With the new football season underway and a first international break incoming, it’s about time to start getting excited about news of a certain football simulation game. However, the world’s biggest management simulation has had its thunder stolen by a new upstart with this week’s Early Access launch of Non-League Manager.
It’s no secret that many people have become disillusioned with Football Manager in recent years. And, with the game having no big rival, there’s been a slew of management games bringing their own unique tilts on the genre. The latest allows us to step right into the grassroots of English football. So, with a little while until FM27 is released, I was keen to get my hands on it and try my hand (probably unsuccessfully) at managing further down the pyramid.
Non-League Manager, according to the developers at Black Cannon Studios, allows you to: “Manage one of over 1,000 real non-league clubs through the English football pyramid. Day jobs, ground grading, gate receipts, cup runs, and a world where clubs can fold around you. Football management at its most real. This is not a professional football game pointed at small clubs. Every system was built for how non-league football actually works, and no other football management game has them.”
That includes players with day jobs, who’ll miss training and can’t always play midweek games, ground grading that could prevent promotion if stadiums aren’t up to scratch, overspending clubs being put into administration and reforming as phoenix clubs, dual-registration deals and a heavy reliance on gate receipts. We’ll take a first look at Non-League Manager and spend 6 months managing our chosen non-league side.
First Impressions of Non-League Manager
The game was extremely quick to download, taking a matter of seconds to load in windowed mode, which is ideal for me. It opens up with a plain screen with one option, “New Career,” before entering your manager’s details and being given the monumental task of selecting a club. In my case, I knew who I wanted to begin a first save with – my nearest hometown side, Step 3 Gloucester City – but the game provides a huge list of available leagues (I counted 48) from Step 1 (the National League) all the way down to Step 6.
Upon clicking each league, you can browse the available clubs and, when you hover over or click on a club, see brief details like where they’re based, when they were founded, their stadium capacity and their position in the previous season. A neat feature is ‘Find My Local Club,’ in which you can enter your postcode and take control of your nearest non-league side. I tried it and it revealed ten in a 10-mile radius, some of which I’d never heard of.
Once your mind is made up, hitting Start Game takes you to the very clean home screen. The UI feels easy to navigate with plenty of text on the screen, without risking too much information overload. It features a big header block with information about your next match, a search bar and a continue button, and it’s navigated by – FM fans will love this – a sidebar with the categories Home, Team, Recruitment, Competitions, Media, Club and Career. I decided to let the club deal with friendlies for now, before cracking through the inbox, which included welcomes from the chairman and the captain and my assistant manager’s assessment of the squad.
Team: Next up, it was time to discover the Gloucester squad – which, of course, is formed of fake players, because adding real players would be a logistical nightmare. The squad page layout is fairly straightforward, but an initial concern is that you can’t assess how good players are via this page, which is how I start life with every team I manage in FM – but maybe that’s the lazy FM player in me longing for ability and potential ratings. It features their name, position, nationality, fitness level, form, availability, contract details, wages and squad status, which are useful, but you can’t customise the data you want. Furthermore, my squad is absolutely massive with 29 first-team players.
Click on a player, and you can view their profile, which contains contract and personal details, positional info, status and training info, an overview of their attributes, career history and season stats, injury history and a list of actions. It also includes their hometown and, crucially for non-league, its distance from your club. Interestingly, rather than attributes being rated out of 20 or 99, NLM uses an assessment of a player’s ability in core skills, such as defending, passing, pace and finishing, based on your club’s level and their level (for players not at your club).
Tactics: Moving down a tab, we head into tactics, where the assistant manager has helpfully (or not) auto-picked the team for me. He apparently wanted to play a 4-5-1 but no, no, no, we’re going 4-4-2 whether he likes it or not. A slight personal irritation on the screen is that left-sided players are listed before right-sided players, which simply doesn’t sit right with me!
Training: You can select an overall team training focus from Attacking Play, Defending, Fitness, Set Pieces and Team Shape. You can also provide personalised individual training, but you must first select a coach to provide the training and coaches can focus on up to 4 players at any time.
Recruitment: You can navigate between Player Search, Free Agents and Loan List, view active Scouting Assignments and recruit staff. Scouting looks a little tricky to get your head around, as you obviously have no knowledge of who players are and, unlike in FM, there’s no obvious way to ask a Scout to find players in a specific league or create focuses. So the manual approach is something that may need to be addressed / I need to try and understand.
Competitions and Media: The Competitions tab features the league table, fixture schedule, cups and a stats hub, which is obviously empty at the start but looks like it could be interesting to explore. Below that is a nice Media page, which contains social post-style updates down the left, which can be sorted by New, Important, My Club and My League, and a selection of non-league news to the right.
Club and Career: The Club tab contains plenty of useful information, including a detailed club history, your staff, a finances snapshot (for the bravest of managers) and insight into the board and fans’ perception of the job you’re doing. The Club Profile houses some of that information, such as details about your stadium, club records and key facts and rivalries. The final tab is Career, which offers a quick overview of your personal details and managerial history.
At the bottom of the sidebar is a useful Club Manual, which I probably should have opened before delving into the tabs above. It explains each element of the game, including useful guidance like:
- Consider status above ability
- Clear blocked players first then prioritise form, fitness, sharpness and position fit
- Pick a shape that suits your players, not your preferred idea (which I completely ignored!)
Getting Started with Gloucester City
I eventually hit the space bar for the first time, and was thrown straight into gameday with a friendly against Longlevens Reserves. I went for a 4-4-2 with an attacking style and direct approach, accepted the assistant’s quick pick and headed into my first match which, unlike FM26, doesn’t take at least 30 seconds to load! The matchday screen has the two lineups on either side with text-based match action organised by the team in possession. Below that are match stats and scores from other ongoing matches. You can speed the game up or skip to the end of the match. We wound up winning 4-1 thanks to left winger Sean Barker’s hat trick, two of which were first-half penalties. At full time, there’s a brief match overview and a quick media interview.
