Director of Football: Transfer

You are not the coach.

Somebody else picks the eleven. Somebody else decides the shape, and who starts on Saturday. Your job is different, and harder: you decide who is in the building at all.

Director of Football is a management game about the transfer market. You start near the foot of the English pyramid, at a club nobody has heard of, with a budget that does not cover a mistake. Above you sit fifty countries, three hundred clubs and sixty thousand players — and your scouts have heard of almost none of them.

WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO

• Sign and sell. Negotiate the fee, the wage and the length of the contract. Older men want security; ambitious ones want to be free again in two years. • Scout the world. Send a scout to a region and wait weeks for his report. What comes back is an estimate, not a fact — and how good an estimate depends on who you sent. • Run the academy. Boys arrive at fifteen with a ceiling nobody can see. A few become the club's future. Most do not, and deciding which is which is the job. • Watch the books. Wages every week, upkeep every week, and a board that remembers exactly what it paid for. • Build a fortune of your own. Your salary is yours to keep. Put it into a player's transfer rights and take your cut when he moves. • Take over a club. Buy the shares, take the boardroom, and set the budgets you used to beg for.

THE COACH IS NOT YOU

He fields the strongest eleven he can from what you gave him, in his own shape. If he keeps playing a left wing-back you do not own, that is a problem to solve in the market — not a formation screen to open.

A CAREER, NOT A SEASON

A save runs for decades. Clubs rise and fall, the rival directors around you take jobs and lose them, and the owner's patience is finite. Get it wrong for long enough and you will be out of work, clicking through the weeks waiting for the phone to ring.