?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. ?Thats 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 wasnt 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.
?Theres 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, thats 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 weve 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 weve 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 youre on the
train, you play half a dozen matches and then put it down. Its 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 couldnt get the control system right. Its 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. Thats 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 wasnt, there were people saying ?the only thing
I care about this year is Dynamic League Reputation. If thats in the game,
then its all fine.
?Whereas things like the new training set up are in there to help people
whove 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 weve got to come up with ways to make
it easier for people to nail that stuff and whats easier than having a chat
with someone?
For many football fans, the optimism of the seasons opening day soon fades.
For players of Football Manager, theres always the option to improve on
reality.
Buy
Football Manager 2011 from Amazon.co.uk
