Saturday Morning Gaming: Football Manager 2024 is this week’s Epic Game Store’s Free Game

Epic Game Store’s free game this week is Football Manager 2024. Metacritic gives it a score of 84.

Now, one thing that I’ll want to point out is that THIS IS NOT EA SPORTS FC 2024. You and your homies won’t be arguing over who gets to play Poland and who is stuck playing the Netherlands.

This is more of a game about managing spreadsheets and managing coaches. You’re not playing soccer. You are, instead, managing a team. (You can tell your coaches what to do, of course… but that’s not the same thing as controlling the players themselves).

Here are some screenshots that I lifted off of some of the players on Steam:

That’s the level that you’ll be playing at. You’re manipulating numbers, not manipulating your controller.

All the way back in 2009, IGN reviewed Worldwide Soccer Manager 2009 and gave it 2/10, complaining that the game was about managing a soccer team instead of actually playing soccer.

An excerpt:

This game obviously aims to provide the deepest soccer simulation experience possible for the sport’s most passionate and informed fans, but it offers little to nothing that would appeal to a casual fan of the sport or to the average videogame enthusiast. The menus are complex and difficult to navigate, graphics are terrible, the sound is non-existent and there is no traditional gameplay to speak of. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would prefer Worldwide Soccer Manager to FIFA 09 or Pro Evolution Soccer 2009.

Backlash was so great the IGN pulled the review and gave an apology:

After seeing the community feedback and having more editors look at the title, we agree with the readers that our original review didn’t give Worldwide Soccer Manager 2009 a fair shake. Unfortunately, our critical analysis of WWSM ’09 focused more on what the author wanted it to be rather than what the product actually was. We review games at IGN based on their own merits, and agree that it was unreasonable to compare WWSM ’09 with action-oriented sports titles like FIFA or Pro Evolution Soccer. Because of the unfair comparison, we have deemed the review unacceptable and have removed it from the site.

So, if you like management, you should check out Football Manager 2024. From what I’ve gleaned from Metacritic, FM2025 will be going in a bit of a new direction and mixing things up. So this is the culmination of 20ish years of refining and improving the Football Managers. If you’re into footy and updating spreadsheets, you ought to give this one a shot. I guess.

So… what are you playing?/

(Featured image is a screengrab of a promotional video of the game.)