Text-based sports management games like the Football Mogul series are a great pastime for fans who study the sports section of their newspaper every Monday morning and wonder what might have happened if they had been in charge. In some ways, playing games like this is even better than reading the paper, since you don't have to wait four months to see who makes the playoffs and who stays home. But the developers of Football Mogul 2003 seem to have forgotten something rather important: This is supposed to be a game.
Football Mogul 2003 is supposed to be a simulation of professional football that lets players guide franchises to victory in the boardroom and on the gridiron. It isn't supposed to be a statistics generator in which your main role is to click buttons and cheer from the sidelines. The game asks you to do so little that you might as well be spending your time following the real-life NFL instead.
The actual gameplay in Football Mogul 2003 is minimal. You select a team, choose your starters on offense, defense, and special teams (meaning you pick punt and kick returners), set prices for tickets and concessions, decide on a couple of budgetary figures involving your scouting and medical staffs, and then start simulating games. That's it. There are no player depth charts, no playbooks to fool around with, no plays to edit, no coaches to hire or fire, and no way to watch games in progress. Football games are played, football stats are accumulated, and real NFL players stock the 32 club rosters. To its credit, the game generates figures that seem realistic enough, both when it comes to team and individual player performances. Football Mogul 2003 rates players individually in five skills according to their positions, and a college draft is held each off-season, although you have so little impact on these factors, and on pretty much everything else, that it's hard to care. In short, there is no strategic depth to the game, at least when it comes to the gridiron. Following your team through a season is very similar to following your favorite NFL team through the season in the sports pages, since you do practically nothing but read game summaries and scan stat columns. The only difference is that you can actually send poor performers to the bench, instead of watching the real-life game on TV and vainly hoping that somehow your least-favorite players will get injured or pulled from the game.
The management side of Football Mogul 2003 is similarly sparse. There are just a few settings to adjust when trying to maximize your profit margin, and very little of it has much effect on your overall success. Dropping ticket prices, cutting the cost of beer in half, setting a scouting budget that dwarfs every other team in the league--all these things are practically meaningless if your team isn't playing well on the field. The game's finance model is simplistic and unusually unforgiving, even at the game's easiest difficulty setting. Fans abandon your team in droves after just a few losses, let alone a losing season or two. Even successful clubs have a tough time at the box office. Even if you price tickets well below the league average, sell cheap food, drinks, and souvenirs, and win your division, you still have a hard time filling your stadium to much more than half capacity.
Even worse, experiencing just a single losing season can put your team into an inescapable downward spiral. Even the most prosperous franchises don't make a lot of money in Football Mogul 2003. Have a banner year and you're still likely to have only $10 to $15 million to spend--which doesn't go very far when you have to deal with contract extensions and signing draft picks. Ready cash never seems to be available to sign the draft picks you want, making it next to impossible to rebuild a team with youth. You can actually run out of money altogether before or on draft day, making it impossible to select anybody. When this happens, you have to turn the draft over to the computer, which apparently makes selections on your behalf like some sort of bankruptcy trustee--which might explain why it tends to make poor decisions when it comes to the actual game of football. The computer AI seems to draft mostly defensive players, regardless of team need, and it occasionally gets stuck selecting players from one position.
Football Mogul 2003 has other serious bugs and design flaws, too. The onscreen box containing your starting offense sometimes turns completely white a season or two into a league, making the text completely unreadable so that you can't see who's in and who's out. When this happens, all you can really do is hit the autoselect button and hope for the best. The game's player information screens often lack scouting comments, making it more difficult to get a read on a player's abilities. This gets particularly bad after four or five seasons, at which point it affects at least one out of every three players in the draft. Finally, the game has a few stat bugs, most notably one that gives players credit for starting more games than they appeared in, and occasionally more games than they could have appeared in.
Still, Football Mogul 2003 isn't all bad. Since you don't have to make many decisions, you go through literally decades of play in just a couple of hours. The game's interface is well designed, with a menu bar that takes you everywhere you need to go with a minimum of clicking and detailed game summary screens that encapsulate all the information from an entire game. And it looks good, too--for a game that is almost purely composed of text. The developer has used a lot of color on the stat screens and relied on big fonts so you can read through all the numbers without squinting your eyes. Unfortunately, Football Mogul 2003 has no real sound to speak of. But drafting a team can be enjoyable, although you have to read through a lot of player information screens, because there is no way to sort players by statistics or skill ratings. Overall, there is nothing obtrusive or annoying about the game, and its rapid pace can carry you along for a few hours of football dynasty building.
But that's it. Football Mogul 2003 offers no real depth and consequently isn't very promising as a long-term pastime. Football fans would be better off sticking to their sports sections and dreaming about what life would be like in the owner's chair.
