Get your cup final suit out of the wardrobe and start practising your hand gestures, Football Manager is back. Sports Interactive’s annual football franchise has long been the thinking person’s football game, swapping the trading card fantasy of FIFA for the data-heavy detail of modern soccer. So what can you expect when you load up the iconic time vacuum this year?
The headline addition on the 2023 edition is the ability to play fully-licensed Uefa tournaments. You can now lead teams in the Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League. This includes authentic match graphics, elaborate draw ceremonies and even the iconic Champions League theme. Prepare to immerse yourself in a big European night under the lights like never before. You can even go full-Jose Mourinho by trying to win all three cups and getting a tattoo to commemorate it. Ink and needle not included.
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The authentic licensing doesn’t stop there. SI have also inked a deal with Manchester City, giving you their proper kits and player faces. Now the in-game Erling Haaland looks like a cross between Ivan Drago and a nonplussed baby, just like in real life. While playing as mega-rich, multi-champions City is frowned upon in hardcore FM circles, at least this year your shame will look cool.
But gloss and showmanship is FIFA’s bag. If you’re reading an FM review, chances are you’re a massive nerd. It’s fine, so am I. But that means you want to know about the nitty gritty. You’re more bothered by the horsepower than the paint job. Well the big feature for us data-geeks this year is the Squad Planner.
The Squad Planner is a three-season visualisation of your squad depth. This formation graphic is tailored to your current tactics and allows you to see not only who can play where currently, but which of your young stars will break into the reckoning the following season and the season after that. You can customise this view further by changing the formation, if you want to see how your squad would cope with a switch to a 3-4-3 for example. You can also add potential transfer targets to the planner to see where prospective buys would fit in. It’s such a simple tool but I found myself returning to it time and again. The clear layout saved me copious amounts of notebook paper while planning the evolution of my side in the coming years.
The day-to-day experience of being a manager has been brought to life by increasing the influence of the fans. While your main concern used to be keeping the board happy, now the supporters will also grade you on things like your tactics, your ability to compete with local rivals and your performance in various important games. Their opinion is still superseded by the board, but it does have a real bearing on your situation. Owners generally don’t keep coaches who are reviled by the fans, so keeping them on side will be crucial. In a nice touch that reflects the modern composition of football fans, your supporters are broken up into categories like “Fairweather”, “Corporate” and “Hardcore”.
The Dynamic Manager Timeline has also been added this year in order to help you chronicle your progress. All of your major career milestones appear on a graphic, allowing you to browse through past glories. It's a tidier way to look back and remember your career, saving you having to go back through various menus to unearth your previous trophy wins. Its value is mostly aesthetic but it’s a nice touch.
Alongside these headline features, a fair amount of tweaks have been made to the overall gameplay. If you played last year’s game, you’ll be in familiar territory. SI haven’t rewritten the book here, they’ve simply sharpened up a couple of the chapters. Players will display a wider range of emotions during a game now. The most amusing is “Would rather have stayed on the bench”, which feels particularly apt a couple of weeks after Cristiano Ronaldo’s substitute sulk.
The gameplay during matches feels largely similar, though you do have some nice additional options when it comes to setting up your defensive line. You can also choose to press in a low, mid or high block now, which adds necessary depth to one of modern football’s defining characteristics. There’s also more intelligence on display from the AI managers you face. They will make more tweaks to try and counteract the way you play and during my time on the game I found some of these changes to be lethal. If you’re one of these players that leaves the game running to go and make a cup of tea or use the loo, be prepared to come back a goal or two behind.
Overall the actual nuts-and-bolts gameplay has evolved rather than been revolutionised. Some will say that such minor adjustments don’t necessitate an annual release, but when coupled with the aesthetic additions and the immersive experiences of the Uefa competitions and the new Squad Planner, there’s more than enough here for even the most devoted FM22 addicts to make the switch.
There are still improvements to be made. For example, players still get upset when you compliment them on playing well, which just isn’t realistic. No real-life player is going to demand a transfer because you said “Nice one on that hat-trick, pal”. The transfer system is still massively weighted towards the computer. Your £50 million-rated star player will get non-negotiable bids of £13 million and get angry at you for rejecting them. Meanwhile, to prise a player of the same quality from another club you’ll be quoted £150 million. It’s an unfair mechanic that isn’t fun nor is it grounded in realism.
If FM22 or the earlier iterations rocked your world, there is much to savour here. The experience is cleaner, more immersive and tasks like keeping the fans happy and tinkering with your Squad Planner will absorb hours. If you’re looking for an entirely new game built from the ground-up, this isn’t it. Very few annual sports franchises are. But unlike its glitzier cousin FIFA, Football Manager still feels more grounded in its sport than any other game on the market. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if Roy Keane fancies being assistant manager at Nice.
