My name's Neil and - yes - I am addicted, to football management simulations. I have been hooked on Championship Manager for years, and this autumn - when my dealer told me there was something harder, better, even more immersive on the market - I took the plunge and bought Football Manager (FM). They took £30, but they could have had my soul.

They could, that is, had they done their jobs properly. But my FM has quickly proved an extremely bad trip - crashing lows provided not by my footballers' lack of form but by... well, crashing. Lots of it. My computer's falling over more times than El Hadji Diouf in the penalty box.

Worse, the fatal flaw exposes itself only after days of play, at the end of the first season, when you have survived the dreaded axe and have dreams of glory in the next term. And the problems have been more unexpected than a win for Rotherham - an apparently adoring computer games press has handed the game glowing reviews, with not a whisper of "unexpected errors" after nights of eye-numbing play.

It looks like I am not the only person wondering how hard the reviewers tested the game. FM was only launched this month. But at the start of this week, its support forum was showing 12,769 posts, on 2,638 topics. Those are just the topics its maker, Sports Interactive, hasn't deleted because they have graduated to being "known issues" to be addressed in a forthcoming downloadable patch.

A single post detailing those "issues" has been viewed 31,500 times, and lists 55 problems with the new game. Some - an overabundance of diving, for instance - seem trivial (or, perhaps, realistic). Others - like crashes during simple copy-and-paste functions, look worse. Still more, like the serious bug interrupting my FM fix, go unacknowledged in the official list of problems.

Customers have been frustrated by the company's lack of communication. Sports Interactive staff issue only teasing promises as to when a fix might become available. "When it's ready" is a common response. In answer to one plea, one user was jokily told the vital fix would be out before Championship Manager 5 - FM's big rival, which has seen its release date slip into the second half of next year.

We managed to draw a little more comment from SI Games this week. Via email, Miles Jacobson, its chief executive, said: "We are talking about days [...] rather than weeks."

Despite it all, Jacobson says he is happy with the quality of the first release of the game, claiming fewer bugs than previous versions of Championship Manager (which Sports Interactive developed before splitting with the publisher after the last version was released) or other new releases. "There are a few issues that are only affecting a very small amount of users," he says, adding that "the vast majority" are not troubled. It has already sold more than 100,000 copies in the UK alone, the company says.

"We are a victim of our own success, honesty and determination to get all issues fixed, even if they are found after the game has come out."

And although FM and Championship Manager will be slugging it out next year, Jacobson remains confident his game's brand will not suffer from such extensive discussion of its flaws.

"In every respect - quality of product, critical reaction, sales, you name it - FM 2005 has been a great debut for what is going to be an ongoing success story."

Some of his customers might see that as just the kind of defiance any manager worth his salt would come out with, faced with an early reverse.