Copa City Review

Run the matchday experience for a host of football clubs in this novel management strategy sim. Does Copa City have a title challenge in it, or is it battling against relegation? Find out in GameWatcher’s review.

Football management games have long been focused on the running of a club, taking Kettering to Champions League glory and unearthing 30-goal-a-season teenagers. So what Copa City brings is pretty unique, but still an integral part of being behind a winning team.

Copa City is all about the matchday experience in all its minute, yet crucial, ways. You won’t be signing any players or experimenting with your unorthodox variation on the diamond formation. Instead, you will be tinkering with everything inside and outside of the stadium to create the optimal matchday for players and fans alike.

So while it’s a football management game of sorts, it’s also got aspects of a city builder, a tycoon game, and a strategy game. Much like trying to get all your best attackers into your team’s frontline, it’s a tricky thing to make these different aspects click and work together where it matters.

In fact, the first issue I came across was the sheer weight of things to take into consideration as the game jumps from sub-genre to sub-genre. It’s a typical problem for any strategy or management game when you first sit down with it. Thankfully, once you do crest the tidal wave of information, things get into a fairly comfortable groove.

You need to focus on three key resources to succeed. Funds cover your operations, infrastructure, and marketing. Specialists manage your fan zones, and Volunteers utilize the local community in various jobs.

The adage of spending money to make money certainly applies here, as a good marketing campaign, for example, can help fund infrastructure and vice versa, but you need to consider the overall outgoings. Taking risks early in my time with Copa City proved to be reckless. I’d gambled on heavy spending in certain areas to see if I could effectively shortcut my way to boosting the end result. It’s possible to take risks, but you really need to get to grips with Copa City’s systems before it’s worth trying.

Playing on a console perhaps pushed me to get a bit impatient. The controls are a tad fiddly on a controller, and with the early assault of information, its attempts at onboarding are frustrating to say the least. While I can concede that it does get easier to understand and navigate, and that the game does keep more complex parts back until you’ve got deeper into it, my patience only held in that first hour or so because the overall concept sounds so intriguing. 

Even after the frustrations simmered down, there were still occasions where I found the control setup unpleasant and sludgy. Thankfully, the pace of the game doesn’t rely on real-time speed, or I’d likely have launched a Cantona-style attack on my television.

The juggling act outside the stadium is catering to the fans (who have groups with their own needs) whilst placating the concerns of the city and its regular residents. Stacking fan zones around a busy part of the city, for instance, is going to have a detrimental effect on local traffic and create plenty of noise. As is also true for positioning routes to the stadium, being too close to residential areas without a smooth flow of people will have a negative effect on residents and fans alike.

It can also hurt your chances of passing inspections for safety, logistics, and readiness. This is especially true in the stadiums where you get to assign specific fan sectors, sort out changing rooms, and

Each city and team comes with its own challenges. The developer has official layouts for six clubs, including Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Flamengo, and Marseille. This brings the specific philosophy, fan culture, and cityscape for each of them, as well as their official stadiums.

It certainly gives them a unique flavour and adds something unique to each scenario. Developer Triple Espresso has done a commendable job in making each city and team experience feel distinct. Many football games try to capture a vaguer idea of what clubs are about because they have to deal with hundreds of them. 

In Copa City, the background details of creating a matchday to remember bring out a much more granular experience of the clubs and their cities. I know it’s tough for a regular football game to get into so much detail, but when everything comes together, and you witness the build-up to a matchday, it’s an undeniably magical feeling that comes closer to a football fan’s experience of their club than playing EA FC or Football Manager.

It did leave me yearning to get hands-on with the team beyond stocking their changing rooms, but that’s a compliment to the systems Copa City utilised in getting me so deeply involved in the matchday preparation without losing my attention to reams of spreadsheets. As it is, Copa City offers a unique approach to football in video games.

Review code provided by the publisher.

Copa City is on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on June 16, 2026.

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