About FootieManager

FootieManager is not fantasy football, where you pick some real players and score points from their real matches. It is a management game: your club, your players and your decisions.

You pick the team and the tactics for every match. You train your players and decide who to sell, who to buy and who to bring through from the youth team. You balance gate money and sponsorship against player and staff wages and the club's other running costs, and you deal with the board when results go wrong. Every match is played out by the game, and how it goes depends on the choices you made.

Read how to get started ›

Each game world has its own leagues, clubs and managers, and plays its matches on a set timetable: most twice a week, and some every day. You pick your team beforehand, whenever suits you, so you do not need to be online when the matches are played. Then you read the match reports, check the table and plan for the next one.

You are not playing against a computer that is set up to let you win. The other clubs in your league are run by people like you, so every win is earned. You can play from a computer, a tablet or your phone, for a few minutes at lunchtime or an evening planning the season ahead.

Read the questions and answers ›

The free games are free to play for as long as you like, with full gameplay, and you can manage a maximum of one club across all of them.

The premier games are the full game, with extras such as youth academies, club staff, advanced tactics, more transfer options and match weather, and no adverts. They cost from £3 a season, and you can manage a maximum of one club in each premier game.

Read about the premier games ›

FootieManager has always been as much about the people as the game. Managers talk tactics, transfers and real football on the noticeboard and in the chat room, write the newspaper for their game world, and keep a board for anything but football. Some have been managing their clubs for years. Read what they say.

The idea for FootieManager came in March 1999, from a PhD nuclear physicist who had spent years writing computer programs to model the inside of atoms, and wanted to model something more down to earth (some might say harder). A small group of early managers played the first prototypes and helped shape the game, and after almost two years of work it launched in 2001.

It grew in the spirit of the early internet, with free games open to everyone, as friends told friends. It has become more detailed ever since, much of it from ideas sent in by the managers who play it, and it is still made and run by Wavesong Design.