1 October 2026
Manager games give you the impression that the job is picking a team, choosing a formation and shouting at half-time. Those things happen. They're also a small fraction of the week, and the bits games leave out are often the bits that decide whether a manager keeps their job.
Here's roughly how a week looks for a Premier League head coach with a Saturday 3pm game and no midweek fixture. Every club is different, and a manager in a European campaign is doing all of this in half the time.
The day after a match is about the previous one, not the next. The analysis staff have already clipped the game overnight. The manager watches it back, usually more than once, and meets the coaching staff to agree what went right, what went wrong and which of those things were plan problems versus execution problems.
Players who started get a recovery session: pool, bike, light stretching. Players who didn't get a proper training session so they don't lose fitness. The medical staff report on knocks. Sometimes there's a press obligation if the game was on Saturday evening.
Some managers give Sunday off after a win. Fewer do than you'd think.
Monday is the first look at the next opponent. The analysis department will have produced a report covering shape, pressing triggers, set-piece routines, individual tendencies, weaknesses. The manager and staff decide on the broad approach and start shaping the week's training around it.
There's also a lot of administration that never appears in games: meetings with the sporting director about contracts and recruitment, medical updates, a conversation with the academy about which young players train with the first team this week, and usually a review of the fixture calendar to plan rotation across the next three or four games.
The two hardest training days of the week. Tuesday tends to be physical and tactical: intensity, pressing patterns, positional work. Wednesday is often the main tactical session where the game plan gets rehearsed against a shadow team set up like the opponent.
This is where the manager earns their money, and it's mostly invisible. Designing a session that teaches the specific thing you need for Saturday, at the right intensity, for 24 players with different needs, is the actual craft.
Individual meetings happen around training. A player who's been dropped wants to know why. A player coming back from injury needs a plan. A player whose agent has been talking to the papers needs a word. Games model this as a mood icon; in reality it's several hours of conversations a week.
Lower volume, higher specificity. Set pieces, both attacking and defending, usually get a dedicated block. Many clubs now have a specialist set-piece coach who runs this. There'll be a shorter tactical session focused on one or two key details rather than the whole plan.
Thursday is also the most common day for the pre-match press conference, though some clubs hold it on Friday. That's 20 to 40 minutes of questions, many of which are about things the manager would rather not discuss, followed by separate sessions with club media, TV rights holders and sometimes the written press.
Light, short, sharp. The starting eleven is usually confirmed to the players on Friday, sometimes Thursday. The session is a walk-through: shape, set pieces, one final look at the pressing triggers. Nothing that risks an injury.
Then travel, if it's an away game. Team hotel, evening meal, a final team meeting with video clips of the opponent. Some managers do a short individual chat with key players. Most try to keep Friday evening quiet.
The pre-match routine is set to the minute. Team meeting, meal, arrival, warm-up. The team talk that games make so much of is usually short and specific, because the players have heard the plan all week.
During the game, the manager is watching for the things the plan depends on. Is the press working? Has the opponent changed shape? Which substitute fixes the problem that's emerging? The analyst in the stands is feeding information down. Half-time is about ten minutes of actual talking, most of it tactical.
After the match: TV interviews within minutes of the final whistle, then the press conference, then the dressing room, then the coach home. The review has already started by the time the bus leaves.
Across all of that, there's recruitment. Even outside the transfer window, the manager is in conversations about targets, watching clips, occasionally travelling to see a player live. There's the board, who want updates and explanations. There's the academy. There's the medical department, which at some clubs has its own view on player workload that the manager has to negotiate with. And there's the media, which in the Premier League is a daily consideration whether or not there's a press conference.
Games are good at the decisions: selection, tactics, transfers, substitutions. They're less good at the volume of the job, because nobody would play a game that accurately simulated four hours of meetings on a Monday.
The trade-off most manager games make is to compress the week into the decisions that matter and skip the rest. Manager of Football makes that trade deliberately, which is why a season takes an evening or two rather than a month. You still get the pressure. You just don't get the Monday meetings. Play it free in your browser.
For a free football manager game live for the 2026-27 season, check out www.manageroffootball.com.