Ultimate Soccer Manager is an association football management video game series for MS-DOS, Commodore Amiga and Windows 95, produced by Impressions and distributed by Sierra from 1995 to 1999. The game was a massive hit in Europe, although it gained little support in Japan. The series was noted for its micromanagement, where the player had to do the job of the team manager and much of that of the chairman, from player training up to bank balance management. Other well-known features were to bung an opposing team for preferential market treatment, rig or betting on the outcome of the players' team matches. Interviews after the match where some answers were printed with different interpretations on the next days' newspaper. In all three games, the game always kept the same visual style: the main screen is a bird's eye view of the stadium facility and all screens are presented like the player was inside an office. To increase the feeling of "being there", tables are accessed via teletext, news from a newspaper and fixtures are available by clicking on a sheet attached to a clipboard. While improving with each game, most features were the same from the start of the series. The game compared favourably in all areas but AI against its leading competitor, Championship Manager. While similar in name, it has no relations with Ultimate Soccer.
Ultimate Soccer Manager
The original version of the game provided the English league system from the FA Premier League down to the Football Conference. It was distributed as shareware, with a fully functional demo in which the player could only select then Second Division side Brighton and Hove Albion. The game allowed to watch games in top-down view, buy and sell players, manage the team, upgrade the stadium and manage commercial interests such as advertising and merchandise. The game received a rating of 83% from Amiga computing. The review stating the game's graphic approach and coverage of business issues made it stand out in the crowded football management simulation market. The graphics the game used for actual matches, however, were considered poor. In 1996, a data disk for the Amiga version was released, covering the 1995-1996 season.
Ultimate Soccer Manager 2
The second version of the game, USM 2 ran in protected mode, featured a more polished interface which could be accessed with different executables. In Germany, a localized version of the game was released under the name "DSF Fussball Manager", DSF being a well-known German TVsports channel.
Ultimate Soccer Manager 98
This version of the game was updated to run natively on Windows 95 and Windows 98 and included teams, players and statistics from the 1997-1998 season. The number of leagues increased to five, as both Italian and Scottish championships were added. Transfers required often a week or more of fax exchange between clubs and with the player agent, making the game more realistic than most other games in this aspect, which only required the player to bid for the player and agree on wage and length, adding him instantaneously to the team. USM 98 was released as "DSF Fussball Manager 98" for the German market. An update disk named Ultimate Soccer Manager 98-99 Season Update Add-on was sold shortly after the game came out with statistics for the 1998-1999 season, which also included both Spanish and Dutch top two divisions, increasing the number to seven playable leagues. While several bugs were ironed, it became clear that many teams would allow their superstar players to end contract, allowing the player to pick them for free. Similarly, you could loan a big-name player worth millions and then use him as a makeweight in transfer deals. As the official pre-game editor included in the game was poor, some USM users produced enhanced pre-game editors. USM Data Editor , of which the official web site was included in the USM Online web site, was called as the best editor. USMDE includes various features for USM98 editing, e.g., creating players, editing hidden stats, add-on file support for easy data update by USM fans, beta-released save game editing.
USM 2000
There was a planned 2000 version of the game, which was developed. However, the game was thought to be scrapped after Sierra UK became impatient with the game's development progress. The game was set to have an "all-new 3D match engine with advanced Artificial Intelligence". It is also believed that the coding was rewritten.
Updates (2012–present)
After posting on a Facebook group dedicated to the game, Ande Pearson and Dane Smallbone decided to work together to update all player and team data for the 2012–13 season. The data file was made available to download from the Facebook group titled 'Ultimate Soccer Manager Update'. As the update proved popular, they have since updated the player and team data up to and including the 2017–18 season and introduced up-to-date sponsors and advertisers to the game.
Technical issues
The game sometimes crashes when is played for a large number of in-game seasons. The problems with savegames include: no possibility of viewing detailed info on some players, wrong statistics about some players or even an unexpected exit of the game after viewing post-match statistics. The best way to cope with these problems is to make a lot of savegames, for ex. every in-game month. The game does not run properly on Windows XP. But it runs smoothly on Windows 98, so you can use a free software like Microsoft Virtual Machine with Windows 98 on Windows XP to run the game.
