2025 is now in full swing, and we potentially have TWO Football Manager games to look forward to this year!
But while we are waiting for FM25, I’ve been looking at some other football management simulators from years gone by. In today’s review, I’ll be looking at an independently-made Championship Manager clone that was released in 2018, and which is now free to play on Steam!
So here is my review of… [hang on, let me make sure I get this title right…] Global Soccer: A Management Game 2018. That just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
BACKGROUND
You can find quite a few indie football management games on the Steam store. Many of these try to replicate the simplistic look and feel of the classic Championship Manager games, while putting their own spin on things. One such example was Retro Football Boss – a now-abandoned title from 2016 that tried to simulate football from ye olden days.
A year later, Global Soccer: A Management Game 2017 was released by Forever Young Games – which, sadly, has nothing to do with German synthpop icons Alphaville. FYG are based in Budapest, Hungary, and are headed by independent programmer Márk Kovács.
The main selling point of Global Soccer that you could manage anywhere you wanted, no matter how obscure the league. The original game from 2017 showed some promise and was followed up by sequels in 2018 and 2019. All three games have ‘Mixed’ reviews on Steam.
FYG later branched out into other genres, releasing a visual novel (Murder On The Island) and an action game (Bikerz) in 2019, and a roguelite RPG (City of Thugs) in 2021. For the past three years, Kovács has been working on both a turn-based strategy game (Tales of Chandar) and a dating game (Singles’ Generation), though release dates are still TBC.
Anyway, in April last year, Kovács announced that Global Soccer 2018 (or GSM18 for short) was becoming free to buy and keep – forever. Curiously, both its predecessor and successor are still on sale – at £8.50 and £7.49 respectively. But let’s download the 2018 version and see if it has any substance…
STARTING OUT
Obviously, this small Hungarian developer could not afford the licences for the major leagues, but that’s not a big deal. All teams and players have had their names changed oh so subtly (e.g. Menchester Uneted, Beyern Monchen).
If you can’t get your head around these wonky names, there is – luckily – an unofficial database update. The German fansite OD-Base has an extensive database with the real names of 4,500 teams and 25,000 players (plus logos and faces for the top players and clubs). All data is accurate for the 2017/2018 season, when this game was released.
There are three game modes available: Normal Mode, Fantasy Mode, and Classic Matches (more on that later). The Normal game mode allows you to manage in one of 20 major European leagues, with real (or at least real-ish) players.
However, Fantasy mode is where it’s at. Practically every country in the world has a playable league – from American Samoa and the British Virgin Islands through to Vietnam and Zambia. The only caveat with Fantasy mode is that ALL players are randomly generated.
For this review, I’ve taken myself to the Pacific Ocean nation of Guam, which is home to some of the best football club names going. The standard of play there isn’t very good – after all, it is technically an American territory – but this is quite an experience. You can’t exactly manage in such an obscure league on Football Manager without fiddling about with custom data files.
Just like in FM, players are rated on all the usual attributes from 1 to 20 – with the key attributes for their favoured position helpfully highlighted in red. But they also have a Skills rating, which is essentially an ‘overall’ rating.
WHAT I LIKED
GSM18 is a game that you can easily pick up and play. You only really need to worry about the three T’s – tactics, transfers and training. Selecting your team and tactics is quite straightforward, even if the ‘drag and drop’ method of assigning positions to your players can be a little fussy.
Training is very simple – just select a basic focus for each week, and the training intensity. You can also adopt different training sessions on each day, or use them to boost morale or give your players some extra rest. The latter might not be a bad idea, especially as players on this game can be quite injury-prone.
Processing through days is very quick, even with all leagues and cups being simulated in the background (yes, even those you’re not managing in). As such, you can whiz through a season in a matter of hours.
Having looked through all the major European leagues, the match results seem realistic enough, with all the usual suspects challenging for the top honours. Though my Pago Bay side had very mixed results, I’m inclined to believe that’s because there’s not much of a skill gap between all the teams in the Guamanian league.
