Ok, you've picked your team and start investigating all players in the core and look for both the weakest points as well as the super stars (I suggest you take pen & paper as it's as good as impossible to remember all the data that's thrown at you), and then you of course want to go looking for better players that can replace your bad ones.

On to the transfer list, you know, that list where about all players that are "for sale" are mentioned on by their clubs (you don't nééd to pick one from that list but it will cost you less than pursuading a team to sell one of their regular players). Once you've found one you can send out a scout who will analyze the player during three weeks and afterwards tells you whether or not the guy has enough qualities to give additional value to you team. With this scouting we come to the first (one of little in FM2007) innovations. Your scouts have "experience" and this determines how well they can determine a player. They also have their area of expertise like one will be good in South America while the other will be best in North Africa.

Another way of recruiting are youth teams. Here you can have young players educated until they are ready to play in your core or sell them to generate extra income. If you want them to grow instead of selling them, you can now make an alliance with another club. That way you can exchange youth players and eventually get new talent.

Once you've done all these things you can start playing games, schedule trainings, determine tactics, ... as long as the results are good. And it's best to have good ones as being coach easily makes you the scapegoat when things don't go too well and you'll get fired. If everything goes as it should, you have the chance to play in the UEFA Cup or maybe even Champion's League (although you'll have to be extremely good for this).

Unfortunately, Football Manager 2007 stuck with the ancient bolls that keep shuffling after a ball and this remains a big downer on the fun. Although everything looks nice, it quickly becomes a drag to see these things go from one side of the green square to the other. Next to the games everything looks a bit like tuned up excel sheets but it remains the best way to show the enormous tons of information. Also the handy quick menu is still present and this results in swift navigation through the different parts the game contains.