Tactical Manager

Despite not being a football fan, I found this game to be interesting, fun and could not stop playing it. Tactical Manager might look a bit dated, has rubbish graphics, but infinitely satisfying. By far, this is the best manager game I've ever played and kept me gripped. As far as realism goes, it's pretty faithful to the league of the time, and found it pretty believable. The most tedious part of the game is probably having to sit through all of the other teams scores.

In fairness, I'd always wanted to be able to speed this but up, which leads me on to another problem.
I never played it on the PC, but the Amiga version had awful music, and pretty much zero sound, but then I suppose it's a football manager game at the end of the day. All in all, and easy game to get around, easy controls, fairly user friendly menus.
I think there was only one other manager game I played at the time which rivalled it, which was championship manager, which I found to be fairly addictive but nowhere near as easy to get around.
My recommendation? Start it up, have a go with Notts. Forest, ditch Steve Chettle, get Kingsley Black playing and watch yourself get up the league. I also found Stoke City a fairly easy team to be successfull with. Once you've built up an impressive go at managing, you are able to play with the big boys further up the premier league. The key is to look after your good players, ditch the bad ones straight away and don't forget to look at your reserves. There's some pretty nifty players for each team too. Additionally, the transfer list has a whole wealth of players available, usually better than yours too!
It's amazing how much times change, but I've still found this to be a most enjoyable game, and just wish that developers would bear in mind it isn't all about flashy graphics, as this quite clearly demonstrates. I hope this has been helpful to you, and that you enjoy the game as much as I did.