For football lovers, there is no game that surpasses Football Manager. Neither FIFA nor PES offers the same experience as a game that allows you to take your favorite team and lead it to glory, managing it down to the smallest detail. Professionals use it to improve in their jobs, and in fact, its databases are so incredible that they are used to scout players in real life. Football Manager is an essential part of modern football, and yet, that has not prevented us from not having new releases in the last two years.
This has been a shame because, although we knew we weren’t going to have a release in 2024, it has always been an annual franchise. And the delay of the 2025 release has been a hard blow for the fans. With the 2026 release just announced, there is still quite a wait to be able to play the new iteration of the franchise, but that doesn’t mean fans have nothing to hold them over in the meantime.
A new Football Manager that is very old
Kevin Toms published a game called Kevin Toms Football Star Manager on August 14th on Steam, iOS, and Android. Basically, a remaster of the original Football Manager, released in 1982, and now available to play with updated graphics and UI. Not much. Just enough to be playable and enjoyable in 2025, but still faithful and consistent with what it was in 1982. Only with a different name, as although they have the exploitation rights of the game, the rights to the name are held by SEGA and Sports Interactive.
The game published in 1982 was a true engineering masterpiece written entirely in BASIC. Although the names of teams and players are real and in accordance with 1982, you always start in the fourth division and our goal is to get our team to the first division and compete and win the FA Cup.
From here on, everything is what we know about Football Manager. We must manage our players’ energy and morale, the values in each field of our players are compared to the values of the opposing players, and a relatively primitive representation of a football match is displayed on screen without us being able to do anything about it. That’s up to the players. What we can do is transfer players, manage finances, and even request loans, demonstrating that the foundations of everything we love about Football Manager are already present in this early version of the game.
Old, but new
Of course, Kevin Toms Football Star Manager takes some liberties. Originally released for PCs in 1982 and for 8-bit consoles, the graphics and UI were very basic. That’s why, as we mentioned, this re-release is closer to a new version of the original game, a remaster, that gives a slight graphical and mechanical update to the game. With stylized texts and visuals that are reminiscent of the 8-bit style, and with more customization options, the game feels like the original but is designed to be fully enjoyable by today’s standards.
The reason we haven’t had a Football Manager in 2024 or 2025 is that they are changing game engines, moving from their proprietary engine to Unity, but this has given Kevin Tom the opportunity to create this version of the original game. We should appreciate it for what it is: something very interesting and fun that we should take advantage of. And at not even 6 euros, what better way to spend the summer than with a bit of classic Football Manager?
