Halftime Manager

Halftime Manager is a football management game in which you take charge of a club and make the decisions yourself. Pick the lineup, set tactics, manage players and finances, expand the stadium and grounds, and build the club over the years.

Matchday

Watch matches in a 3D TV broadcast from your stadium, using either a TV director or four fixed cameras. Matches include replays, weather and floodlights, and you can choose to see only the major moments or every shot. Players have individual faces, hairstyles and beards that appear both in your squad and on the tactics board; their movements are based on almost 4,000 captures.

At halftime, review replays of the first half’s three key moments, give a team talk, change tactics and make substitutions. You can see which players are responding to the talk, or skip ahead.

Shape your tactics

Choose your eleven from a lineup showing each player’s picture, rating and fitness, and select from 16 formations. On a 3D tactics board, draw plans for each phase of play using runs and zones in your club colors. Opponent dossiers show their recent tactics, while the AI prepares for your established style, so repeating the same approach can make you easier to read.

Tactical choices have costs: a high press boosts your team but uses stamina over multiple matchdays, even with a large squad, while a low block has the opposite trade-off. You can make touchline changes with a key during a match, and the opponent responds. Your assistant coach makes substitutions during windows you set on a timeline.

Before a match counts, you can test your plan against the next opponent up to 200 times. These test runs show where your chances come from and what they cost, but not the results. A search adjusts each unlocked slider by one notch and shows which settings improve the plan. The match simulation is calibrated against real seasons and is reproducible: the same save and decisions produce the same result.

Run the club

Develop your stadium stand by stand, from a local ground to an arena, and build training pitches and facilities on your 3D campus. Seasons, weather and night affect the grounds. Manage main and secondary sponsors, ticket prices, season tickets and loans; setting prices too high can leave the stands empty. The board sets a season objective, monitors your progress and can eventually run out of patience.

Train players weekly with plans you create, save and rotate. The Youth Academy lets you sign talents, follow them through three performance tests, then promote or release them. In the transfer market, negotiate fees, signing bonuses, loans and pre-contracts, and work with agents who take a cut.

Build your football world

Choose from six game worlds: six major leagues for a quick start, all of Europe with 52 countries and 3,054 clubs, or regions covering South America, North America, Asia with Oceania, and Africa. Worlds have up to four tiers with promotion and relegation, playoffs played as matches, and domestic and continental cups. Clubs are fictional, while league structures are rebuilt to reflect real ones. You can also create a world in the editor and share it through the Steam Workshop.

Design and decisions

The Merch Lab lets you design kits and merchandise with six sliders, test prototypes with target groups and see the finished item come out of a 3D printer. Fifteen dilemmas arrive without prompting, each with a deadline and consequences for your squad. You can also write dilemmas in the workbench and share them through the Steam Workshop. Four fan groups respond in their own ways to transfers, coaching changes and ticket prices, and each has a place in the stadium.

Other features

• Local multiplayer for up to four managers on the same computer
• Five difficulty levels and 40 achievements
• Cloud saves and 49 soundtrack tracks