Gaelic Star: Football Manager

Gaelic Star is a free Gaelic football game for iPhone. You take over a team as manager and it's yours to make something of. A county, or your own club — you're asked which when you start, and both are full careers. Most of the job is picking the team. Everyone in your panel is rated in stars, form moves around, lads get injured, young fellas come through and the older ones start to go. You name your fifteen on a Sunday and then you live with it. Then you play the match. It's a full fifteen a side game under the 2025 rules, so you've got the solo and the hand pass, the high catch in the middle, the two-pointer from outside the arc, and the shot over the bar that either feels right or it doesn't. You can simulate a game if you're short of time, but playing them is the whole point. TAKE A COUNTY All thirty-two are in it from the first launch and none of them are locked. The league and the championship, the split season, scouting, transfers you can't get over the line, awards nights, retirements, and a county board whose patience does run out. Get sacked and you start again somewhere else. TAKE A CLUB Over 1,500 real clubs, placed where they actually are, in their own colours, each one playing its county's real championship. There's nobody to sign — you have the men who were born in the parish, and that's the point of it. Win the county and the province is next. Win that and you're in Croke Park. Matches are played at four grounds depending on what the day is worth, from a field with a rail round it up to Croke Park, and the weather changes with the month. Seasons roll on. Players you brought in as teenagers turn into the spine of the team and then start to fade, and you go looking for the next ones. The whole thing is free and there is nothing to buy — no energy meter, no loot boxes, no second currency, nothing locked. It carries advertising, and that's what pays for it. Those ads are never personalised, nobody under 13 is shown one, and nothing in the game is locked behind one. No betting ads ever, because children play this. Made in Ireland by one person. Play a season on the bus, or lose a whole winter to it.