1st Division Manager

Rather old and simple football management game that simulates a single English division (first as it is stated in the title, but today first doesn’t exactly mean the top division).

We have only the very basic options available - training, team selection and transfers, the rest of the club parameters are more or less beyond our reach. For example we have the weekly balance of incomes and expenditure, but practically no tools to improve the incomes or limit the expends.

Simple animations with multiple endings are used during the match (similar to Anstoss, although not that impressive), which give very little information about the performance of our players.

Unfortunately only few foreign players are available (van Basten, Zenga, McCoist) and there is not even one international competition, so it is literally "1st Division only" manager.

The graphic aspect is far from being impressive, but it isn’t the main point of the game. 1st Division Manager can be considered "middle class" among such games - nothing special.

Anstoss / On the Ball - classic football manager

One of the most surprising German games - contrary to their typical, very strict, approach to any games, especially football manager ones, Anstoss had great atmosphere and introduced many elements present in today games of the genre that were a novelty back then. We run a Bundesliga team in local and international competitions. For legal reasons they were not the real names, but made up (f.e. HSV Berlin or SG Bremen), but the editor allowed to edit all of them. Same case with the player names.

match preview while no events take place

The player skills are described, as usually in German football managers, using only one value (between 1 and 10) and form factor (between 1 and 20) that together give us the match value for this player at this particular moment. The player statistics are almost non-existent, the training and other management options (including transfers) are very simple and limited, yet Anstoss was a great success and lead to production of English version of the game called On the Ball and its World Cup version.

match preview during the event

The reason was simple - the atmosphere. The matches are presented in a manner similar to that of The Manager, by using animations with different endings, but these are animations of considerable size and often are accompanied by funny comments or unexpected events. There are several elements that were quite novelty in 1993, like team of the week, interviews with the media, random events (some of them quite surprising) - all of it recreated the climate that surrounded Bundesliga in that era.

tactics setting

One of the "must-see" games that changed a lot in the genre and introduced elements later copied by other games, some of them even in today online football managers. Of course in today standards Anstoss is not that impressive, but keep in mind that it was published 25 years ago.