Football Manager 2006

Football Manager 2006 is a version from the era when an engine called Football Manager finally established itself in the genre after the division of the series. The manager receives a full-fledged club: tactics, transfers, training, scouts, finance and medicine. It’s difficult to understand everything at once, but the feeling of working as a real coach comes quickly. The match part is represented by a text engine with a visual diagram: you can see who is where, how the players move and where the gaps appear. This kind of presentation requires imagination, but it allows you to move through the season quickly and concentrate on solutions, not on the picture. Separately, it is worth noting the work with the press: journalists ask questions, and an unsuccessful answer can cost the morale of the team. Players, in turn, respond to promises made in the locker room, so promising salary increases is best done wisely. We are particularly pleased with the low hardware requirements: the game ran on weak computers and worked quickly, which was important for managers of that time. Reports and tables remained clear even after a dozen seasons, and searching for players did not require flipping through dozens of screens. That is why this version lived on home machines for a long time. The game looks modest even by the standards of its time, but the depth of the processes here was already serious. For those who value planning, this version remains interesting today.