International Manager published for ZX Spectrum (and later transferred to C64 and Amstrad) was one of the first games that gave user the chance to see how difficult the job is of national team manager. We can choose one of many national teams to run, but the creators provided us only with English names, so if you want to play f.e. as Bulgaria you would have to enter all the names yourself. We have scheduled qualification games, but we can also organize friendly games to test different squads or players.
The match engine was rather simple, the squad statistics were basic (to put it nicely) and the player skills were simplified, but you have to remember that the whole game had to fit within 48kB of memory. The interesting bit of the game was the pool of players - beside the main squad and reserves we also had the "hopefuls" list, which meant the players outside of the national team that are potential talents.
Overall simple little game that made good use of the limited hardware available in 1980s.
