Irish Sport Manager

The county is yours. So is the blame.

The management sim for the Gaelic games — football, hurling, camogie and ladies' football. Take a county in Ireland, name your fifteen from the parishes that produced them, and answer to a board that remembers everything — four codes on one calendar, and a summer that stops the country.

You are the bainisteoir. Not a chairman, not a director of football; the one on the sideline in a county jacket, appointed by a board that expects par and dreams of more, working with the players your parishes actually produce. Nobody is bought. Everybody is from somewhere.

Four codes, one sideline.

Pick your code — football, hurling, camogie or ladies' football — and the rest run beside you on the one calendar, with real dual counties, dual players, and the fixture congestion that comes with them. Lead with one; the others are always a screen away.

The season as she is played.

January shields under sodium lights. A league where the table pays your bills. Provincial championships, round-robin summer groups, back doors, preliminary quarter-finals, and one final in a national stadium of 82,500. Winner on the day: extra time, then penalties, exactly per the regulations.

Match days you actually manage.

Watch the game live; a ticking clock, an ambient ball, replays for the scores that matter. Make your switches while the play runs, burn your subs, pick your moment for the speech at the break, and stand over the result afterward.

A system, not a formation.

Restarts, shape, press and tempo: four levers that each buy their edge somewhere by paying for it somewhere else. Name a free-taker, a long-range taker, a target man. Put a marker on their danger man, tight or goal-side — whether he does the job is his character, not your team talk. Change any of it from the sideline and it lands at the next passage of play.

A county, not a squad list.

Players come up from real club country; surnames that belong to their ground, a Power where Powers are from. Call a club man into the panel, retrain a corner-back into a midfielder, nurse the panel through training knocks, and answer the disciplinary post on time or lose your man for the summer. What you see is what your selectors know: a stranger's figures are a guess until somebody watches him.

A quiet word.

Praise a purple patch, demand more of a slump, reassure the player losing their Sundays, contest a dual player's weekend with the other code, or talk somebody out of the boats for one more winter. One word per player per month: talk constantly and the room tunes you out.

The county happens to you.

Between the Sundays the post arrives: a wedding the night before a championship match, a J1 summer in Boston, the river in the street and the parish out with sandbags, a greyhound running Thursday. Ten days to answer, and the consequences run through the same systems as everything else. Write your own in plain JSON and share them through the Steam Workshop.

Careers with consequences.

Board confidence, severance cheques, sackings, and the job market that follows them. Have a good year and another county's board makes a quiet call; have a bad one and read about your own position in the paper. Start with a county, take whatever the dice give you, or start with nothing at all and wait for a phone that may not ring. Silverware buys patience. Drift buys none.

Feature list

• All four codes fully simulated: football, hurling, camogie and ladies' football — one save, one calendar
• 36 county boards: the island's 32 plus London, New York, Warwickshire and Lancashire
• Exact modern season structures: shields, league finals, provincial championships, round-robin groups, tiered cups, preliminary quarter-finals and a national series that ends in high summer
• Live match engine with on-the-fly subs, team talks, injuries and discipline drawn from the official playing rules
• Tactics that read as a system: restarts, shape, press, tempo, marking jobs and named takers, changed mid-match
• Deep counties: club call-ups, position retraining, staff market, finances, gate receipts and procedural county crests
• Scouting that gates what you know — point your selectors' week and watch the file fill in
• One-on-ones with your players: praise, demand, reassure, contest a dual man's weekend, talk him out of the boats
• Stories with consequences, moddable in plain JSON and shared through the Steam Workshop
• The match report: every man's rating, score, assists, turnovers and saves on one sheet, kept season after season
• Careers remembered year by year with medals and Player of the Match awards — players and backroom alike
• Career stakes: board expectations, dismissals, approaches from other counties, a working job market
• Season honours: awards, an All-County Fifteen, the top scorer race, head-to-head ledgers and the full roll of honour
• The county underneath: U20 springs and club championships fully played, watchable from the stand — and the call-up rows they start
• Deterministic world seeds — share a seed, share a world