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24.05.13

Back of the net! Three fantastic football apps

 

It’s the Champions League final this weekend and we’ll be glued to our screens at 7.45 on Saturday evening to watch Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund go toe to toe at Wembley! But if you want to get yourself eager for what will likely be an excellent match, here are three football apps to get you in the mood.

Score! World Goals

 

It’s fair to say that I never thought that Dennis Bergkamp’s wonder goal against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup would ever be part of a nostalgic puzzle game. Yet with the arrival of Score! Classic Goals (now Score! World Goals) on IOS last year, that crazy day dream has become true.

The premise is pretty simple. You’re tasked with recreating classic goals by drawing lines between players as shown on a chalkboard, scoring up to three stars on each goal for how successfully you recreate it. On the easiest level, you simply have to draw the lines as exactly as possible. But by the time you’re on the higher levels,  you have to make sure that you’re carefully weighting your finger strokes to make sure your passes and shots achieve the elusive “excellent” rating.

It’s simple but my goodness it is utterly addictive. Score! ticks two essential boxes for any football fan. The first is its statto credentials: while the lack of licenses mean that player names aren’t on show, the inclusion of the date and country involved with each goal mean you can work out which goal it is pretty easy. The second is the way the great controls combine with that gleeful geeekery to get you laughing like an idiot when you’ve powered home a classic Henrik Larsson header.

Score! is a great football game and one that also perfectly utilises the touch screen interface. Glorious.

NewStar Soccer

Mix Sensible World of Soccer with old school classic Football of the Year and you get New Star Soccer, the ultimate old school football experience on mobile devices.

You start as a fledgling player plying his trade in the lower leagues in the hope of getting signed by the big boys. Every pass, shot, cross, corner and free kick counts towards your match rating as you play your heart out in an attempt to impress your manager and keep your team mates happy, play today and live the full experience.

And if that wasn’t enough, you need to juggle the rest of the football life along the side as well. Nabbing a girlfriend and sponsorship does wonders for your confidence but you’ve got to take time out to keep them happy. You can even go into a full gambling meltdown if that’s what you fancy doing.

While it sounds like it could be pretty complicated, NSS keeps things wonderfully simple. Everything is controlled by a tap of the screen, a control scheme that is good enough to take your 18 year old wonder kid and make him a 100 year old midfield grand master (I kid you not) more easily than you could dare to imagine. Utterly addictive stuff!

Four Four Two Stats Zone

How does one man who loves football stats turn his passion into an absolutely hit for football fans? In the case of Colm McMullan, he makes the Stats Zone app for Four Four Two and makes Opta data accessible to the masses.

Stats Zone is a veritable bible of information. Featuring up to the date statistics on top Premier League, Champions League matches (and a special Euro 2012 version), users can access everything from possession stats to influence zones to help them understand how each match progressed.

The result is utterly beguiling.  The sheer wealth of statistics is staggering and it makes interpreting the true pattern of each game easier to follow. It’s no surprise that Zonal Marking, the internet’s tactical mastermind, uses the app for all of his match reports as it provides exactly the sorts of detail necessary to master the game.

So if you fancy yourself as a bit of a footballing Billy Beane, cutting through surface level scouting assessments in favour of  deeper statistics, then Stats Zone really is the app for you.

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