Being a football manager must rank as one of the most stressful professions in the world. The pressure to get results is immense - even if you enjoy a season of success you can expect to find yourself down the job centre if you don’t keep the silverware flooding in the following year. Taking all of this into account, you’d imagine that a video game based on this job would be a hellish proposition – but having spent a few hours in the company of Football Manager Handheld 2010, we can report that the exact opposite is true.

This incredibly addictive game attempts to replicate the often chaotic world of soccer management, from training your players, scouting for new talents, establishing tactics and – most important of all – actually playing out the match.

You can select your team from a dazzling array of different clubs, including all of the participants in the various English leagues. Your choice of team essentially determines how you’ll be playing the game. Picking Manchester United might seem like a dream job but you need to be aware that the board and supporters will expect nothing but glory. At the opposite end of the scale, coaching a lower division minnow may seem like a dismal waste of time, but the level of expectation isn’t as high and the sense of achievement can be incredible.

Once you’ve selected your team you can tinker with various options to get them playing the way you want. For example, you can alter your attitude towards particular players to ensure they turn in the kind of results you want to see. It’s also possible to appeal to your board of directors for additional funds if you believe that your current squad simply isn’t up to scratch.

You’ll spend an inordinate amount of time performing little changes before actually entering a match but it’s all part of the appeal; when the team does well you know it’s down to your influence. Likewise, poor results spur you on to try different approaches.

After all the planning the actual matches in Football Manager Handheld are something of anti-climax. Most of the match is simply described via text, but during intense moments the view switches to a 2D representation of the action. Individual players are displayed via circles and you can see their movements and spot weaknesses.

With bags of options, pages of stats and engaging – if simplistic – match playback, Football Manager Handheld certainly has all the key ingredients to make an enjoyable and involving sports sim. There are some shortcomings to contend with – for example, aside from making substitutions you can’t really influence team tactics once a match is underway – but on the whole this game is astonishingly deep. In fact it’s not far off matching the complexity of its PC and home console-based counterparts.

Naturally the high price tag means that you have to be fairly serious about making a purchase – if you desire instant thrills and flashy visuals then Football Manager Handheld is likely to be something of a non-starter. However, if you’re a fan of football and crave an iPhone title which is going to hold your attention for months to come, then download this right away.