Game Reviews: FIFA Manager 10

There's a shrewd saying about football that does the rounds every time the World Cup swings into town: everyone, everywhere, thinks they'd be the greatest football manager ever after a drink or two.

It's fairly accurate, too. Switch on any football phone-in on a Saturday afternoon, and you'll hear almost every single manager - whether their team resides at the top of the league, or is languishing down the bottom - being ripped to shreds by the club's fans.

Managing to give a decent account of football management is just as tricky a task as the profession itself, some offering expansive, but often confusing, accounts, others plumping for far too simplistic a system.

FIFA Manager 10, much like EA's first foray into the genre, sadly weighs far too heavily towards the latter.

Style over substance

Of course, you know with any EA Sports title that presentation is going to be at a premium, and it's not overstating the case to suggest that FIFA Manager 10 has a superb menu set up that's as easy as it is logical to navigate.

The problem is, the game those menus are framed around never takes advantage of this simple set-up to offer a deeper take on the sport. Instead, play is stripped back to the point where football seems to have been left behind almost entirely.

All the standard options are available here, of course, from setting up your team's formation, strategy and training routine, to expanding its very number via the transfer market.

But said market is a little too condensed, the search option only allowing you to browse for roles - defence, midfield, attack - rather than actual set positions, such as right-back or centre-forward.

It's a frustrating over-simplification, but one that's entirely in line with the matches themselves. Though interspersed with a flashy highlights set-up (where set moves are played out in an attempt to represent the flow of the match), they pass far too quickly with little detail, your take on the final result more heavily influenced by the words of your assistant coach.

His view is designed to steer your tactics and training, but he very rarely settles, instructing you to focus on defence one week, only to say you need to lean on attack the following week.

Game of two halves

Even if you do heed your assistant's warnings, it seems to have very little bearing on the matches themselves. A quick phone reset mid-match shows just how random the results seem to be, one early game we played handing us a 2-0 lead at half time the first time around, only for the same team with the same tactics to lose embarrassingly on a second play-through.

As a result, FIFA Manager 2010 feels like a management sim without any kind of simulation, undermined by a complete lack of consistency.

While an array of official licenses will certainly do it no harm (all the big leagues and teams from England, Germany, Spain, and Italy are here), the fact football itself has seemingly been pushed to the sidelines means FIFA Manager 10 is unlikely to be touting its management skills come the summer.