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From a completely personal point of view, being a football manager must be the dullest, most unrewarding and downright tedious job anyone could ever take. Nevertheless, this is European Superleague's central idea, so someone somwhere obviously thought it was a good move.

You play a budding soccer team's manager with all the incumbent responsibilities and pressures, not to mention the boredom and the silly hairstyles. From your desk on the main office screen, you can do all the boring managerial-type things you're supposed to. You have access to a phone or your secretary, to call the press, a team scout or other useful bods; you can read through the team's files to see which players are doing what and why; you can mark appointments and meetings in your diary, set tactics for upcoming matches and generally do a pretty convincing imitation of a businessman. There are more enjoyable things on hand though - having a quick snifter from the whisky bottle on your desk, staring out the window and daydreaming, switching the light on and off (ahem), or simply going home.

There are some other screens, such as the Tactics display with its incredibly badly drawn Coach or the fake newspaper which appears when you make a comment to the press. Unfortunately the photo of the crowd that appears on this newspaper is overlaid on the headline, making it unreadable and therefore totally pointless. Oops. Frankly though, for a game whih relies so heavily on graphics as its interface, they could be better, to say the least - many screens looks as though they've been knocked up in half an hour by a programmer past his deadline.

These graphics could be forgiven if the game was a whirlwind of intrigue, big business and double dealing, but it's not. It could easily be renamed John Harvey Jones' Industrial Management Training Course (Parts 1-22B) for all the excitement it delivers. Football fans will be disappointed because the nearest it gets to the pitch is at the match reports (more badly-drawn graphics), and management sim buffs (all three of them) won't want to play because there's nothing to do - at least, nothing you'd enjoy doing. If you think the game sounds interesting, save the £25 and get a job as a bank clerk - that way you'll get paid for indulging your paperclip fetish.