Playing matches will evoke memories of Champ Man, with text commentary popping up as each highlight progresses. You can also switch to multiple different views during the game, allowing you to see match stats, player ratings, the full match commentary, or even just the summary of the key events. Lastly, the numerous speed settings allow you to watch the action unfold at a leisurely pace – or at 16x speed, which can complete a single match in less than a minute.
WHAT I DIDN’T
I do have a few gripes with the match experience. I find that a lot of yellow cards are handed out just for arguing with the referee. To be fair, refs in this game also have a tendency to flatly REFUSE to award corners, even if the commentary said that the ball clearly crossed the byline! Even Premier League referees aren’t this incompetent!
The commentary box is also a bit on the small side, so some players may struggle to read it. There’s also a fair bit of dead space on the match screen, which gives the game a somewhat unfinished look.
You can’t make substitutions when you’ve paused a match during a highlight. I can live with that, but what really annoys me is that if your centre-back gets sent off, you can’t move another player into that position to fill the gap. You’ll either have to play with a huge gap in your backline, or improvise by changing formation.
I would also have appreciated more input in terms of how my team plays. I can select the captain and set-piece takers, and the intensity that my team plays with, but that’s basically it. There are no options for choosing your team’s playing style, or anything else that even the most basic football management games now come with as standard.
Searching for players to sign can get quite messy, because the UI is so wonky and unintuitive. When setting attribute filters, the button that increases an attribute’s minimum threshold is to the left of the button that decreases it.
Likewise, the way that the game displays finances is confusing. For example, my star playmaker has a wage of “0.23 k p/week” and a value of “0.04 M”. Obviously, I know what “k” and “M” stand for, but if these values were displayed as “23,000 p/w” and “40,000” respectively, it would be much easier to understand them.
And then there are the player faces. This is perhaps the only football game on Steam that has uglier and less realistic generated faces than Football Manager – and that is quite some feat!
But on a more serious note, GSM18 is also one of the worst games I’ve ever played in terms of optimisation. This game was a real CPU hog, in that it would often take my processor temperatures north of 70 degrees Celsius, even when idle! For comparison, if I load up Football Manager and don’t do anything else, the CPU temps when idle are usually in the 40s or low 50s.
WE MUST TALK ABOUT…
The Classic Matches mode. If you get bored with managing in random Asian nations, you can go back in time and replay a historic fixture.
As you can probably tell, these are quick one-off matches. You just pick your team and your tactic, then hop straight into the action.
In the example above, you can relive the 1999 Champions League Final – and either rewrite history with Bayern München, or complete Manchester United’s Treble in even more dramatic version. Sure, the late Sheringham and Solskjær show was brilliant, but did United come from TWO goals behind to win in Barcelona? I think you’ll find my victory was more impressive than yours, Fergie.
You can also play the Euro 1988 Semi Final between Germany and the Netherlands, or the 1986 World Cup Quarter Final between England and some bloke named Diego Maradona. And… erm, that’s your lot. More matches were promised as “coming soon”, but they never materialised.
SUMMARY
I’ll level with you – GSM 18 isn’t the worst football management game I’ve ever played by any stretch, but it got mind-numbingly dull very quickly. Its huge database and journeyman potential are sadly undermined by bare-bones gameplay, a clunky interface, and horrible optimisation that constantly pushes my computer to its limits.
I don’t want to be too harsh on a game that was developed by a very small and relatively inexperienced team. The idea of being able to manage in literally any league is an ambitious and admirable one. Unfortunately, FYG missed the target on so many areas, and I doubt they’ll ever go back to fix these issues, seeing as the last GSM was released over five years ago. That’s a shame.
FULLER FM RATING: 1.5* – National League.
So that was GSM18… Global Soccer 2018… Global Soccer Manager… A Management Game. Whatever you want to call it.
Anyway, feel free to check it out on Steam and let me know what you think. You can leave a comment below, or you can find me on BlueSky or Threads.
Fuller FM 