Progression through the game is quick, with each hit of the space bar followed by a maximum of a 7-second wait to move to the next day. A second easy friendly saw Baker score 4 more in a 5-0 rout of Step 7 side UDA Gloucester, before losing 3-0 at home to NLN side Buxton, getting torn apart in a 5-0 defeat to Hull and playing well to draw 1-1 with League 2 local rivals Cheltenham.
Soon enough, we were preparing for our first-ever non-league game at home to Chertsey Town in the Southern League Premier Division South, only for our best centre back to be unavailable for no obvious reason. Welcome to non-league! We got absolutely battered early on and eventually conceded after half an hour. I had to change it at the break and we went more direct and attacking, then went all-out attack. That worked as Baker equalised… then missed a penalty… then we conceded again. And we lost our debut 2-1.
We started our first away day at Bracknell Town much brighter but just couldn’t score. Our left back got injured and we conceded late on to lose 1-0. This looks really tough! I changed up the approach slightly, moving to balanced and counter attacking. Another away day took us to Wimborne 3 days later and we conceded early but equalised through Baker. Striker Mohsen got us in front with a header on 77 minutes, only to concede 2 minutes later. But at least we finally had our first point…
We dominated Hantwell at home by 20 shots to 6 but, yet again, couldn’t score and had to settle for another point. However, we finally got the rub of the green at Havant & Waterlooville as, despite going behind after half an hour, striker Robert Shaw, who apparently has excellent finishing but that’s his first goal, got us back into it before the break and midfielder Bennett scored a late winner. Two days later, on Bank Holiday Monday, we entertained local rivals Evesham and had the better of it only to concede to their first shot. But Mohsen, winger Yasser Ebrahim and midfielder Alfie James turned things around for a 3-1 win.
Next up, we hosted Frome Town in the FA Cup first qualifying round and suffered our first GK injury, but luckily I had one on the bench. We took the lead but the replacement GK had a shocker and we exited the cup at the first attempt. Irritatingly, the GK, who earns over £1k a week, had ruptured his Achilles, and was out for approaching a year!! The dodgy backup conceded again early in the next match then, just after halftime, he fractured his wrist! Is this FM24 in disguise? So I had to chuck a midfielder in goal and, somehow, we equalised and drew 1-1. I tried to scout some local keepers and got one in on trial, who looked terrible, then found one available for loan from Watford, and he apparently looks fantastic.
Out of nowhere, the chairman at Didcot Town, who play a step below us in step 4, approached me about a job opportunity and I let him know I was happy to talk, basically to see what would happen. And nothing did happen. We nicked a win in the FA Trophy then lost at home to Plymouth Parkway before a really solid 10-game unbeaten streak, including beating Malvern 3-0, lifted us all the way up to 3rd.
The run ended with a 2-0 defeat at home to Sholing, but got back on track with a win, before a draw at Basingstoke left us 4th at the halfway mark of the season. So, despite a slow start, we’ve actually done pretty well. That said, I’ve noticed that using the Skip to Result button seems more effective than actually playing the match, and changing tactics in-game doesn’t have a massive effect… but that’s down to personal preference, I guess.
My Thoughts on Non-League Manager
Nearly six months into life as a non-league manager, I’ve found myself enjoying the game. It’s quick to get through matches and there’s a simple approach to management that harks back to the retro football games I grew up on. That said, it does feel a little limited at times.
For example, player recruitment is challenging in that, as far as I can see, you can’t find out how good a player is without scouting them individually – which is basically impossible with a database of thousands of players. Team selection can be difficult when trying to remember who your best players are; it’s difficult to assess player ability or attributes without clicking on their profiles; there’s minimal to zero interaction with players, coaches or fans; your manager doesn’t appear to have a rating, attributes or reputation level; and in-match management isn’t particularly easy and tends to be very injury-heavy.
But these are small niggles that I’m sure will be ironed out as the game develops through Early Access and/or are probably features that the Football Manager player in me takes for granted. And, let’s be honest, this is a completely different game that offers a different approach to football management, so the onus is on me to work out how features like recruitment, staffing and more actually work.
But there’s definitely plenty of positives. I’ve quickly looked through the Stats Hub and that’s a feature I really like, allowing you to search through a quick snapshot of defensive, attacking and goalkeeping stats for every available league. Therefore, “moneyballing” could be a fun option using the Stats Hub rather than relying on an assistant manager’s ‘star rating’ assessment of a player’s ability and potential. Some nice features also pop up occasionally, such as a sponsored walk earning us £23k early on in the season and a pub quiz bagging us £22k, so it’d be great to see more of that in terms of making money and being more involved in the community side of managing a non-league club.
Overall, I’m impressed by Non-League Manager, and I think the game has huge potential. It offers us something a little different to anything else in the market, and I’m sure fellow non-league lovers will enjoy the more realistic take on managing further down the football pyramid. Furthermore, the developers have already been working hard to remove bugs that people have reported, openly welcoming peoples’ suggestions for new features / tweaks and actively talking to players in the Discord channels, so I’m convinced the game will be in a really strong position come full launch.
For now, I’m off to enjoy the second half of my first full season with a view to taking Gloucester into a promotion race. Or, I may just try my hand at a new save with a random team in Step 6 to see how difficult that is. Whatever I decide, I definitely need to work out how to scout players and find the most effective tactical approach. And, fingers crossed, no more GK injuries!
Have you played Non-League Manager? Or will you be looking to buy it? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment below!
You can purchase Non-League Manager in Early Access on Steam for £19.99.
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