This game is a sequel of the Championship Manager saga, consequence of the end of the agreement between the distributors and the developers of the game. Although Championship Manager is still a saga in the market, the real engine of the game, the one that succeeded greatly in Championship Manager 2001-02 (CM 01-02) is present in Football Manager 2005 and in all its sequels (including the one in the present year); game distributed now and hopefully for next years by Sega. Isn'tl this alla fuss? See how stupid money is!

Both the old Championship Manager saga -until and including thel 03rd/04th season- and the FM one offer the best features available for such a genre of videogames (strategy, management simulator). You are supposed to be a football manager and since a team have contracted you, you have to manage a wide part of the economical and sporting team sides: conctracting players, setting their wages, roles and enganging them to the team, making them be competitive and happy -if they are sad or angry your squad can be quickly discouraged-, setting up the tactics, talking to the press for the fans; having verbal intercourse with the rivals or even the directive board; looking for staff like coachs or scouters, making your own shortlist of possible new signings, expanding the stadium, going through the roof against the players or the journalists, and an endless etc.!

As regard matches theirselves, there is a great way to take decisions when you are on them. If you want to you can see them in a 2D simulation and change players or modify tactics. You can set the speed of the match from very slow to very fast and of course you can skip the simulation obtaining the results directly.

You can apply for a new job in other teams or even in national squads if you have a good popularity; you can also try to stay in a club for several years to build a strong team.

Football Manager is addictive, pretty addictive. It can become an illness if you play it via TCP/IP with other players. It can be played in this way managing several teams of a same league so that players compete against each other. A war of signings or a comparison of careers make one feels an incredibly addictive feeling hard to get by any other videogame.

A little bad point in this game is that the amount of present data is so impressive -more than 200.00 players in FM 2005 if I do not remember badly- that the game advances slower each day of the game it passes. Even with a good PC -Pentium III or IV and from 512k of RAM on- the speed in the game is usually not good unless you personalize your own game and remove the uninteresting -and even interesting- low-priority data.

The game keeps on advancing when

you click on the 'continue' button. Then all the data is updated. The key to solve this is to play a fake game to test the real speed of the game in our machine and decide after two or three weeks of game how many leagues to include in our game.

There are also options like avoiding detailed data or setting the database size to large, big, medium or small, basic stuff to control the aspect of the gaming speed in FM.

Football Manager 2005 is the best game of its genre in my humble opinion. The Spanish PC Fútbol -a very good game but with some bad little details like managing the stock of food in stadiums mixing it with the economy of the clubs, or a bad gameplay talking about trainings or tactics- is likely to be the one below the game made by Sega. And talking about famous games like Total Manager for Playstation, I would say they all include only a few options that are hidden by nice graphics in the simulation of the game, something completely useless in a strategy game.

The best of FM: the experience that you can feel when you reach the top managing your own and humble team. Also the challenge of competing against other human players, participants of the same league as you.

The worst: after managing our club several years the speed in Football Manager can become awkwardly slow.