TECHNICAL STUFF

System Requirements for Universal Soccer Manager are: Pentium 2 300mhz, 128mb of RAM, SVGA Graphic Card with 8mb or more, about 25mb of space on HD (this may vary depending on number of savegames), mouse.

It has been tested with Windows 95/98, Windows 2000 and XP. It should work also on Windows NT with service pack 5, but no support is provided with that platform.

That's all for the technical stuff, remember to send your feedback about the game with suggestions/requests. We will do our best to improve the game.

If we get your feedback it really does give us a chance to improve the work we do, which is really all for your benefit.

ABOUT THE GAME AND FUTURE UPDATES

The game simulates the life of a soccer manager, allowing you to make tactical decisions, sell and buy players, and hopefully bring your team to win the championship title!
The game consists of various screen from which you'll be able to choose your formation, look at players skills and statistics and finally play the game.

Also, this game is designed for speed. We have made our best to make the game fast even with old computers.

Last but not least, remember that the game is going to get frequent updates, which will be free for all registered users. Our to-do list currently includes:

- more leagues
- more tournaments
- a 3D view of the match
- a interactive version of the match

You can expect at least one update every 2-3 months. If you subscribe to the newsletter you'll receive notification of new updates as soon as they're available.

NOTE: in the following screenshots you can receive additional help by passing the mouse over hotspots to reveal a short description. Please note also that the image looks blurred because of JPG compression, in the game they look much better.

MAIN MENU

The main menu is quite self-explanatory. Select "Start new game" to begin a new game from scratch or "Load Saved Game" to resume a previous game. Select "Quit" to exit from the game. Select "Update" to open the browser and look for latest patch available.

When you start a new game, after a short time needed for the initialization process, you'll enter your name and choose a team to manage from the following nations: Italy, France, England, Spain, Germany and Holland (REGISTERED VERSION).

The Option screen will pop-up allowing you to adjust some settings, in particular the database size (REGISTERED VERSION).

Then you'll see on the left of the screen four buttons: NEXT MATCH, MANAGE TEAM, TABLES & RESULTS, SEARCH PLAYER, GAME OPTIONS.

The default screen is the EMAIL SCREEN, and when you exit one of the others screen (like manage or tables) you go back to this screen. To go back from any screen, you can use the back button on top-left or the right mouse button. Always use right mouse button as a go-back/cancel button (useful to cancel buying/selling players too, for example).

EMAILS SCREEN

Here you'll see all the various news and the comunications between you and players or staff members. You can choose which kind of email to filter on/off using the options menu.
Use the arrow up/down to scroll the email list, and click on their subjects to view the message.

MANAGE TEAM SCREEN

It is the fulcrum of the game, here you can study the winning tactic or simply take a look at the various players statistics and maybe decide to sell someone.
On top there's the team name, and the number of players along with team finances.
You can have maximum 30 players in a team, and no less than 18.
Below there's the list of the players. If you click on their name, you see the stats for the selected player on the right screen.
From this panel, you can see also the buttons SELL and CONTRACT. They're used to set the player's selling strategy and to renew the contract.

Players sold and contract renewed news will be reported to you by the email screen in the game.

To go back with the normal view, simply click the right-mouse button. If you want to switch players, click on their shirt-number and you'll see the player bar floating with your mouse. Now click on the player you want to swap with, and you're done. You can swap goalkeepers only with another goalkeeper.

Using the buttons on the right side you can select an ordering criteria: alphabetic, value, role, age, by selection, by goals scored, by assists and by rating.

More on the right you can also select the display method, which are the following:
- GENERAL: the name, value, nationality, age, height and weight of the player are displayed
- GK,DF,MF,AT: stands for GoalKeeper, Defender, Midfielder and Attacker, and show the most relevant stats for each category of players
- STATISTICS: show statistics like number of games played, goals, assists, yellow and red cards, and average rating for the season

On the top right there's the tactic display, showing your current team formation. You can click on number (representing your team shirt numbers) and change the tactic using the grid. The only fixed position is the one of the goalkeeper, but apart for that, you can make every tactic you want (even a 8-1-1, but I'd personally avoid that!).

