Manage Your Football Club International

Robert Green can fumble as many balls as he likes – if England crash out or win this year's world cup in South Africa, the buck will ultimately stop with Fabio Capello.

The manager holds all the power and, with it, all the responsibility. That's why a management sim that gives you relatively few options is such a curious prospect.

Does the stripped-back simplicity of Manage Your Football Club International open up the process of management to a new audience or does its relatively unsophisticated setup make it something on a nonentity?

If you've sampled the original Manage Your Football Club then you already have a fair idea of just which approach wins out.

The premise here is near identical, save for the fact that it's national teams and their quest for World Cup glory that the on which the franchise focuses. Not that you have to head to Cape Town in the first place if South Africa isn't your cup of tea.

Manage Your Football Club International actually lets you choose everything from the name of each and every player (licenses sadly not making the leap – Joe Coli, anyone?) to the actual location of the cup itself. Still, if you fancy playing the final out at Dublin's Croke Park rather than the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg, then so be it.

As nice as such flexibility might be (in truth, it amounts to little beyond actually changing a few text files) it's the management side of play that breaks Manage Your Football Club International.

A little bit country

To its credit, Manage Your Football Club International makes every option available to you easy to access throughout. At the bottom of the screen at almost all times is a shield symbolising day to day team management decisions. Additionally, there's a ball, which takes you straight to the next match scheduled.

There's actually very little you can do with the squads, though. With transfers not a factor, your main job is to decide just who is in and out of the starting eleven and, perhaps even more importantly, what training they undertake between matches.

It's the latter that seems to have the most impact on just what happens when they walk onto the pitch. With training divided between five-a-side practice, tactics, set pieces, and free time, it's up to you just how much time your squad devotes to each activity.

One game at a time

It's only continued play that highlights what works best for each team, although your qualification campaign is often as good as over by the time the best setup becomes clear.

Not that you can draw much from your performance in the matches themselves.

Restricted to some simple (and overly replicated) lines of description, it's especially hard to gauge just how well your team has played beyond the final score itself. As such, making any kind of connection between your approach to team management and the results is rather difficult.

It's a problem that adversely affected the original Manage Your Football Club, with both games failing to extend beyond the basics to consider the wider spectrum of football management: interviews, press coverage, player morale, just to a name a few.

By simply ignoring its predecessor's failings, it's hard to view Manage Your Football Club International as anything more than a quick and not-so-subtle repeat of an already flawed management sim.

In essence, Manage Your Football Club International is little more than a swish looking, if ultimately short-lived, World Cup score predictor.