The Gaffer review – fantasy fifties football

The Gaffer – jumpers for goalposts isn’t the half of it (Pitchwork Studios) A new indie football manager sim has the unique selling point of starting in the 1950s, long before the Premier League and even before the invention of substitutes. It may be difficult to imagine now – especially with Manchester City facing sanctions following alleged financial sharp practice – but there once was a time when football wasn’t all about money, but was instead a humble, prosaic, and working class sport. Admittedly, you have to travel a long way back in time to experience that, but that’s exactly what The Gaffer does. It’s a football management sim, but one with a huge difference: initially set in 1959, it lets you play through up to 30 seasons, as you take control of a Fourth Division team (League Two as it is now) and shoot for promotion to the heady heights of the First Division, long since rebranded as the Premier League. That’s a fascinating premise, rendering The Gaffer as much a history lesson as a game, and it’s certainly an experience you won’t mistake for anything else. Its 8-bit era style visuals place it very much in indie territory, appropriately enough since it is the brainchild of Cardiff based Sanwar Ahmed, who developed it as a project for the computing degree he is pursuing as a mature student. And it has the price tag to match: just under a tenner on Steam. Although it has all the mechanics you would expect from a football management sim – a transfer system, the ability to set different training regimes, tactical approaches and half-time team talks and the need to deal with input from your club’s various stakeholders and the local press – The Gaffer isn’t primarily about its gameplay. Instead, its main fascination lies in its gloriously evocative depiction of what football was like in the black and white days, with a bunch of local dignitaries nominally running the shop from behind pints of light and bitter in the snug bar in the local pub, thick leather balls that weighed half a hundredweight, players who were paid less than coalminers, and pitches that degenerated into mud baths in winter. Want GTA 6 news? Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for the latest GTA 6 news, reviews of new games you should play and exclusive analysis of the biggest stories of the week. In terms of gameplay, it’s super minimal – the absolute antithesis of the likes of EA Sports FC 27 and the returning Football Manager. It kicks off by inviting you to pick your club, from any in the Fourth Division going into the 1959 league season, or to create a fictional club of your own. Sign your contract (you can opt for two or four year ones), take a training session (you can choose between the training categories attack, defence, formation, fitness, or youth) and you’re ready to play your first league game. You can pick your team manually or let The Gaffer auto select your best players. Set your play style (Direct, as in lumping the ball up to your forwards, seemed the most appropriate one for 1959) and the level of aggression or defensiveness, trigger the kick-off and watch as a marching band struts onto the pitch and the subsequent game is rendered in amusingly pixellated fashion. After that, there isn’t a vast amount you can do to influence proceedings, beyond changing the play style and aggression level, and fast-forwarding to half-time. The absence of an option to speed up the on-field play is a big and somewhat annoying omission. At half-time you can pick two styles of team talk – from Hairdryer to Calm – and if it looks like you’re going to lose a game, you might as well ramp up the aggression level. You can’t even make substitutions, as they didn’t allow substitutes in 1959, although if you make it through to 1965, that’s when they were first introduced. As a result, the gameplay is pretty mechanical and I soon found myself clicking through the matches as quickly as possible – the seasons were long in those days. Nevertheless, The Gaffer’s autoplay tendencies did develop an oddly soothing and compelling rhythm and I rapidly became obsessed with achieving the necessary results to get promoted. It is, of course, a football management game, so nobody should expect it to provide adrenaline-inducing gameplay. Those were the days, probably (Pitchwork Studios) The Gaffer’s real interest, though, lies in what happens off the pitch, where snatches of conversations between the local dignitaries, who have a say in club affairs – the mayor, the head of the local company that sponsors the club, the councillor, the head of the supporters’ club, and so on – are relayed via text. They convey a sense of what your efforts actually mean for local residents and do so with plenty of humour and period charm. Achieve promotion and the whole town goes wild, which definitely leaves you with a warm feeling. It helps that whatever club you take over (I opted for Barnet, one of the few London based teams in the then Fourth Division) will have been wallowing in the doldrums for quite a while, so it’s quite easy to outstrip the locals’ expectations. But The Gaffer undeniably has a cosy, feel good vibe to it which hits the spot. The Gaffer is a very odd game, which leaves you wondering whether it’s going to develop beyond its somewhat insubstantial gameplay, but eventually sucks you in by immersing you in its small but perfectly formed time-warped universe. As long as you approach it with awareness of its humble origins there’s every chance that you’ll end up finding it charming, endearing, and curiously compelling. It will be fascinating to see what its creator Sanwar Ahmed comes up with next. The Gaffer review summary In Short: If you’ve always wished Football Manager was an auto-battler set in the 1950s then your dreams have come true, in this bizarre but charming indie curio. Pros: The period setting is highly unusual and very amusing, with great retro-inspired graphics and sound effect. An interesting history lesson and sensibly cheap. Cons: Very little actual gameplay and the inability to speed up matches is annoying. Score: 6/10 Formats: PCPrice: £9.99Publisher: Pitchwork StudiosDeveloper: Pitchwork StudiosRelease Date: 30th October 2026Age Rating: N/A It’s just a shame there’s not more gameplay (Pitchwork Studios) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. Arrow MORE: Star Wars: Galactic Racer has DLC plans but doesn’t want to ‘overpromise’ Arrow MORE: GTA 6 has a dedicated pop-up store in Selfridges with exclusive merch Arrow MORE: Zelda: Ocarina Of Time Master Quest DLC rumoured as game tops UK sales GameCentral Get the latest GTA 6 news, reviews of new games you should play and exclusive analysis of the biggest stories of the week.