As almost any woman will tell you if you ask (and quite a few will volunteer the information unprompted), there is almost no limit to the delusions that the average male harbors about his capabilities. Chief among these is the conviction that being a coach of a top soccer club is a job (like TV chat-show host or gigolo) that he could do better than any professional.


As mass delusions go it is harmless enough (I am not aware, for instance, of any serial killings you could confidently attribute to it) and it probably accounts for the roaring success of Europe's latest craze -- Fantasy Soccer.


This curious phenomenon is a play-by-mail game that lets you manage your own team in a simulated league that exists in a central computer. In exchange for an entry fee and regular payments of a few dollars, you get a theoretical budget of millions, and can thus assemble your own team from a cast of thousands of players across the continent, each of whom has a price. Your players get a weekly rating according to their real performance and thus your fantasy team has a fluctuating points value which determines match results.


If these games stopped there, they would merely be a modern version of those bar-room pastimes like "What would be your Europe XI?" Regrettably they don't. Just reading their complex advertisements (and I counted 12 of them in a recent British soccer magazine) is enough to run the risk of serious, and possibly permanent, brainache.


Take 'Soccer Star,' which claims to be "the world's original, biggest and best." In return for your $7.50, plus $2.25 a week thereafter, you get "up to 10 pages of fully computerized weekly reports" and it boasts features such as "highly detailed rating system with each player having 50 separate attributes, describing all skills and mental states" (all?) "... Players also have separate wages and contracts which must be negotiated ... Fully detailed youth squad ... Full transfer market ... Detailed training system ... A variety of tactics and playing styles ... etc etc."


Don't ask me how all this works in practice, because I have no intention of finding out. But for those who do give up their day job to master it, there are leagues, cups and even friendlies. And all the while, there is some wretched computer somewhere throwing you problem after problem. In "Soccer Star," these even include "injuries, suspensions" and, if you please, "director interference."


Indeed, for those more sedentary (and interfering types), there is even a game called "Football Director," which presumably lets you solve such tricky dilemmas as how many cigars you should smoke in each half.


Fantasy Soccer is now very big business indeed. From the daydreams of men across Europe has been constructed an industry which runs into many millions of dollars, has spawned spin-off "How To..." books and videos and has been taken up as a promotion by newspapers as big and serious as London's Daily Telegraph.


The games' promoters (and their advertisements now support the biggest boom in soccer periodical publishing I can remember) claim they offer "the authentic experience of soccer management." Well of course no one is fooled by that. No fantasy manager has the enriching experience of 30,000 fans chanting abuse at him, has to deal with the fall-out from his star striker's hyperactive love life or gets to give a pre-match team talk (although I have no doubt some fantasy coaches are to be found at 3 P.M. on a Saturday afternoon, addressing a hair-raising speech to their computer screens). And, of course, most unrealistic of all, no fantasy manager ever gets the sack, no matter how bad the results. Otherwise he would stop sending his money in, wouldn't he?


Until these games can simulate that, and the ubiquitous management experience of feeling each day the club chairman's clammy, expectant breath down your neck, this is a craze that I will resist.