Reviews

Manage a lowly third division team and watch them get hammered every week. Ain't it the life?

Well saying that it's definately one of the most advanced soccer management games on the Spectrum, complete with in-game highlights normally missing from most management games. If you're into management games on your Spectrum you'd want to give this a shot.

1989 CRL (UK)
Written by David Leitch, Ben Jackson and Kevin Brice

Back in '89 I was already a bit fed up with soccer management games. I had played some of the best, from the early Football Manager to Football Director, to The Double or Tracksuit Manager. These are still my favorite management games of the world of soccer. They all had something new, original and excellent gameplay.
Professional Soccer came while browsing a software rack, never heard of it, but looked ok, so in a whim I ended up buying it.
It was one of the few games I played in '89 and one of the last games I played on the Speccy until emulators came and dethrone the original machines.

The game itself has nothing new and still it is sort of different from the bunch.
It has all of the important features: Team selection, formations, substitutions, buy/sell market etc and features nice action scenes.
The action scenes tend to get repetitive and long, and the graphics are not pretty, they actually remind me the baby-looking players from Match Day II. Still this scenes, which can be switched off any time, give more diversity to the game. So they are very welcome.
Has you can guess, the results aren't accurate, but still seem slightly calculated by all the data involved, which gives the player motive to makes the necessary changes in the team. Of course it's way far from the perfection of The Double.
The presentation is rather nice with a good selection console and very user friendly, the downside is the slowness of the key response, partially because of the two-beeps it emits when a key is pressed. This really spoils things to me nowadays, not back then when my patience was higher and the absence of fast computers or fast games made things bearable.
Overall I think this is one the best soccer management games of the Spectrum Era, and perhaps good enough to feature in a top 5.

4,5 points

It's another football manager game. It's a well programmed game but it's also fussy too. The menu is a bit too slow for my taste and selecting my squad took longer than I desired, then when I bought a player it reset my squad and I had to do it all over again which annoyed me greatly. The action highlights are quite nice, even if they take forever to shoot and they never ever get tackled plus most of the goals are scored with the ball going through the goalie. But it's fairly decent for what it is, the presentation is miles ahead of many of the BASIC ones and I did get into this more than I ought to.