We might have to wait until next season for a new Football Manager, but that doesn’t mean there’s a shortage of football games on the Steam storefront.
A few weeks ago, I looked at a bare-bones Championship Manager clone that didn’t stray too far from the standard formula. The game I’ll be reviewing today is… well, let’s just say it’s VERY different.
For this Retro Review, I’m going back to the year 2013 (i.e. the last time Manchester United were any good) to find out what happened when some Italians decided to make their own FM… with blackjack, and hookers. Literally.
This is Lords of Football.
BACKGROUND
Many of the games I’ve reviewed on Fuller FM were produced in either the UK or Germany… but not Lords of Football. Instead, this game comes to us from the land of calcio, catenaccio, co-ownership, and Crudeli. [“Fratelli d’Italia” intensifies]
Geniaware was formed in 2008, in the northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia. Subsequently, they set up a development studio further west – in the seaside resort of Savona, about 40 minutes from Genoa. They were also bought by the Portuguese publishers Fish Eagle.
After working on their first game for about five years, Geniaware eventually released Lords of Football in April 2013. And as far as I can tell, LoF was the only game Geniaware ever developed. There is no record of them producing anything else, and the link to the company’s website is long dead. (Likewise, Fish Eagle seem to have been dormant since 2018.)
I’ve been vaguely aware of LoF for a while, but I never paid much attention to it until the spring of 2020. While we were all stuck indoors and the US President was telling us to inject ourselves with disinfectant, the FIFA YouTuber FNG was playing “the best football game ever made”. Let me tell you – it really has to be seen to be believed!
Wanting to assess this madness at first hand, I eventually bought LoF on Steam’s Christmas sale a couple of months ago, for £2.55. Time to see what all the fuss is about…
STARTING OUT
On the base game, you can manage a team in any of the top two leagues in England, France, Germany, Italy or Spain. You can also buy DLC that allows you to manage in Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia or Ukraine) or the United States.
Teams are subtly renamed, but their kit colours make it easy to identify their real-life counterparts (e.g. London Gunners are obviously Arsenal). All players have fictional names but likewise are based on real superstars.
Some players also have nicknames, which they are referred to at all times. Some of these are pretty weird, like ‘Le Tracteur’, ‘The Schoolboy’ and ‘The Danger Zone’. Others are based on lazy foreign stereotypes – an Egyptian player is nicknamed ‘The Mummy’, an Australian star is dubbed ‘The Kangaroo’, and there’s even a Geordie called ‘Brian Johnson’.
You can edit your club and player names and kits before you start a new game, in case you don’t want to play as the Blackpool Dolphins or the confusingly-named Nottingham Wolves. I removed all the London Gunners’ nicknames from my game – except for the Santi Cazorla expy, who shall forever remain as ‘El Mágico’.
Once you start the new game, you are formally introduced to the motley crew you’ll be managing. You will get an early insight into your players’ personalities, and you can quickly identify the foodies, gambling addicts, womanisers, egomaniacs… and maybe one or two who might be decent footballers.
WHAT I LIKED
Lords of Football is not really a football management game. I would say it plays more like Lionhead’s iconic 2005 film studio simulator The Movies, in which you need to monitor your employees’ urges and needs – even when they’re not working. The only difference is that instead of working with big-headed alcoholic film stars, you’re dealing with big-headed alcoholic athletes.
At the start of each day, you can train your players on various physical and technical skills and prepare them for your next match. When the day is up, your stars will clock off and head for the town, where they can indulge their various vices… but we’ll discuss those in more detail a bit later.
Players can be assigned to training routines through ‘dragging and dropping’. You can do this individually, or you can sort them into various groups and then drop one group onto a specific routine. If you want, you can quite easily assign all your midfielders to work on passing, or any tired players to get a massage.
This can all get a bit repetitive. Mercifully, you only have to go through one day of training and leisure before each match.
Setting up your team and tactics is fairly simple, with a few basic instructions to select. You can also easily compare your line-up to your next opponents, which is particularly useful. When matchday finally comes, you can choose whether to quickly simulate through the match or watch the action unfold live in full.
