It plays sort of like the old Championship Managers only they've added some incentive to buy stuff so you can progress faster. You name a club, stadium and fan group and you get a randomly generated team of players to manage. The tactics interface is most reminiscent of the really early CMs but you can use arrows and set a number of pre-used tactics if you like as well as some basic instructions for the team like counterattack, overall mentality and the like.
You're dropped into a league of 14 teams, if you're on a crowded server all of them will be other people, otherwise you may end up with a bunch of BOTs. There's no real difference though. Each season is 28 days long, the first two days can be spent planning the season, setting up your team and training different players. Then you play 1 game per day for the remaining 26 days of the season. Nonstop, you can't pause or go back as it all happens whether you keep up or not.
You get bonuses for logging in each day, you get possession-bonuses if you watch the games you play, as well as if you have a full house at the match and also if any of your TopEleven fans are watching.
The economy is built on tokens, but they're not really be all, end all, you can get by without them as you automatically get at least one per day due to sponsor agreements in game. I think there's something like 3 days left of the season, my 3rd now and I've been completely hooked, but I guess it takes as much time as you want it to depending on what you want to put into it.
