Underworld Football Manager is a strategy game much like other manager simulations, with one key difference. While you only control the team, transfers and training in most other games, here you can also bribe opponents, injure players or shut down enemy buildings. This adds a whole new level to simulation and tycoon games.


How does the game work?


You start off with a very weak team full of "level one" players. All your buildings are also very small and undeveloped. You then try to earn a lot of experience, money and other currencies so that you can hire better players, train your existing players, expand your facilities and learn new skills.

When it comes to the game of football itself you can:
Play friendly matches (exhibition matches)
Play in cups (tournaments)
Play in leagues
The more developed your facilities are and the better you perform, the better the prize money, experience points and so on.

On top of that, several in-game characters will ask you to complete quests. These elements of the game are voluntary but very crucial. Completing quests will get you very far in the game! Quests pop up very couple of minutes or hours and may include "injure player X", "beat team Y" or "level up 6 players".

When you play matches, you will either face an A.I. player (the ones with the blank face for a profile picture) or real human players (shadowy picture or facebook account picture). The matches don't have any gameplay footage, just live text on what's going on.

In order to make it far in the game, you will have to get used to the different currencies in the game. Every currency is good for something, so it's best to understand what they are for.

Currencies used in Underworld Football Manager

Here are all the currencies used in Underworld Football Manager. Before I start: You can decide how often you want to upgrade a facility. When I say that building is not that much worth for leveling up, I mean it's not good to level it up very often or very intensively. That does not mean that you should keep these buildings at level one. Just be aware that it may be good to bring some facilities to level 9 quickly, while others can wait and maybe stay at level 3 for a while. But ultimately, it's up to you. You can even decide to level up all buildings one at a time and keep them all on the same level, although I believe that's not very useful.

Experience Points / XP


You gain experience points for almost every action you perform in the game, from bribing or injuring a player, playing a match, most of all from completing a quest, achievement or from finishing a tournament or league.

Experience points are basically your ticket for gaining a level as a manager. When you gain a level as a manager, you are rewarded very handsomely with money, budget points, gifts and, most importantly, skill points.

Experience points are only a small part of what matters in Underground Football Manager, but you'll be very happy to gain levels quickly, as you will soon find out.

Money


It should be very obvious that money matters very much in every game that deals with economic aspects. This game is no exception.

Money lets you do the following things: Buy items, upgrade buildings, buy talented players in bidding wars, ask an agency to look for talents in the community pitch, and bring players to new levels with training.

If you run out of money, it's very difficult to keep moving. So it's wise to have a constant flow of money. There are several different sources of income, the most known is a building called "Finance HQ". This building literally makes money by the minute. How much money it makes depends on the level of the building. So if you want more money, upgrade the Finance HQ.

Another way to earn money is to score good positions in tournaments or in the league. Completing quests also helps. Exhibition matches also produce income, although not enough to survive.

Gold


Gold is the rarest and most precious currency in Underworld Football Manager. You can either buy it with real money through a transaction, or you earn it very slowly. You can get it as a reward sometimes or by pure luck with the wheel of fortune. Do not spend gold lightly as it is so rare.

Gold basically speeds up a lot of processes. Here are some examples:


Immediately finish the injury time of a player
Fill up the available exhibition matches immediately
Finish the upgrading process of a building
Finish leveling up a player


Gold can sometimes be traded in for other currencies. Gold is your shortcut in many situations that would otherwise require you to play the game longer. If you are in a hurry, you can use this currency, but like I said, be very careful with it. If you haven't played the game so much yet, better save the gold and use it only when you have fully understood which situations require gold to be spent.

Budget Points / "Green Cheese"


It is not enough to have a lot of money. Even if you have all the money in the world, you can't upgrade your buildings, hire players or level up players, unless you have budget points.

Budget points are a way of the game to make sure you don't just buy your way up in the game. You need to prove that you have been successful enough to improve your team or your facilities.

You earn budget points, sometimes called "Green Cheese", by completing quests, leveling up yourself as a manager through XP, Competing in tournaments and the league, and by accomplishing achievements such as "win X games" or "buy Y items". We will come to that later.

