More gameplay

Worldwide Soccer Manager is full of local flavor options as well. You can change the currency in the game from the Euro to the Pound to the Dollar to even the Albanian Lek. Not only will the name and symbol of the currency change, but the game will make the appropriate valuation adjustments. Consequently, a player who costs $1 million euros will cost around $1.2m dollars. The game is equally at home with metric or standard/imperial measure, and can even display the temperature in degrees Kelvin if you are so inclined.

Not only are the club competitions represented, but the major Cups are represented too – Euro Cup, World Cup, two Champions Cups, the Olympics and more. Clubs compete in some of these tournaments, others are national meetings. The goals for the player as manager can be many – avoiding relegation to a lesser league, trying for promotion to a better league, making a stab at a Cup or even simply getting enough of a reputation to try for your national job or a job at another club. It’s all possible.

As coach and manager, you can take responsibility solely for the first team, or add your reserves squad and even under-18s as well. Otherwise, these tasks will be left to your assistants. It’s up to the player how just how much he wants to meddle with the day-to-day chores of his team, but there is no doubt that WSM 2006 requires far more attention than simming along in FIFA.

One more note should be made to say how remarkably bug-free the game seems to be. There are patches that apparently do address some bugs, but these are so minor that quite frankly I never noticed them in all my time with Worldwide Soccer Manager – or Eastside Hockey Manager for that matter.


Even as someone whose soccer knowledge is quite limited, the game is fascinating. It doesn’t have quite the same pull as Eastside Hockey Manager, but the additional features and the staggering depth of Worldwide Soccer Manager keeps me busy. Sometimes, it’s amusing to simply go through the rosters of top squads like Manchester United and comparing two players from the first team – one worth $20m, another worth $100k, but the former earns $3m per year and the other a mere $13,000. Is it even humanly possible to maintain camaraderie in the face of such income disparity? Just imagine: practice is over, so $20m man Cristiano Ronaldo drives off in his Ferrari while teammate Mark Howard begs for bus fare on the street corner. It’s such an unexpected source of entertainment, contemplating how these two actually get along in real life. This does bring up a point about the game’s bizarre behavior at times, however. Say you decide to take Mark Howard, that 19-year-old prospect who cracked the first team off Manchester United’s hands. You give them an offer, they agree to let you negotiate with Mark, and yet he doesn’t want all that much more money than he was earning in the first place. It’s somewhat bizarre.