A pretty good football business management game. Would more accurately be named Football Club Director. I can easily recommend it to anyone who enjoys management games, and especially to anyone who plays Football Manager and always wanted to try playing as the Chairman instead of the Manager.
See, unlike FM, where you manage the team in great detail but any big financial decisions are an endless struggle with the board, here you ARE the board but have limited control over the football side of the team. This means the main gameplay is deciding how to spend your limited finances. There's no transfer budget, no wage budget, no restrictions on building and improving stadiums, no restrictions on staff, no limits on youth spending, etc. You just have to choose what's best to invest in.
One of the main things you'll be doing, of course, is buying and selling players. Much like in FM, you need reputation to attract better players. Once on your team, players' value will increase when they play in matches. Negotiations are thankfully quite simple and straightforward, and there are no infuriating agents around to mess with you.
A pretty cool aspect of the game is the Youth teams feature. You have 6 tiers of Youth squads made up of kids in different age brackets, from 17-18 years old in team A all the way to 7-8 years old in team F. You can only bring those 17 and over into the main squad, but the ones you see in the younger groups are the ones you'll have available years down the line. You set a Youth budget at the start of every season and it determines how quickly the youngsters' skills increase and how talented the new recruits are. Youngsters with higher talent will grow their skills faster. While you can't really fill your entire team with home-grown talent and compete at the top level, you can get at least 1-2 top level players per season if you invest enough to get talented kids and let them reach their potential.
It's important to note that once you bring a youth player into the main squad, and this applies to everyone else in your main squad too, you won't get the quick skill progression available in youth training. Regular skill training for the senior squad is almost ineffectual, and most of the starting 11's training will be focused on recovering their fitness/condition after matches anyway.
However, there are 2 factors that offset this. First, there are training camps at the start and the middle of every season. These cause random increases in skill for a few players. The impact depends on which camp you go to. The basic camp, in Germany, is free and provides little benefits (sometimes no increase in skill at all!). Other camps cost way more than a small team could afford, so you'll only be able to use them once you get rich.
Second, at the end of every season, some players will gain a fair amount of skill and others will lose some. I've not been able to figure out how exactly the game decides who to buff or nerf and by how much.
Another prominent feature in the game are stadiums. There are tons of options for them, including type of stand (standing or seated, roof or no roof) and number of seats for the 4 sides of the stadium; different ticket prices for the different types of stand; VIP sections and catering; internal upgrades like pitch surface, floodlights, loudspeakers, toilets, TV screens, refreshments, security, etc.; external upgrades like bus stops, tram lines and train lines, roads and parking lots, restaurants and merchandise shops, training fields and youth centers, doctor's offices and business offices. Overall, a lot of the gameplay is about how to manage your stadium. Upgrades are expensive and money is tight, so choose wisely what to invest in.
What's probably a dealbreaker for many people is that there's no match engine. You get a video on every goal opportunity, but other than that it's like playing FM on Commentary Only. Personally, I'm completely okay with that. It lets you focus on the long-term growth of the club rather than match minutiae.
And speaking of long-term growth, there's a lot of that. The game features only one league system, a semi-realistic German one, with 8 tiers. Those at the bottom are so far from those at the top that we're talking orders of magnitude. People who like to take super obscure teams in FM and turn them into world champions will probably feel at home here. For extra zero to hero potential, you can found your own club, with not a single player, no reputation to speak of, a tiny stadium with no upgrades, and some starting capital.
It's also possible to just take over management of a major team (You can take any team from any of the 8 tiers), but that isn't very appealing, as there's little growth possible.
Another thing worth mentioning is that tactics aren't deep. You only choose a formation. Basically, choose the one that lets you have the highest total skill on the field. Players don't have any positional ratings outside of GK/DF/MF/FW, so players in those 4 groups can be used interchangeably. Other than that, you have an aggression setting, which, as far as I can tell, makes your team play a bit better but also get injured and booked more. And the final tool with which you can influence a match is the win bonus, up to €20,000, to be shared among the players if they win. Only use it for really important matches while you're still small.
Now, onto the game's problems:
First and foremost, there's an unbelievably stupid "feature" that would much more accurately be described as a bug. See, one of your few sources of income is selling merchandise. You buy it from the manufacturer, set a price, and sell it primarily at home games. But, I'm not kidding, if you have any merchandise left in stock at the end of the season, it's just gone for good. You get no compensation. And you can only buy merchandise in the first 15 days of a season. This means you have to save at the start of a season, buy lots of merchandise, then speed-play through it to the end, then look at how much merchandise was sold, then load the save from the start of the season and try to estimate how much to buy for real. And you have to do it EVERY SEASON. I just went "♥♥♥♥ it" and decided to use Cheat Engine to give myself some money instead.
Another stupid issue with the game is that while it's possible to change the soundtrack volume when you start a game, there's no way to change the volume of the main menu music, and it's waaaay too loud. So much so that I mostly just disable my PC's sound entirely before starting the game, so I don't have to turn the volume down then up every time. What's more, I'm fairly sure the different tracks aren't normalized, but it's hard to tell when they're so loud to begin with.
Also, even in-game, there's no way to change the volume of sound effects.
Yet another stupid issue is that it's impossible to exit to the main menu or to load a saved game while in-game. You have to exit to desktop, then start the game again, then load a save from the main menu. And every time you start the game, you have to click through a ton of screens, for no reason that I can imagine.
An annoying issue is that it takes a very long time for the game to save and load, especially for a game of such relatively limited scope. Usually I just get up and do something else while I'm waiting for it to save or load.
A further issue is the UI, specifically exiting menus. The X button with which you close most menus is much too small and hard to click, so it would have been very useful if the right mouse button had the same exact function. But instead, the RMB takes you all the way to the game's main screen, closing everything.
A minor issue is the poor translation. Sometimes funny, rarely confusing. Somewhat breaks immersion.
Overall, the game's strengths significantly outweigh its weaknesses, and I find it quite enjoyable.
