I'm talking the REAL football here. You know, with feet.

But for simplicity's sake, I'll keep it at soccer. I'm not really a soccer aficionado, I just like to watch a good game of sweaty millionaires going at it on the green pitch from time to time. I've never really loved soccer games, except for the occasional round of Pro Evolution Soccer (Winning Eleven) and I don't even play the real game. I used to, though, but I quit when I was six. I loved the game, but hated practice.

But if there's one type of soccer game that can captivate me like the city zoo can captivate a 5 year old, it's soccer management and its inherent addictiveness. And so Football Manager 2006 for Xbox 360 is available in stores since last week and I got it immediately. You might wonder why I'm not getting this game for PC as it's undoubtly more convenient to click through to menus with a mouse rather than with a controller. Well, this game is so insanely complex and huge that it bogs your computer if you run more than half a league. Not to mention the frequent crashes because your system cannot churn it. I remember playing last year's edition on my 3.2 GHz Athlon 64bit with 1 GB of RAM and it still took more than 3 minutes to just load up a game.

You could blame the game. However, there's nothing wrong with a game trying to be too perfect. This game is perfect, too perfect almost, especially for the soccer fanatic. Here's the deal. You start a game and take control of a club in any of the world's major leagues, and almost all countries, all the way from the US to Japan are present. Your goal? Be successful. Wrestle with the line-up, try to get them to rank up there, or if you're up for challenges, lead a team that's always been a relegation candidate up to the world's best. Of course the ultimate goal is to try to win the World Cup with a national team.

This complexity hasn't been translated to consoles previously, because they lacked processing power. That's precisely something the 360 has aplenty, and that's exactly why you get the same game the PC has, and it even runs smoother than on many systems. The fun thing is that, apart from the massive amounts of data the console is squeezing out every minute, this game is completely bare bones. There are no graphics, there is no sound. It's just you and massive amounts of text and data to make something out of. Go for micro-management, or just let your 'assistants' do most of the job. The biggest let-down? Controls. Some of the menus feel awkward and it will take you quite some time getting used to flipping through the pages and menus.

It's too bad that it's not available in the US, at least the console version is not. However, I know some of you are soccer fans (Coleman?) and you might give this a shot if you're into things like fantasy football and know a little bit about soccer. The game is region-free and easy to import from a good number of websites, so it will run on US consoles.

What's also funny of that every region seems to have its own kind of game that's able to move millions of copies. Japanese have their quirky RPGs and dating sims, Americans have Madden and the endless other football spin-offs, and Europeans have soccer management.