Ultimate Soccer Manager or USM is a soccer management video game series for MS-DOS, Commodore Amiga and Windows 95, produced by Impressions and distributed by Sierra from 1995 to 1999. The game was never more than a minor hit in Europe (except in Germany, where it was better received due to some similarities with managers produced by local software houses such as Software 2000 and Ascaron), although it gained much support in Japan.
In all three games, the game always kept the same visual style: the main screen is a bird's eye view of the stadium facility (where clicking on the grass brings the squad selection screen or in the stands for the stadium builder) and all screens are presented like the player was inside an office (TCM 2004 used a similar interface option). To increase the feeling of "being there", tables are accessed via teletext, news from a newspaper and fixtures are available by clicking on a sheet attached on a clipboard.
The original version of the game provided the English league system from the Premiership down to the Vauxhall Conference. It was distributed as shareware, with a fully functional demo in which the player could only select then Second Division side Brighton and Hove Albion. The game allowed to watch games in top-down view, buy and sell players, manage the team, upgrade the stadium and manage commercial interests such as advertising and merchandise. The game statistics were for the 1995-1996 season.
The second version of the game, USM 2 ran in protected mode, featured a more polished interface (plus teams and players of the 1996-1997 season and also the French and German leagues (although in the last the final name of the players had a letter swapped to avoid legal problems regarding licensing) which could be accessed with different executables. In Germany, a localized version of the game was released under the name "DSF Fussball Manager", DSF being a well-known German TV sports channel.
This version of the game was updated to run natively on Windows 95 and Windows 98 and included teams, players and statistics from the 1997-1998 season. The number of leagues increased to five, as both Italian and Scottish championships were added. Transfers required often a week or more of fax exchange between clubs and with the player agent, making the game more realistic than most other games in this aspect, which only required the player to bid for the player and agree wage and length, adding him instantaneously to the team. USM 98 was released as "DSF Fussball Manager 98" for the German market.
As the official pre-game editor included in the game was poor, some USM users produced enhanced pre-game editors. USM Data Editor (USMDE or UDE), of which the official web site was included in the USM Online web site (usm.footymanager.net), was called as the best editor. USMDE includes various features for USM98 editing, e.g., creating players, editing hidden stats, add-on file support for easy data update by USM fans, beta-released save game editing.
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