Modus Hopper Random: El Tel Tells It Like it Is as The Manager

Monday, 24 August 2026

El Tel Tells It Like it Is as The Manager

Welcome to another MHR blogpost looking back at the world of football games before the age of the personal computer and games consoles. I have no recollection of how I came to acquire this pristine copy of The Manager, a game co-invented and endorsed by Terry Venables. It dates from 1990, when I would have been a youngish deputy headteacher with two young children and a tight domestic budget, and Terry himself was the manager of Spurs. Although my own copy, shortly to head to a charity shop, is clearly unused, it’s more likely that I picked it up from eBay around the turn of the century. Today it gets dusted off, literally, for this nostalgic blogpost.

The football-related aspects of Terry Venables’ career are inevitably linked to a large number of other commercial activities. These got plenty of coverage once again when he died in 2023 at the age of 80. I’ll concentrate on this particular board game here, but you can easily track down tales from his forays into the retail world, professional singing, co-writing novels and private members’ club ownership. Some of the novels were adapted for a TV series. What is striking about those articles is the sheer range of the activity. Most of the contributors to the stories are glowing and positive about his vision and business acumen, but he also ruffled some feathers. Similarly, his football and management career was varied and broadly successful, starting with promotions at Crystal Palace, a trophy or two at Barcelona, and then leading the England team at Wembley in Euro ’96.

So, this game. It is manufactured to a very high quality. It benefits from Barclays League branding and three photographs featuring Terry and one other person. Two of them would have been instantly recognisable as Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker. I don’t recognise the third, but it could well be Paul Riviere who is credited as the co-inventor of the game. I cannot shed any more light on him, but the company name on the rules booklet is Glenhope Management with an address in Exhibition Road in London. A quick couple of Google searches also suggests that a Polish Hearth Club (yes, hearth not health) and Restaurant has been located there since 1989, and it is also the registered address for at least one other management company.

The main features of the game seem to be collecting player cards to build a team, managing money, answering quiz questions and, to a certain extent, winning trophies. These two sentences stand out in the light of 21^st century norms and expectations …

“The Manager can be enjoyed and won by those who have no special interest in soccer and it may be found that women are frequently the winners.”

“The player with the most money is declared the winner.”

It’s clear from the rules that there is a huge financial penalty in the endgame for having an incomplete squad. The quiz questions come in three categories – soccer, entertainment and general knowledge. Inevitably some of them have now been superseded. Answering a question correctly was deemed to add a goal to the score you had achieved with a throw of the die. The dodecahedral (12-side) die was part of the player collection mechanism. Other aspects of the game would be common features in many of this type – land on a certain type of square, pick up the corresponding type of card, follow the instructions immediately. I’ve captured a few of those in the photos here. The FA Cup turns up along the way as a side hustle with possible financial reward once a player has reached a certain point on the board. The rules as originally printed have auctions of teams and players at various points, but there is an additional printed slip in my box saying that, “Terry suggests that playing The Manager is improved if players ignore the Auction Option completely.”

Although the first player to pass the Final Whistle space with a full team gets a ten million pound prize from the Banco de Venables, that person may not end up as the winner until a lot of arithmetic is completed. You might even need to calculate the 25% interest on your overdraft. To be fair, the rules booklet is well-written and unambiguous with a final warning that “… should players disagree … we are sorry, but these rules and the answers provided are final.”

If you’d like to pick up a copy of this game for yourself, there are plenty of copies around on eBay and such like with asking prices ranging from £5 to £20. Postage costs would add another several pounds – there’s a lot of weighty paper and cardboard in that box.

The 1990 release must have been successful enough as a product to be re-launched under the leading Waddingtons brand in 1996, with a redesign of the playing board too.

Image credit : sircollectalot.com

Thanks for your interest! Hopefully the photographs that follow will give you a more detailed sense of the gameplay. I have kept a pdf copy of the full rules if anyone needs them.