Is We Are Football A Worthy Football Manager Rival?

I think I need to be honest right at the top of this: We Are Football is one of the barmiest, most fascinating games I’ve ever played. It’s unlike any other football management game out there, and while I might not have been fully convinced by this wacky maiden entry, I sincerely hope it becomes an annual fixture to compete with Football Manager.

And competing with Football Manager is what every game in the genre invariably has to do to really succeed. Football Manager is the undisputed king of football management games, an absolute dynasty of life-killing, knee-aching addictathons that come around each year and make grown men sweat about their little Excel spreadsheet. How can a brand new series without much of a pedigree behind it hope to rival Football Manager, especially without having any real players or licenses?

By being something completely different. Both games have lots of screens and the sport of football, and that’s just about where the similarities begin and end. If Football Manager is the serious man’s sim, We Are Football is the serious Sims player’s sim.

Inspired by long-dead franchises like FIFA Manager, We Are Football takes much more of an overtly narrative-focused approach than Football Manager. Those who invest themselves heavily into being the Pep to their little digital Oxford United will likely perk up reading this, but We Are Football arguably goes way overboard in its search for story in the beautiful game.

You can hire streakers to interrupt the flow of a match. Just read that again. You can hire streakers to interrupt the flow of a match.

There’s a lot more like this, including keep yourself fit to stave off heart attacks (maybe?) from all the stress, arranging train travel for your squad, and even throwing some parties.

Winning Streak Games has put an admirable amount of effort into the bells and whistles here, but almost to the extent that they didn’t know when to pull it back. I’ll never begrudge a developer that throws everything at a project, but We Are Football is guilty of “feature bloat” — there’s just too many different ideas without the cohesive vision to match.

Take Action Points, which you get for increasing your level — one of a few systems to make the game feel more like an RPG. You get these sporadically and they’re helpful for player progression, training, and negotiations, but they come about so rarely while not really being that useful that you just kind of forget about them.

You can also upgrade your players with a mindmap of sorts where you can assign them to learn specific things, which is cool. What’s not cool, though, is the strange harmonica sound effect in celebration of their progression. Or the Harry Redknapp wannabe agent who chats away about the apples and pears (or some bollocks) while you try and negotiate a deal. The sound effects are funny little curios of the game’s design that will likely make you laugh more than anything, but it does smack of a lack of oversight, some impartial voice who points out things that aren’t as good as they could be or just don’t work.

This extends to the writing, as the localisation from German to English seems to conjure up so much odd phrasing. There’s an option in tactics to say how much your players should press the opposition, which is normal. You can make them press little or press a lot; again, normal. The last option is “instead, frown”.

Not normal.

Really, the tactics and actual football feel like the least interesting things in We Are Football. There’s a few tactical options and even an attack editor to make your players string together a move in a specific way, but there’s no real tangible sense of that translating to matches. As for those matches, they’re very basic and seem to be wildly unrealistic with only two shots from either team or the other team only having one central defender, for some reason.

There’s a lot of stuff here that feels either wrong or just plain weird. There’s no real attributes (unless I missed something in the maze of screens) for players, just a star system, so you can’t be all that granular with your scouting. You can give individual players pep talks, but only once every six months. If another match is ongoing and yours is finished, you have to sit there and wait for it to end, and you can’t look at replays or anything either. Good luck clicking out of a match to check anything as well, you’re locked in until it ends.

There’s a lot of stuff to complain about in We Are Football, but is it a bad game? No. It’s actually quite charming in its strange ways and there’s a lot to like and appreciate, like the ability to personally upgrade your stadium, the grounds surrounding it, and even take a first-person walk through your trophy room. This scope is even more impressive when you consider this is Winning Streak Games’ first crack at it. Did Sports Interactive absolutely nail everything with the very first Championship Manager installment back in the day? I’d also say no.

We Are Football is an odd football management game with either too many cooks or too few making the design decisions. While this year’s entry might not be to everyone’s taste, there’s always next year. I hope.

PC key provided by PR.

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