As the Premier League begins this weekend, football fans across the country will finally see whether their manager’s transfer dealings have paid off. For those who prefer to play at being manager, however, the season doesn’t get started for a few months.
Football Manager 2011 was announced this week and will be released in the autumn. It’s the latest edition in a series of games that began almost 20 years ago under the name Championship Manager. Gamers take over every aspect of running a football club, from signing players to choosing tactics and dealing with the media. It’s detailed, frustrating and fiercely beloved by its many fans. It’s also addictive: the average Football Manager 2010 player has spent around 100 hours on the game since its release last October.
“Have you ever been in the pub after a game and bemoaned a substitution by the manager? Have you ever driven home and listened to the radio and shouted at one of your supporters who suggests that you should bring in a new keeper?” asks Miles Jacobson, studio director at Sports Interactive, which makes the game. “That’s why it does so well. We give people the chance to find out whether their rants are accurate or not.”
Season after season the game has steadily improved its intricately detailed simulation of modern football management. There have been hiccups along the way, of course. “Football Manager 2009 had too many bugs in it,” Jacobson says. “It wasn’t acceptable.” As a result, Sports Interactive had a “polish year” last year, limiting new features and focusing on bug fixes.
The knock-on effect of that is that Football Manager 2011 comes with 400 new features - the most in any new edition of the game. Changes include a new training module to make it easier to fine-tune your team, conversations with players so that you can try to keep your squad happy and new contract negotiations, a feature based on actual football contracts to which Sports Interactive was given rare access.
“There’s one new feature which has been added in specifically for the community and for people who play the game long-term, which is something called Dynamic League Reputation,” Jacobson says. “With our previous games, the reputations of the countries and the countries’ leagues would stay the same. That would mean that you could never take a team from Northern Ireland, say, to European glory and be able to sign similar players to Barcelona or Real Madrid and the other teams in Northern Ireland would be unable to attract better players.
“With Dynamic League Reputation, if you took a Northern Irish team to winning the Champions League - for a start, that’s a miracle and you're the greatest manager in the world and give us a call because we can definitely find something for you to do here - it would mean that the reputation of the league would start going up because people would want to be playing at that club.”
The game has become so well known - the likes of Arsenal striker Andrei Arshavin and pop star Paulo Nutini are fans - that Jacobson and his team are given plenty of access to football clubs. Ray Houghton, the former Liverpool and Republic of Ireland player, acts as a consultant ensuring that the game is as accurate as can be.
The exchange of information goes the other way too. There are 400,000 players and staff in the Football Manager database, each meticulously researched by experts all over the world. Jacobson says: “Everton have an official licence to use our database as part of their scouting network because we’ve got more scouts than anyone else in football. We have 1,500 scouts around the world going to watch, not just first team players but the reserve team and the youth team.”
That depth can be daunting for some so in recent years Sports Interactive has begun offering simpler versions of the game. “For some people, our games had become too complicated we know that,” says Jacobson. “So we’ve released games, whether it be Football Manager Live or Football Manager Handheld, there are games out there for those people to play.
“The PSP and the iPhone games are a pick-up-and-play, five minute experience - you play one match and you put it back down again. Or if you’re on the train, you play half a dozen matches and then put it down. It’s not meant to be the in-depth experience.”
The team experimented with taking the game to consoles too, with an Xbox 360 version, but Jacobson says they were not happy with the results and have no plans to try again. We couldn’t get the control system right. It’s very difficult trying to get this kind of game working on that kind of control method and it beat us,” he says.
The main focus of Football Manager remains the laptop and desktop computer, whether PC or Mac. That’s where the complete experience is to be found and Jacobson says that it works for all levels of players.
“We make features that appeal to different sets of users,” he says. “Dynamic League Reputation is for the hardcore and if you look on our forums there are people saying ‘I never thought it would happen’. When there was a leak about something a couple of weeks ago and I went in there and said some of it was true and some of it wasn’t, there were people saying ‘the only thing I care about this year is Dynamic League Reputation. If that’s in the game, then it’s all fine’.
“Whereas things like the new training set up are in there to help people who’ve asked how they can make their team blend. The player interaction is to deal with players who become unhappy. The real, in-depth people know the tricks to try to keep them happy but we’ve got to come up with ways to make it easier for people to nail that stuff and what’s easier than having a chat with someone?”
For many football fans, the optimism of the season’s opening day soon fades. For players of Football Manager, there’s always the option to improve on reality
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but like I said I get bored really fast :o
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