.

How to start without burning yourself out

First: choose a game you can play in short bursts — the best managers are enjoyed in 10 or 15 minutes a day. Second: don’t sell anyone in the first week; get to know your squad before you start changing it. Third: read the game guides (in ELDT there’s the full Manager’s Guide). And fourth: pick a no pay-to-win manager, where the table measures management and not wallets — if the person who pays wins, your effort is worth nothing.

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So where do I begin?

If you want to try the genre with an Argentine flavour, ELDT is free, playable in your browser and you can start out managing a lower-league club in two minutes. The bench is waiting.