With Football Director, you are the General Manager of the English Professional League team of your choosing. You are at the helm. You are in charge of the staff, players, lineup, finances, EVERYTHING. Take the team through the season, keep an eye on the transfer list (free agency). You can even ‘watch’ the progression of the game, though you have no input into the happenings during the game. Football Director includes 90 teams over 4 different levels of divisions (Premier division has 20 teams, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd each have 24 teams). There are over 480 players. In short, Football Director is a huge sports simulation.
WHAT’S HOT
Football Director uses a standard InstallShield-type Wizard to install the program on your Pocket PC. Setup is simple and straight-forward. I experienced no issues in installing and setting up the program, and I installed it to my storage card.
SETUP
Football Director is one addictive game. I have spent hours playing this game for this review. Several times I went to look up something for this review and ended up getting stuck playing the game again. It’s that fun. Let me give an overview of the game first. When you first load up Football Director, you see this screen. You can start a new game, load a previously saved game, change sound options, and exit.
PROGRAM FEATURES
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Load-up Screen |
Starting a new game |
When you start a new game, type in your name — you are the new general manager of the team that you select in the next screen. With Football Director, you can choose one of 20 premier division teams, or choose a team from one the three lower divisions (which each have 24 teams) and try to work your team up to the premier division.
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Select one of 92 teams(!) |
Main screen and Club menu |
This is the main screen that you will see between matches. This is your captain’s chair, your command center, your war-room, your … you get the picture. The buttons at the bottom are, from left to right, the roster, the current division standings, and the advance date button.
From the Club menu, you can check your status (your approval rating from the Board of Club Owners and from the fans), view the club accounts, view your teams fixtures (scheduled matches), change various match specifics, view contracts, specify your team’s training strategy, and club information. By checking out your team’s financial account, you can make sure that you are not going into the red too often, which has a way of upsetting the Board of owners.
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Club Accounts |
Club Fixtures (that’s Brit for “Games”) |
The first Premier championship that I won, I did it by keeping an eye on upcoming matches and resting my best players during matches against poor teams. But there is another way to pull up this screen that I’ll go into below.
Match specifics. Okay — this is where I was *really* weak. (Where’s my 3-4 defense?) Fortunately, I found that you don’t have to know too much about the matches in order to have fun with Football Director, and in order to have a successful club. I set my style of play to “Passing” and my marking (Defense??) to “Tight” and left everything else the same. This worked okay for me. One thing here: keep agression where it is. If you crank it up even a little, you will begin getting a lot of yellow cards during matches.
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Set Match Tactics |
Set the Match formation |
Match Formation. Okay, I’m clueless here as well, so I used a simple 4-3-3 (4 defenders, 3 midfielders, 3 attackers) formation. The formation that you choose here will need to be reflected in your roster. Also, note the number next to the formation name — 5-2-3(74). The 74 appears to be how well your team plays this particular formation (and perhaps how well they defend against it). You can increase this number through training.
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Match Roles |
Club Wages & Contracts |
The Match Roles screen allows you to specify which player you want to be captain, penalty taker, corner taker, and free kicker (from top to bottom respectively). The Club wages & contracts screen is a screen that I never look at, though it may be helpful.
From the Team Training screen you can change the breakdown of training percentages and you can also change which tactic you are working during training, and which set piece you are working on. Translation: choose which formation you need work on (I work the 4-3-3 until it stands at 99), and then, because my tactic is passing, I just work on passing. You can also change the breakdown individually if you want, but I never do.
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Team Training Screen |
Club Records |
From the Club Records screen, you can view your records, though I think there are some bugs in this screen. The record competitions (highest place, lowest place) was incorrect most of the time. Notice the average attendance: 0. You’d expect more from a $14 piece of software, much less $29.99.
From the Admin menu, you can view the Job Centre, view your team Youths, view the Transfer List, see the latest Team news, or visit the Bank to repay loans or borrow money.
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Admin Menu |
Get the best Coach possible |
From the Job Centre, you can view your coaching staff and the coaching staff that is currently available for hire. Notice in the screenshot that a 88 Coach and a 94 Physio are available. The first thing I would do here is hire those two and sack Woad and Salskjaer. You can also hire scouts on this screen. I’m not sure how much these affect the play of your team, but you will want to hire the best possible staff. After I took Chelsea through the Premier Division for several years, I decided to take a team from the 3rd Division. While in the 3rd Division, players and coaches from higher divisions will not accept your offers for hire. As I worked my team (Swansea C) up through the divisions, I noticed that once I reached the Premier Division (it took me 7 seasons to get up to the Premier Division) the available coaches still thought that Swansea was in one of the lower divisions. So my coaching staff stayed in the 70s but I was able to put together a pretty dominant roster nonetheless and even won the championship. From the Youth Squad screen you can view available youths on the youth squad. I never did anything with this, though I could see getting a pretty good lower level team using these youths.
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View your clubs Youth Squad |
Transfer List |
Ah the Transfer List. This is your ticket to the Championship. You can view all available players based upon criteria you specify with the “Search” button. After the first season (and during the first season), players will be cut and placed on this Transfer List — that is, they will be placed on the list and there will be no transfer fee. These are the players you want to grab up — even if you don’t need them. The computer run teams are pretty aggressive in going after players on this list. If you place one of your own players on the list, another team must pay you a transfer fee before being able to sign them. That means, you sign this player for free and another team must pay you, then, to pick that player up. I usually keep about 23 players on my roster, but whenever I’m able to sign a player off the Transfer list, I will. The Board will only let you sign 30 players, so I will sign up to 30 players and put 7 of those on the transfer list. At some point, usually before December, all of those players will be signed.
From the League Menu, you can change the in-game sound options, view the Help file, Save the current Game, Quit, view the Cup matches & Schedules, Monthly Awards (every month a Manager of the Month is chosen), view the leading players (scoring and discipline), and view the League matches.
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League Menu |
The Roster |
This is your roster. This is the screen that you get when you click the roster button at the bottom of the screen. When one of your starting players is injured, just replace him. You do that by clicking on the player to replace, and then click again on the player you want to replace him. From this screen, you can extend contracts, place a player on the transfer list, view contracts, view player stats, adjust your roster and just about everything you need to do with the roster.
The next button is the division standings button. From here you can view where you are in the league, but you can also click on a team and view its squad and its schedule. You can also click on your own team and view the upcoming matches.
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League Tables (Standings) |
Initiate and answer trade offers |
When you have a player that is playing exceptionally well, the computer teams may offer to trade for him. Actually, they offer to buy your player. This will also happen if you place a player on the transfer list (eventually).
When you approach a day with a match on it, you will see this screen. Here, I am Chelsea (currently 17th). From this screen I can choose to view the match or just go to the match results. Anymore, I just go to the match results screen.
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Match Day! |
Watch the Match if you want |
This is what the match looks like as you watch it. It’s just a running play-by-play with sound effects (crowd cheers, etc.). It’s pretty fun to watch the first couple of matches. The slider that you see is the speed of the match. Unfortunately, once you choose to watch the match you have to watch the whole thing — this isn’t so bad; a 90-minute match lasts about 4 minutes with the slider set halfway. After the match is played you can view the match results.
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Match Summary |
Team of the Week |
Football Director includes an inline help file. If you want more information, you can visit the Game Play page of Football Director’s website. If you are having problems, RW Software does have a support page on their website.
HELP SUPPORT
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