No elegant representation for a manager class?

If you don’t need replication, need no actor and look for something even simpler, just use UObject. If what you are looking for doesn’t need an instance, use a static utility library. In some other cases I go for a subsystem, usually when there is a single system managing things on for example the game instance, like the zombie spawner in left 4 dead could be, or the system managing all music for the game.