How Cyber-Ball Manager works

CBM does not stop after you have picked eleven players and shouted something encouraging at them. You handle training, tactics, transfers, staff, facilities, sponsors, the money, and the general mood of the supporters.

These things have a habit of bumping into each other. Better players cost more. Better facilities need paying for. A quick fix today may become an expensive problem next week. Such is management.

• Build a squad that can survive the schedule.
• Set up the team and prepare automatic match reactions.
• Train individual players and the team as a whole.
• Grow the club without setting fire to the accounts.

Matches, training and competitions happen on a schedule. You prepare before they arrive; you do not control every pass in real time or pause the match because you have suddenly had a much better idea.

So the rhythm is fairly simple: check the club, make your decisions, see what happened, and try to look as if that was the plan.

Players have roles, strengths, fitness, morale, and careers that change as the seasons pass. Individual training improves the player. Team training improves the things the squad has to do together, which football does occasionally require.

Injuries, tired legs, implants and a thin bench can ruin a perfectly sensible lineup. The best eleven on paper is not always the best eleven that can still walk.

There are leagues, cups, seasonal competitions, community tournaments and matches across leagues. Human managers share the world with bot clubs, so the calendar does not stop simply because someone went on holiday.

Results do more than move you up or down a table. They affect income, reputation, supporter mood and what you qualify for next. They may also encourage another manager to buy the player you wanted, which is rude but legal.

The game is set roughly 500 years in the future. Football is faster, more violent, more commercial, and nobody gets particularly nervous about installing machinery in the players.

The management is meant to be taken seriously. The world it happens in has made no such promise.