Oh yes, and the in-game music is quite pleasant. I don’t say that very often in these reviews.
WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE
I have mixed thoughts on the game engine. By mid-2010s standards, the graphics aren’t too bad, even if all the players look like criminal mugshots.
Unfortunately, players seem to have the intelligence of low-level criminals as well. They tend to wander aimlessly, or run around the opposition player on the ball and do everything except tackle them. This boneheadness can be infuriating… but you can do something about it.
During the match, you can instruct your players to counter-attack (when they have the ball) or defend quickly (when they don’t). You can also pause the game and click on players to give them specific instructions – make a run, make a pass, shoot at goal, or TACKLE THE GUY ON THE GODDAMN BALL! [Ahem, excuse me.]
This also highlights one of the great inconsistencies about LoF. You can pause a match but cannot fast-forward… whereas outside of matches, you can fast-forward through the day but you cannot pause. This clunky experience gives you a lot less time to assign your players to specific activities.
There is a transfer system in this game, but it’s incredibly basic. When January comes, you select which players you want to leave – and the positions and key attributes for any players you want to replace them with. The chairman will then sign these players for you, but he won’t always get you what you want. I asked for a new left-winger and attacking midfielder, and instead got a new third-choice goalkeeper and a centre-half!
The game also has serious memory and stability issues, and after about 45-60 minutes’ play will often crash with a “No more memory available” message. If you’re unlucky enough to get this at night or during a match, then tough luck. You’ll have to play through the ENTIRE day all over again – even if you save your progress midway through.
Despite all that, I persevered through a whole season and led the London Gunners to the League, Cup and European Cup treble. We only lost two league matches away from home against our nearest rivals, and the games themselves didn’t provide the challenges I was expecting. Even considering my players’ hedonistic lifestyles, it all felt a bit too easy.
WE MUST TALK ABOUT…
Player needs. Player needs. Are found on greed, are found on greed.
After your players finish training, they’ll visit various buildings in the local town to amuse themselves for the evening. They can boost their ego at a radio station, enjoy food at the restaurant, drink at the pub, and gamble at the casino. Finally, the disco allows them to fulfil their needs for partying and… ahem… snu-snu.
Of course, too much of a good thing can lead to an addiction. If a star player is missing training because he’s passed out drunk on the pavement or doing the conga outside the disco, you’ve got a problem. Other addicts may slack off during training, and someone with an overinflated ego might even start a punch-up with an unfortunate team-mate!
You can drag your overfed or oversexed players off to therapy to reduce these addictions. Alternatively, you can ‘punish’ them with gruelling training sessions that cure addictions much faster, but also make them unhappy and/or tired.
The key to keeping your players satisfied is to fulfil all their needs without letting any of them get dangerously high. You could micromanage each and every single player by manually dragging them to wherever they need to be. In practice, that is impractical – and you only have so much time in an evening before it’s matchday.
This just adds to the sense of monotony. Before too long, you’ll be starting each training day like, “Okay, fellas! Heavy drinkers go here, party animals go there… Grzegorz, you’re going into therapy again. And everyone else can just run laps on the athletics track for all I care.”
SUMMARY
Lords of Football gets high marks for originality. I have warmed to other soccer games that don’t take themselves seriously or try to be yet another stale Football Manager imitator.
But good Lord Bendtner, the execution is awful. The mind-numbing repetitiveness, the glitchy match engine and the constant game crashes may well kill your interest before you even get close to completing a full season. I only did that just so you don’t have to.
On an unrelated topic, I desperately need some snu-snu.
FULLER FM RATING: 2* – National League.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this review. If you’ve also had the… ahem, pleasure of playing Lords of Football, please leave your thoughts in the comments below. You can also find me on Threads and BlueSky.
Look, I know the last few Fuller FM reviews have all been very negative. I promise you I’ll review a half-decent game soon… or at least as soon as I can find a copy of Premier Manager 97 on eBay (PC only. I don’t have a Mega Drive).
Anyway… ciao!
DISCLAIMER: No footballers were harmed in the making of this review. Okay, so maybe there were a few black eyes and sore heads, but whatever.
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