Hattrick

What it is

On its own site Hattrick calls itself a football strategy game where you build and manage your team for the long term, and the description holds. You are in charge of the whole club: buying and selling on the transfer market, deciding what the squad trains, preparing a tactical plan for each match and keeping the finances healthy. There is also a youth team if you would rather grow players than buy them.

Every club you meet in league and cup is run by another human manager. That changes how a result feels. A narrow defeat is not a script deciding you should lose; it is somebody else who read the fixture a little more sharply than you did. The site is also open about where it comes from: online since 1997, and still offered as a free football game.

How a season feels

The calendar is the backbone. According to the official beginners' guide, a Hattrick season lasts 16 weeks: 14 league rounds, one week for qualifiers and one week without league action. League matches are played at the weekend, while cup ties and friendlies happen midweek.

Training runs on the same weekly beat. Its effect is applied once a week, and a player only gets full training in a skill if he plays 90 minutes in the matching position during that week. That is why the guide nudges new managers to arrange a friendly every week when they are out of the cup: two matches mean twice as many players picking up training.

When a match kicks off, the system simulates it and you can follow it in a live commentary viewer while chatting with the opposing manager, or read and analyse it afterwards. Away from your own fixtures there is a lot going on: national team elections that any manager can stand in, a World Cup organised every season for senior and under-21 sides, and private tournaments you can set up with friends.

Time it asks of you

This is where Hattrick earns its place. The official line is that you can log in every day or just once a week and, if you make the right calls, still have the same chance of becoming champion. The beginners' guide singles out one job above all others: submit your match orders. Everything else, from scouting the transfer market to studying the next opponent, is as deep as you choose to make it.

The flip side is pace. A training decision can take seasons to show, and a season lasts four months. If you want to see the effect of a change by Friday, another card on this board will suit you more.

How it pays its way

Signing up is free and no download is needed: the game runs in a browser, and there are free apps for iOS and Android through which, the site says, you can manage every part of the game. The optional paid layer is Hattrick Supporter, offered in four tiers.

The Supporter page groups its extras into team management tools, team designer tools and statistics. Examples it lists include a head-to-head pre-match analysis tool, a detailed training report archive, automatic friendly booking, a match kit designer, a team logo designer, rating graphs and league-wide player statistics. In other words: time savers, information and cosmetics. Try the free version for a full season before deciding whether any of that is worth paying for.