Many people struggle with Green Cheese. If you are in the early stages of the game, you will often come accross this problem. One tip I can give you is: Hire a bunch of low level players (level 1 to 3), then focus on improving your really good players, and fire every player that you think is worthless. You will get a refund on all player you fire, not only the budget points the initially cost you, but also the budget points gained through a level up. So don't be afraid to fire a player, you will get all the budget points back.

Manager Skill Points

You can only view your manager skill points when you visit the "University" in the game. Skill points are what you get for leveling up as a manager through XP. It is also possible to get skill points by completing certain achievements, but that's a rather uncommon situation.

When you gain skill points, you can use them to improve yourself as manager in various ways. You can increase the number of exhibition matches you can play, increase your ability to injure other players, improve the performance of your training and so on. This is one of the most valuable tools in the game. Always strive to become a better manager and use the skill points to gain an advantage! I will talk about this a little more later.

Exhibition Tokens

When you play exhibition matches, or friendly matches as they are called in real life, you need tokens. It's not very complicated. You get a token every about 20 to 30 minutes, and once your token bar in the "Exhibition Grounds" is full, you no longer get them unless you play matches. This is just to limit the number of matches you can play. Nothing special and nothing to worry about too much. It's just the way it is.

Talent Agency Tokens

Later on in the game, it is possible to get highly talented players in some kind of auction house, the "Talent Agency". To get really good players, you will need lots of cash. But money alone won't help. The number of times you can place a bid is limited by tokens. You get these tokens from the fortune wheel, as daily rewards or by buying them with gold. My advice is: Don't engage in bidding wars too often, better focus on players you really, really want, and be prepared to spend hundres of thousand of dollars for a good player. If you lose a bidding war, it's a waste of tokens. Only bid if you are totally determined to pull through.


List of buildings and how important they are


Buildings, or facilities, are used as a base for your team. There is no building that is totally useless, so don't think that you should neglect any of them completely. However, there are some buildings that might be more useful to you than others.

Also, there is no such thing as "the number one most important building". It depends totally on your style of playing. If you are more the kind of guy who wants a high level manager, the university may be more important. If money matters for you and your goals, then the Finance HQ ist of relevance. If you just want to level up players as quickly as possible, it's the Sports Lab. Here are all the facilities in Underworld Football Manager and how important they are.


Finance HQ



Effect: Produces Income (Money)

Sooner or later, you will want to level this thing up as it is your #1 source of income (until your tournaments produce even more money). The more you upgrade it, the higher the amount of money per minute is. The downside of this is that you may have to spend a lot of time on your phone or tablet, because there is a maximum amount of money that the Finance HQ can save. You constantly have to withdraw that money. To avoid this problem, use manager skill points to increase the maximum amount of money that the Finance HQ can hold.


University


Effect: Increases the amount of Experience Points gained (XP)

This was the facility I personally focussed on when I started the game. I realised that I wanted to get a lot of experience points, because experience equals level ups, and level ups equal skill points that can be used in the University.
The downside of having a quick level up as a manager is that "teams of your level" will soon be teams that are actually stronger than you. The reason for this is that while you level up quickly as a manager, your players may not be able to catch up with that. Other human players may spend more time on one manager level and improve their team first. But that's okay, because in the long run, you will be better off with all your skill points.
Whenever you feel that you are running out of budget points, check for your University because an upgrade can get you out of trouble.

Sports Lab


Effect: Makes players gain experience faster

The Sports Lab is the place where you put your players to improve. When a player has played a number of games and is ready to level up (his background is totally blue and he has an arrow next to him), you can go here and get him to the next level. This may take some minutes or hours based on the level.
People who invest in a much-improved Sports Lab have the advantage that their players will get stronger and stronger very quickly. You may have level 20 players when other people still have level 15 players.

The downside of this strategy may be that you are only leveling up bad players without real talent. On the other hand, this is one of the safest, easiest and most rewarding strategies, so don't feel discouraged if this is your idea of playing the game.
Also, if you spend lots of budget points upgrading this thing, but you don't have enough budget points later to upgrade your players, then the speed of upgrading your players doesn't help you much, so keep a balance.


Training Grounds


Effect: Improves the stats of your team by a certain percentage

You can think of your Training Grounds as some sort of boost or buff that will make your team stronger. Let's say your team has an overall shooting ability of 20000 points. Your Training Grounds may double that amount if they are well developed!

