Kenny Dalglish Soccer Manager

Kenny Dalglish Soccer Manager from 1989 borrowed the name of the man who was then player-manager of Liverpool at the peak of English football. It was made by Eutechnyx, at that point still operating under its original name Zeppelin Games, and ours is the Commodore 64 version. Licensed sports names were a standard weapon for budget publishers of the era: a famous face sold cheap cassettes.

Your job is to haul a club from the Fourth Division to the top of the First. You get a squad of more than twenty players, each described by a simple numeric rating, and besides picking your eleven you also arrange the formation, placing players in specific positions and reacting to the opposition's shape — pleasantly advanced for the late eighties. Add transfers, finances and the season routine: pick a team, play a round, read the result and the table, dip into the transfer market.

The interface deserves a special mention. The game is driven entirely by icons and menus, with no typed commands — that sounds trivial today, but in a genre stuck in text tables it was a real step toward the modern football management game.

Honestly, it is a budget title and it shows. Matches are essentially a comparison of numbers, the tactical depth soon hits bottom, and after a while the seasons blur together. Compared to the later giants of the genre it is a sketch — but a fast, readable one: a round takes about a minute, so the climb through the divisions genuinely flows. The famous Scot on the cover is marketing; the game itself knows nothing about Liverpool or Dalglish's style.

You can play it on oldgame.cz right in the browser, nothing to install.