Under the playfield with the tactic, you see the team staff members, with their relative skills.

TABLES AND RESULTS

Here you can view the league table, the next week fixtures and the latest week results. The bottom four team will be relegated at the end of the season, so those positions are marked in red. You can also view various teams stats like goals for, goals against, wins, draws and losts.

PLAYER SEARCH

Your team need a good scorer? you want to invest in an interesting young player? then this screen is really for you. It let you search through the huge database of players (depending on your hardware and choice it may contain up to 25,000 different players!) based on various search filters.

On the left you can set filters by skills. Toggle the INJURED button to include/exclude injured players in the search. Toggle the NO TEAM to include/exclude team already in a team. Toggle the SHORTLISTED checkbox to show only players in the shortlist. Finally, the FILTER BY AGE tool let you filter the search by certain age groups.

After you are satisfied with the settings, you can click START SEARCH and see the results. The number of players found is displayed on the right (if more than 1000 it displays 1000+).

You can then look at the players list, scrolling up/down with the arrows or the mousewheel. You can change the players' order using the buttons labeled STATUS, NAME, AGE, NATION, POSITION, VALUE and RATING. The meaning of those is quite clear.

If you click on a player in the list, on top-right of the screen you see his info. You can toggle between player info and player statistics: the former shows you a short description of the player's skills, while the latter let you see his statistics (useful to spot a good goalscorer). When a player is highlighted, you have the option to add him to shortlist using the ADD TO SHORTLIST button. If it is already present in your shortlist, the button become REMOVE TO SHORTLIST to remove him from your shortlist.

To buy a player, check the team funds (AVAILABLE FUNDS) and click buy player. A panel similar to those of SELL and CONTRACT will appear, here you can set the buying strategy. You can try to buy maximum 10 players at time.

GAME OPTIONS

Here you can configure the settings, and load or save a game. This screen appear automatically when you choose to start a new game, because you need to set the database size before starting. This is a fixed value and can be changed only at the start of a new game.

The available options are:
- Database size : you can define how big the player database will be. The normal value is of 10.000 players should be good for low-end pc, but you can increase it up to 25.000 players. <NOTE THAT YOU CAN CHANGE THE DATABASE SIZE ONLY BEFORE YOU START A NEW GAME.>
- Currency: you can set your favourite currency of the game. The choices are: euros, english pounds, yen and dollars.
- Filter email: you can set which kind of email you want or don't want to receive (in the game email screen). You can select to receive only email about your team, or apply other filter (buy/sell email, match-related email, etc).
- Save: you can choose to save the game in one of the ten savegame slots
- Load: you can load a previously saved game (same function as the one in main menu)
- Quit: you can exit the game

MATCH SUMMARY

You'll see an instant result of the match, and in the bottom part of the screen you can review the match's summary. Here you'll see the highlights of the match, the goalscorers, injuries, sent offs and so on.
As always, use the arrows to scroll up/down the text.

HOW TO GET UPDATES

The simplest way is to use the UPDATE button in the main menu. This will launch the updates webpage of the site, where you can download the latest version.

Alternatively, you can always download the lastest version of the game manually from the website.

Programming
Celso Riva

Graphics
Celso Riva

Testing
Celso Riva, Marco Ragno, Patrice Krysztofiak, Bruno Sousa, Andrea Sabatini

Translation
Celso Riva (Italian), Patrice Krysztofiak (French), Bruno Sousa (English), Jos Hirth (German), Dutch (Mike Wieiring), Gabriel Gambetta (Spanish)

SPECIAL THANKS TO
Andrea Griffini (calendar code), Patrice Krysztofiak and Graziella Tomesani (moral support)