Let's Make a Soccer Team!

Let's Make a Soccer Team!
European cover art
Developer(s)	Smilebit
Publisher(s)	Sega
Series	Pro Soccer Club o Tsukurō!
Platform(s)	PlayStation 2
Release	JP: March 29, 2006 EU: August 25, 2006
Genre(s)	Football Management
Mode(s)	Single-player, multiplayer

Let's Make a Soccer Team!, known in Japan as Pro Soccer Club o Tsukurō! Euro Championship (プロサッカークラブをつくろう！ヨーロッパチャンピオンシップ), is a PlayStation 2 football management game, released by Sega in 2006. Until the worldwide release of SEGA Pocket Club Manager on Android and iOS platform in May 2018, it was the only game in the Pro Soccer Club o Tsukurō! (SakaTsuku for short) series to be localised for the Western market.

Gameplay

Let's Make A Soccer Team featured a 3D match engine using assets from Virtua Pro Football.

The game has heavy role-playing video game elements with a running story and characters alongside the more regular management side of the game. Unlike in other football management titles, the player is the chairperson and founder of the club, and has a job similar to a director of football. The game features 439 real, mostly unlicensed club teams from all over the world, with real rosters covered by the FIFPRO license, unlicensed versions of the UEFA club tournaments, and a handful of fictional friendly tournaments. Many of the friendly tournaments are playable only if you fail to qualify for the European group, or knockout stages.

In total there are six playable leagues: England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. While players can create teams based in the home nations of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland; as well as in Monaco, they will still play in the English and French league systems, respectively. Of the six leagues, only the Spanish and Dutch leagues are fully licensed, while Italy is mostly licensed, with Palermo, Siena, and Cagliari being unlicensed Serie A teams. Six Serie B teams and the Italian leagues themselves are unlicensed as well. The game also has official licensing from Juventus, with the Stadio Delle Alpi being used when Juventus is playing at home.

In addition, the game provides a Versus Mode, which allows players to choose all 439 real club teams and all in-game national teams to simulate (but not manage) friendly matches and custom tournaments. However, if a player exports their custom team from the main story mode, they can then directly manage their team like in normal gameplay.

Virtua Pro Football integration

Teams created in the main game may be imported to Virtua Pro Football for use in custom games, leagues, and tournaments. Players from a completed career mode of VPF can also be imported into LMAST as youth players, with better play in career mode rewarded by improving the player's initial skill and potential.

Plot

The game's story begins with a brief introduction concerning the history of football. After this, the player is then led to creating their own football club, selecting the hometown, the club's main colour, the design of the club kit, the team's playing style and the club's secretary.

Following this, the game slides a series of newspaper headlines, chronicling the formation of the player's team, and its rise to the third tier of the respective country's league system. It also introduces the main antagonist, a local-born business tycoon who plans to take over and merge a football club into his conglomerate, Big Bang Konzern, which is also based in the player's hometown.

The player's club starts the playoffs in severe debt, and the tycoon is insinuated to be trying to buy the player's club in a Hostile takeover. The game's playoffs to the second tier and first pre-season acts as a tutorial, which continues until most features are unlocked in August of the 2006–07 season, the first fully playable season. Some features remain locked to the player until the team either finishes two seasons or promotes to the first tier, whichever comes first.

If the player's club is knocked out of the initial playoffs, they trigger an early Game Over as the tycoon buys your club. Otherwise, the rival buys a different club from the same hometown who earned automatic promotion and begins a local rivalry which lasts for the rest of the game, forming the main thread of the story.

Reception

When the game was first released, critical reception to the game was generally unfavourable, with a 44 rating on Metacritic shortly after release, with many reviews criticising the match engine and lack of depth. Players disagreed, with the user score being far higher at around 8.7. Some users were upset and felt like the critics didn't give the game a fair chance past the first couple of hours.

Retrospectively, the game still has its advocates. The Neoseeker forum for LMAST was the second highest used in 2008, only behind the FIFA 07 forum, it is still used by the game's small community to this day. Some Let's Plays of the game have thousands of views on YouTube.

A fan-made texture mod for the PCSX2 emulator replacing the unlicensed logos with official, period accurate ones was created and released on Neoseeker in 2022 by an Australian YouTuber named Nexxus Drako Gaming. Shortly afterwards, Nexxus herself released a video essay on the series' history and the game's small community.

Trivia

• Roberto Baggio appeared in promotional commercials for the game in Japan, and also featuring on a limited edition cover for pre-orders, as well as a cross-promotion with SEGA's arcade title World Club Champion Football.
• The game's localisation was vastly different between Japan and the European release, despite the text already being translated before localisation, with the English localisation team replacing many lines of locker room talk. Examples included players originally talking of attending the opera and playing violin of an evening, references replaced with more culturally relevant topics such as, seeing a rock concert and going to the cinema.
• The game was the 18th retail title to be given a perfect compatibility rating in the PS2 emulator, PCSX2.

External links

• Official site (in Japanese)