Football Manager 2011 (PC) > Reviews (15)

Having taken over from the highly Championship Manager series in 2005, Football Manager has continued to build on the success of its predecessor, improving every year in a seemingly relentless drive towards management simulation perfection. Football Manager 2011 makes few changes to last season’s version of the game, but existing features have been improved and the changes that have been made only add to an already rich and engrossing experience.
For those unfamiliar with the series, Football Manager involves taking up the Manager’s post at a club of your choosing (or you can start unemployed and apply for jobs) and then carrying out everything that a football manager would. The matches themselves are now shown in a full 3D match engine, a feature that has only been present since the 2009 version but that now is really starting to take shape, if still a little short of looking like the latest FIFA title. How you manage your team is up to you; formations, finances, training, you name it, you sort it. The amount of options in the game is remarkable and truly, truly vast.

It’s probably worth stressing at this early point that if you’re not a football lover, you could find this game overwhelming. Every decision you make has a very noticeable impact on your player’s performances and moral, and the amount of information available to you is considerable. If you’re not sure how to use that information, you won’t get as much out of the game as someone who knows the nuances of football and follows it closely. There is, however, an advisor that can be turned on and gives you advice on each page, in a window in the top corner of the game screen. This is useful even for experienced Football Manager players, especially when sampling the new features in the game.

These new features add a more personal feel to the game and make the people that you interact with feel much more real. Agents have been added to the game, meaning that when negotiating contracts with existing players or transfer targets, the agents own personal attributes, such as his negotiating flexibility and his current feelings about you, impact on the outcome of the negotiations. There is also a new ‘Private Chat’ option, where a conversation takes place between you and a player, and you can discuss anything from their recent form to possible transfer targets. The nature of your relationship with the player alters how likely things are to go well and how they respond to you; players who you keep at a respectful arms length or new players might say ‘Hello, you wanted to see me?’, whilst those you’ve had around a while might say ‘Good to see you boss’. It keeps the game feeling more realistic, and more than just statistics, numbers and graphs

Mind you, if you are a bit of an anorak for the records, charts and statistics that are constantly drawn from football (a bracket I sit worryingly proudly in), then you will not be disappointed. Whilst the managerial options are impressive, the database the game uses is enormous.

You can play in countless leagues from across the globe, with hundreds of thousands of players making up thousands of teams. The rules of all the various leagues are accurate, as are the stadia and their capacity, player regulations including work permits, age restrictions - you name it, it’s here. There is now also a dynamic league system which subtly alters the appeal of playing in certain leagues. For example, if Italian teams perform well in European competition, then the appeal of the Italian league is nudged up, so teams in Italy will have a slightly increased chance of signing their transfer targets. The intricacies of the game are just amazing. Such is its depth, there were rumours less than a decade ago that Everton, the Premiership Football Club (back in the real world), used the Football Manager database to enhance their scouting efforts. Football Manager fans of years gone by were well aware of the youthful talents of Ronaldinho, Saviola and Messi long before they were bathed in the media spotlight. It is testament to the researchers behind the game that their database is not just enormous; it’s accuracy is unmatched.

What then, of the actual matches? Again, the options available to you as Manager are vast. Notice the other team is playing a narrow formation? Tell your team to focus their passing down the flanks. Are your opponents playing quite a high defensive line? Why not make your pacey winger your playmaker, so that he can get in behind? Got a big centre forward? Make him your target man, so he can hold up play or win headers. Every decision that can be made, you can make. I won’t continue down this path any further because any decision you can think you might make during a football match, you can make in Football Manager 2011. During the games themselves, you can use touchline instructions to make quick alterations to your team; ask them to get stuck in, ease off a bit, play more long balls. The 3D match engine is available in a range of angles around the pitch, so you can better get a judge of where your team are getting undone, or where most of your chances are coming from etc. Throughout the match you can analyse passes, tackles, shots, and you can use the ‘Player Rating’ tab to get a good idea of who’s performing well and who isn’t. This is also the only point in the game where there are any sounds, it’s just crowd noise which obviously rises for goals and chances and generally it adds to the matchday atmosphere. There isn’t any music or anything outside of the Match Engine, but the layout and the lack of heavy graphics in the game means you can easily run music software in the background without any difficulty, should you feel the need for it.

Away from your team and up in the Boardroom, there’s even more decisions than before. You can ask the board for pretty much anything, using the new chat feature explained earlier. You can ask for money to relay your pitch or buy some new players, ask the board to search for a parent or feeder club, ask them to build a youth academy – it’s all there, and their decisions are based on their personality as well as the financial situation at your club.

I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this game and the options it delivers, but the keywords here are depth, detail and immersion. Rarely has a game given the player such control over his own ‘destiny’, for want of a better word, within the game. There is no end, as long as your computer can handle all the data you’re working your way through. Whether you become a world-famous and successful manager or a dreadful one jumping from job to job is entirely down to you. These aren’t decisions like you might get in a Role Playing Game, where you are given a right and a wrong decision to make as you tread a certain path. The role you play in this game is much more realistic than that, it is an ever-changing world, where the context in which you act is constantly changing, whether it’s dealing with injuries, building a new stadium to help your club progress or fighting back from a 2-goal deficit in the Cup Final. It is a complete footballing world and it is genuinely hard to imagine how Sports Interactive, the game’s developers, can ever hope to expand it – though I’ve no doubt they will try.

The question is then, whether or not you should buy Football Manager 2011. If you love football, then I can’t recommend it enough. If you like strategy games, it’s a definite yes as well. If you feel daunted by it, I urge you not to let this get in the way of you trying it. The interface is clean, the game runs smoothly due to the lack of graphical requirements and after a couple of hours with the advisor you’ll be surprised how comfortable you feel handling all the data and making those decisions.

Statistics show that Football Manager 2011 was the top-selling PC title in the year 2010. Second place in those charts? Football Manager 2010, last season’s version. This shows that not only are people standing by the series, but that more are joining in; it’s an amazing statistic given that the game was released in early November.

Combine all this with good technical support, constant updates and a thriving online community and you’ve little excuse not to get hold of Football Manager 2011. There’s a free demo available on the Sports Interactive website which gives you 6 months of a season to enjoy. I’d seriously recommend you get on it.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve a rather important FA Cup match to prepare for...