As deep and involving as they are, management games require a lot of patience. To its credit, Total Club Manager does everything to make this as exciting an experience as possible. Banging menu music grabs you by the lapels of your sheepskin and drags you kicking into the game.

Pick a team from the multitude of worldwide squads on offer (yep, take that obscure second-division Portuguese side to European glory and beyond), and immerse yourself in the almost incomprehensible number of squad options, from buying, selling and training players to taking care of the day-to-day running of the club.

After prepping your team to the best of your ability, match days roll around quicker than Lady Chatterly. Skip a game and an instant result is available, calculated on the relative strengths of each game influencing the random nature of a football match. But we'd much rather participate than spectate, and Total Club Manager allows players to view a real(ish)-time game, with the ability to significantly affect the outcome. Watch the game comfortingly surrounded by menus of player stats and possible dugout shouts. Simple, intuitive commands like Attack and Defend are complemented by more complex shouts like Pressing and Play Dirty. But utilise the fantastic Football Fusion option and you can take total control. Pop in your FIFA 2005 disc, and you can physically play through the virtual fixture. It may be a bit of a faff swapping between discs, but aficionados won't find a more immersive football experience.

Total Club Manager stands out as one of the more accessible titles in a fairly niche market. It might not have the technical weight of its PC counterpart, but it leads the league of management sims on Xbox.

Total Club Manager encourages new talent to swell its ranks and enforces the fact it's still the guvnor of Xbox managerial games.