Full Backing

Full Backing is a football management game about the only question that ever mattered: does the board still fancy you? One card a week. Three choices. No going back. Every call moves the boardroom, the terrace, the dressing room and the press. Let any one of them hit the floor and the club issues a statement of full confidence in you, and you are gone by lunchtime. Then Saturday happens. Your club's own pink 'un lands with the result: a banner headline that is always on your side, and a scoreline beside it that never is. A THRILLER, OF A SORT, it says. LOST 0-4, says the plate. Both true, one inch apart. You start at the foot of the pyramid, in the County Alliance. Sixty clubs across three divisions all play their own seasons, whether you are watching or not. Three go up and three come down every summer, and the board reads the table at the final whistle. Two cups are drawn properly, with byes, replays and a final at a neutral ground. Climb to the National Combination, if the board lets you. Take the job by opening a sealed foil pack of three clubs. Every decision after that is another sticker pressed into the album, and the album outlives the career you lost. There are no transfers to fiddle, no formations to tinker and no match engine. Just choices, consequences, and the long walk to the car park when your full backing runs out. • 320 dilemmas, many of them parodies of things that really happened • 35 storylines, some of which the club remembers you for seasons later • Sixty parody clubs in three divisions, each with its own crest and colours • Two cups, with replays, neutral-ground finals and a wallchart of your run • A Saturday paper that reports every result and remembers what it printed • 138 endings to collect in a 1970s-style sticker album • The Gaffer's Record: longest reign, honours, and who sacked you by lunchtime • A 58-second chip-band theme tune, and foley made entirely of paper and tin foil • No ads, no account, no tracking. Plays offline. The board wishes to place on record its full confidence in you.