A franchise that began on the Saturn launched its first new entry in years today with Sega Football Club Champions going on sale for Android and iOS devices as well as the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and PC via Steam .

It’s a soccer management simulation game similar to Sega’s Football Manager franchise. Unlike the full-price Football Manager, Sega Football Club Champions is a free-to-play game with microtransactions for its multiplayer mode.

Sega commemorated the launch with a trailer on YouTube that touts features like player training programs, tense salary negotiations and a roster of 5,000 real soccer players.

www.youtube.com

“The beloved soccer club management simulation game from Japan ‘SakaTsuku’ is here for global players with its latest version!” the store page says, referring to the franchise’s Japanese title, “Pro Sakk Kurabu o Tsukurou,” which translates to “Let’s Make a Pro Soccer Club.”

“Celebrate 30 years of passion and strategy in this iconic title brought to you by SEGA!” the store page continues.

Indeed, the first game in the series, “J.League Pro Soccer Club o Tsukurou!” was developed by one of Sega’s consumer software teams and published on the Saturn exclusively in Japan in February 1996. It was a decent success for Sega, selling more than 270,000 copies , leading to a sequel in November 1997 that did even better — it sold more than 460,000 copies.

Over the next two decades, Sega released new entries in the “SakaTsuku” series on home consoles, portable consoles, the PC and cell phones. Its most recent entry, “Pro Soccer Club Manager” in 2018, was on Android devices in Europe and Japan as well as iOS devices in Japan. The series hasn’t been seen on consoles since 2013 or on PC since 2009.

The series has been localized into English only a few times, too: J. League Spectacle Soccer on Dreamcast in 2002, Let’s Make a Soccer Team! on PlayStation 2 in 2006, the aforementioned Pro Soccer Club Manager in 2018 and today’s Sega Football Club Champions.

Mixed reception

The return of “SakaTsuku” was met with excitement after its announcement last year, and that hype continued into its launch. An automated account on Bluesky that tracks Apple store rankings said that Sega Football Club Champions debuted at No. 1 among free games on iTunes. The official account for the game on X issued an apology overnight for download errors caused by “heavy traffic from initial downloads.”

But reception on Steam has been less rosy, where negative reviews are pouring in.

“Pay to win gacha game, an insult to the ‘SakaTsuku’ brand,” one reviewer said.

“As others have said, this is less of a management game, and more of the same mobile gacha lottery madness,” another reviewer said.

The game has microtransactions labeled things like “Monthly Player Upgrade Bundle” and “One-Time RB Pack” that range in price from US$0.99 to $63.99.

People have criticized the look of the game, too, with one person on X saying, “Sega UI and graphics are stuck in 2006.”

Another possible source of consternation for some is the AI disclosure on the Steam page, which Valve mandates for all releases on its store. It says, “At SEGA Corporation, we utilize generative AI as a support tool for developers, aiming to provide better content to our users and enable developers to focus more on creative tasks. We have used such generative AI support tools during development of SEGA FOOTBALL CLUB CHAMPIONS.”

	Danthrax
		Danthrax is a member of the SHIRO! Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks and helping to manage the group's social media accounts. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the '90s, he didn't get a Saturn until 2018. It didn't take him long to fall in love with the console's library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and he's helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.