Training Grounds are great if you want to crush your oponents with pure team strength. The stats of the whole team are multiplied with the training ability of your Traning Grounds and the Training Talents aquired in University. A deadly combination.

The downside of this strategy might be that it's a little shortsighted if this is your only approach. You should try to also focus on actually making your players better (Sports Lab) and finding young talents that deserve to play matches (Community Pitch). In my opinion, the Training Grounds are great for later in the game when you have build some of the most important buildings listed above.


Tournament Arena


Effect: Unlocks new tournaments


You can enter a new tournament every day, as it consists only of 7 matches, with a match played every 2 hours. The better the tournaments are, the better the rewards are. The first tournaments only yield a crappy 10000 bucks or so, but later you can earn ten times more and it doesn't stop there.

What I also noticed is that higher level tournaments may not even have that many human players involved. If you are really lucky like me, you get to play only against NPCs. These computer teams will not be able to stop you and you can easily get a hundred thousand dollars or more!

In my opinion, improving the Tournament Arena is very useful every once in a while. The way I did it is this: Whenever I won a tournament, I improved the facility, then waited to win the next tournament, and so on. That way, you don't have to upgrade the facility all the time, and your trophies will look nice next to each other. A great income source by the way!

Having played this game for a while now, I believe the tournament arena is one of the most important places! Try to get really high, at least level 10-14, this will get you lots of rewards and you have a higher chance of encountering only NPCs than at the lower levels.

Pawn Shop


Effect: Unlocks new an better items

The Pawn Shop is a facility in Underground Football Manager that is most useful when you have a lot of money, so I advise you to only upgrade it very much when you think that you are swimming in money. It can be very useful if you want to manipulate matches. Vandalizing enemy buildings, bribing players, injuring players or giving improvement items to your own players is a lot of fun.

Just imagine that you can give an enemy player a car so he will score an own goal in the match against you! Wow!

Here is the downside though: The Pawn Shop will eat away a lot of your money, and all the effects are only temporary. Every bribe, every injury, even improvement items will wear off. You are basically spending money on things that will not have a long term effect. Therefore, it is wise to also invest in buildings that bring long term effects, like Sports Lab, Finance HQ and the like.

But if you are close to being promoted in the league, or you need to beat your next opponent to win the cup, then a quick bribe or a mass killing (just kidding) of enemy players will give you the best results you can hope for.


Villa


Effect: Reduces time needed to improve facilities

The villa is one of the most simplistic but also most overlooked buildings in the game. It allows you to improve buildings more quickly. When you progress in the game, you will soon find that some buildings need several real time days (!) to be built. So you might decide on a friday that you want to improve your Sports Lab, but it will take until Sunday afternoon until your building is finished and you can go on with the next building (only one building at a time is allowed).

The villa is a very prudent investment for people who know the like Underworld Football Manager and want to keep playing it for a while. If you don't know what to build next, build your villa! Then every building after that will be built faster!

The best buildings to combine this with is Finance HQ and University. You will need a lot of money (Finance HQ) and Budget Points (from leveling up) to build lots of facilities when the time in between is shorter.


Stadium


Effect: Increases player loyalty

This building only becomes important at later stages, when bribery is at its highest. At the same time, it's up to you whether you use a lot of money to improve this building or simply improve your player's loyalty when leveling up. A stadium at around level 10 should be enough for most people.


Talent Agency


Effect: Produces bidding tokens

The Talent Agency is that "auction house" kind of place where you can get highly developed players for money. It is very useful if you need a really good player without having to bring someone all the way up from, let's say, level 5 up to level 25. Also, all the players in the Talent Agency are in one way or another above average. All of them are either silver or gold players, which means they are much better than other players at that level.

The Talent Agency was changed in a recent patch and now produces bidding tokens instead of opportunities to see hidden talents. It's still a building I don't like because auctions are hard to win.


League Facility


Effect: Gives you a stronger home advantage in the league

The league facility is the place where all your league games take place. If it is really big, your stats will be stronger when you are playing at home. This gives you a bigger chance to be promoted to the next league, because your team will even be able to beat otherwise stronger teams.

