I'm considering buying the game. I spent a large portion of a day playing it at a friends, and found it to be quite addictive. But I found it quite difficult, even with Manchester United, and what should have been pretty sound tactics. Perhaps it was simply that my players morale was low due to my being a new, inexperienced manager, or maybe I just needed to tweak the tactics more, but it was frustrating to say the least. It was quite demoralising to see all that effort put into generating a sound gameplan result in scraping by piss poor friendly oppositon, then drawing with lower league opposition at the start of the season.
But the word regarding installation, verification, and needing to run STEAM everytime one wants to play, puts massive doubt over whether I can be bothered with it all. I haven't played since CM4, which I loved, and was considering getting back into the series, but it seems I picked a bad time.