The news caused an uproar in the football world. The Wanarama Nations League’s own Southend United have just appointed the most respected manager of all time as their new boss. Yes, it was this Phil Ivaniuk who led Parma to two Serie A titles and a Champions League in the mid-90s. The man who brought Premier League glory to Newcastle in 2001-02 before taking down Roman Abramovich’s filthy billions and turning it into a mercurial figurehead of Chelsea’s silverware for a decade. The mystery man, who has never gone more than a few seasons without a major trophy in three years, runs the Shrimp team. They must not be able to believe their goddamn luck.
Of course, we’ve all had incredible careers as football managers so far. It’s not only since SI parted ways with Eidos but even with the improved CL demo and that song (champion!) to find your way into this latest release, and when you topple PSG in the final, you can’t help but feel like you’re revisiting old lands now. They say football is a game of clichés, and when FM23 arrives, that cliché seems particularly pertinent: familiarity breeds contempt.
Of course, this is the core conflict for any studio working on an annual release cadence, and no one has a fully satisfied answer to it. It’s not Sports Interactive’s fault, especially as the industry culture has moved towards more and more acceptance of more and more releases. But there is a point when you feel that the culture has gone too far. You know you’ve reached it when you start commenting and point out that this new one has some Champions League performance elements.
It’s not entirely without fresh content elsewhere. It’s just that those new features aren’t exciting. A new set of squad planning menus. An overhauled fan confidence system that won’t have a huge impact on the way you do business. The redesigned AI manager, as the game’s own marketing materials say, responds to your strategy by improving decision-making. I don’t argue – it’s just that you have to dig into heatmaps and graphs to understand how and where it’s happening, and I don’t feel particularly motivated to start another 300+ hour career in it. I’m not saying the talented and dedicated team at SI isn’t putting in the work at all – rather, there aren’t many new features here that just aren’t enough to change the way I play games.
Of course, the reason titles like this are often obsolete is because the experience is still largely sound. Who am I kidding – it’s still Football Manager, which means it’s still capable of absolutely fascinating you, cultivating an obsession with 15-plus proximity numbers. It’s still built around a database of players and staff, so detailed that real scouts and data analysts use it as a recruiting tool.
Honestly, it still allows for a really hands-on approach to building a formation and a system to support it, and it plays more of a player role than anyone really understands. If you put me on a football field and made me play a Segundo Volante, I’d run away crying. Yet I often ask the same question to fifth-tier players.
Crucially, it still fires your imagination. No matter which team you’re in charge of, you’ve come up with such grand plans, and you just need to see them come to fruition. It’s obsessive at the level Destiny 2 hopes. When you’re in the throes of an FM save, every second you don’t hit the continue button or watch the match engine feels like a waste of time.
Well, Football Manager certainly isn’t broken. But it’s not like the COD activity you spend seven hours a year. Every release takes a lot of your time, and in such a long time, every little problem is magnified. In this way, playing FM is a lot like marriage.
So even after players have pointed this out and expressed their desire to fix it a few games ago, gegenpressing is still so effective and seems to have such a small impact on stamina it feels like a bigger deal . . The set-piece management screen is still a finicky, fragile thing, prone to reshuffling players with just the slightest provocation, and that’s been the case in multiple builds. If you’re also a long-term FM player, you’ll have your own very specific grievances of this nature.
Since you asked, apparently Southend has achieved back-to-back promotions. What else is there for the manager who helped Fiorentina lift the Champions League and take York City into the Premier League? We’ve made our way through the league, maintaining an impressive grasp of a rather complex tactical system built around a 5-2-3, and haven’t changed that formation in two and a half seasons.
If I were a data analyst, I would be able to tell you exactly why it works so well, and why AI, despite its newfound discovery of reactive decision-making, cannot cope with it. but I am not. Heatmaps terrify me. I can pretty much understand the charts for passing and shooting attempts, but honestly, all I get out of this is whether the “work ball into box” button is ticked. Part of FM’s longevity is its ability to grow alongside football and rebuild the sport’s culture, which is now rooted in data analytics. So it’s fitting that the SI has made it the focus of recent games, just as it reflects post-Brexit work permits, VAR and Boseman’s years of domination.
But the overall effect, the sheer density of data on the screen at a given moment, is pretty daunting. Not only did my inbox screen show me a feed of over 20 news stories and employee interactions, it also showed me four league tables, a list of recent transfers, recent results and upcoming events. Between the highlights, the race engine is covered with an absolutely horrible amount of information. All of my starting XIs have player ratings and status levels at the bottom. There are eight different game stats below the score in the upper left corner. In the middle of the screen, assistant manager suggestions and scoreline updates from elsewhere in the league. Then on the right, the “tablet,” which is actually a modular system of six customizable menus. From my ears, eyes and nose: blood.
FM demos have been popular this way for a decade. Constrained by an annual release schedule, this ever-growing array of readings is absolutely ubiquitous, and it’s a feeling it’s trying to add value, try to make life easier, and communicate the progress of the series. Its intentions are absolutely noble. But this is giving me a headache. I’ve spent months with Champ Man 01/02 during lockdown and not once – not once – have I missed not having all this information printed on every screen.
Thirty years after Champ Man’s debut, it feels as good as any moment to stop and really evaluate FM’s current form. A very engaging management game whose depth and detail could spill over the screen, produced by a studio whose talent and understanding of the intricacies of the sport is absolutely unmatched. For a £40 offer, you could easily lose a hundred happy hours. are all true.
But what will we do with the current matching engine when it debuts in its earliest form in November 2008? It’s hard to imagine we’d agree that this looks like a 14-game improvement.
I’d love to see what this game would have been if its creators had had longer to reinvent and re-release it. I could survive a year or two without a new game, and I’d probably pay at least half the price to update the database if that meant I was funding something that felt like a meaningful step forward. Like I told Southend rookie Max Haygarth in my office during that opening season: I’m giving you a break now so you can reach your full potential later.
