The Soccer Game 2

The Soccer Game 2 is a football management simulation from 1990, the second entry in a shareware series. If you expect any football to be played on screen, look elsewhere: not a second of match action is shown. You have just been hired as a club manager on probation, and your playing field is a stack of tables.

The whole game runs in text mode and is driven from keyboard menus — no graphics, no animation, just screens of numbers laid out like a spreadsheet. You pick the squad, deal with the coaching staff and keep the club finances in order, and match results arrive the way they always did in managers of this generation: as bare numbers from which you reconstruct the drama yourself.

At its core the sequel is a feature upgrade of the original late-eighties game — more options, more detail, the same idea. In its day it was regarded as an above-average management title, and you can see why: it concentrates on decisions that carry weight and wastes no time on anything else. It is equally true that next to later managers it feels spartan; anyone raised on Championship Manager and its descendants will feel like they have stepped back into the stone age.

That austerity is also the charm. Text managers of this era are essentially board games moved onto a computer — everything important happens in your head. If you enjoy planning, budgeting and reading a league table the way other people read a thriller, this can still swallow an evening; if you need to actually see a goal go in, give it a miss.

You can try it at oldgame.cz, running directly in your browser with nothing to install.