Football management games can be addictive things – eating up time with many stats screens and menus – offering the ‘thrill’ of managing a football team from the ground up. This is Footballl Management (TIFM) is the latest to hit the PSP as one of the cheap and cheerful ‘Minis’ which are proving to be welcome ‘bite sized’ chunks of gaming. So does this stack up against the more expensive alternatives such as the sublime ‘Football Manager 2010’?

Well the first thing you notice is that the team and player names are fake – obviously the budget wouldn’t stretch to bagging the rights to the actual ones. This leads to some mirth as you see line ups like the London Whites sporting players like a strike force of Defoi and Croach. The good news is that you can use the built in editor to change all the names to the real ones – which is worth doing.

The real meat of the game though is the stats of the players, and how these translate into the simulated games (which amount to looking at a top down pitch with a ball icon pinging about next to a text commentary). The good news is the that stats seem to be pretty spot on so it is the players you’d expect to see scoring and the teams generally follow the sort of form you’d expect.

You can pick to manage a team from the main English leagues (Premier, Championship, League One and League Two) and you’ll be tasked with managing both board’s and fan’s expectations, if you want to keep your job. You have your own AI Coach who you can ask to automatically pick the team for you if you just want to whizz through. During a match you can make substitutions or change strategy if not going well – or skip straight to the result if you fancy.

When not playing matches there is the serious business of buying and selling players during the transfer windows, scouting youth players, setting training regimes – whatever you think it takes to bring in the results.

It’s all pretty pick up and play friendly – and allows for those who want to spend 5 mins on the bus or those who want to pick over every detail for hours on end. The knack of selecting and managing the best squad, choosing the right tactics for various fixtures and coping with injuries and other wild card events feels nicely ripped from real-life. It’s reasonably absorbing. stuff and should please wannabe managers with tight budgets.

Verdict:

TIFM on PSP suffers by comparison to the more expensive options out there but I found it diverting enough to warrant picking it up and whipping through a part of a Season every now and then. Overall this is worth considering if you are a footie fan packing a PSP looking for a bargain.

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