I find this update quite useful as it is not as expensive as one might think, and it also don't take so much time. At the same time, it's still not the most important thing, but try to level it up once in a while, at least in order to stay in the same league.


Community Pitch


Effect: Lets you find new players at higher levels

Think of the Community Pitch as a small suburban pitch where young kids are playing. You get to scout these new players and pick the ones you think are really talented and fitting for your team.

I have to admit that I underestimated this facility in Underground Football Manager. So as a part of my guide / walkthrough, I have to correct that mistake.

At first, I thought that it would be best to get players at really low levels and then level them up myself (I would get a bonus for leveling them up). However, when you get higher level players in the Community Pitch, it is easier to distinguish bad players from super talented ones. And if your Community Pitch matches the level of your team players, you can pick up a player and directly use him in your next match!

Also, but this may just be a theory, when you find players from level 1 to 20, there is probably more of a chance to get a silver or gold player than when you just look for players ranged level 1 to 10. What do you think?


Hospital


Effect: Reduces injury time

I haven't upgraded my hospital much because I just accepted that injuries are a part of the sport. Players get injured, so live with it, move on and use some other players in your team.

However, when you have very special players in your team, winning or losing may depend on whether they can play or not. So perhaps it is good to keep the hospital in good shape. I personally think that you don't need to level up the hospital so much in the beginning, but if you notice that you lose games constantly because your best guys are out of action from injury, then this is the place to go.


Exhibition Grounds


Effect: Let's you earn more money through friendly matches

It's nice to earn a thousand bucks for a single match that only takes some seconds. The Exhibition Grounds are a source of income, although not a very big one. I can imagine that you can earn a lot more if you level this place up.

However, the main source of income should already be your Finance HQ. This place lets you earn 300, 400, 500 dollars, depending on how much you level it up. Why would you instead level up the Exhibition Grounds, which only gives you money when you play matches? I think this is one of the least useful places, leave it behind and only level it up if you want the achievement for leveling up all facilities.


Prison


Effect: Reduces prison time

You will end up in prison a lot when you play this game! Whenever you do something illegal, there is a chance you will get caught and grounded in prison. Therefore, it may be useful to improve that prison. For some weird logic, this will reduce your prison sentence. Just go with it.

Although it may make sense to reduce prison time at a later stage, your prison doesn't need your imidiate attention at the beginning of the game. Besides, if you have friends in the game, you will often be released from prison very quickly.


Police Station


Effect: Protects buildings from vandalism

Another facility that can be useful, but it doesn't need to be on a high level. Policemen help you protect your buildings from attacks by other players. I have 12 police officers at the moment, and I think that's more or less enough.

There are some reasons why you should hire enough police:


Your Training Ground affects your stats very much, so players in tournaments or the league will try to pull it down
Your League Facility may be brought down to minimize your home advantage in the league
You may get a quest that says one of your facilities will be attacked and you should protect it


So I suggest you get at least 12 policemen or a little more. But you don't need much more until later in the game when you have enough time and money.


Museum


Effect: None (just for viewing)

The only building in Underworld Football Manager that you can't upgrade. But at the same time, it is also one of the most overlooked places. Here is why:

The Museum lays out all of the achievements you can unlock and have unlocked. It also shows how many more things you need to do to unlock the next level. Let's say you have won 50 matches. Next up, you have to win 100 matches, and so on.

Every time you unlock an achievement, you get money, green cheese, sometimes even manager experience points. Some of the achievements are very easy, but most people never look into the museum and therefore fail to realize that they can get something for free very quickly!

For example, there are high level players out there who have never in their life injured their own players, or locked down a city. However, you should try to not only achieve every achievement, but achieve it multiple times! That's how you get very far in the game and have resources left!

I will give you a few tips on some of the achievements later on. Keep reading.


B-Team


Effect: Allows for a second set of players to get experience

This facility in Underworld Football Manager has recently been introduced. Here, you can let young players grow up as well as old players get experience to catch up with the best players. This is very useful to keep all players at a high level in case someone gets injured or too old.

It is very useful because of the common dilemma that a young, talented player at a lower level doesn't become strong so quickly while an old player may be very strong but loses his abilities when growing older and older.

Make use of the B-Team, but if you only have a handful of young, talented players, fill the empty slots with Level 1 players. That's a good option for you.