Football Manager

This article is about the computer game series. For the general concept of football management, see coach (sport).

File:Fm08boxart.jpg

Football Manager 2008 box art

Football Manager is a series of football management simulation games first released in 1982 by Addictive Games, and lasting until the mid 1990s. In 2004, the series was revived by Sports Interactive to replace the name of their Championship Manager series. The original series is credited as being the first ever computer game to use the concept of managing a football team. Football Manager 2008 is the latest in the series.

In the United States and Canada the series is sold as Worldwide Soccer Manager or WSM. This is similar to the name of the series on the Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast. These games were published by Sega who, incidentally, are now Football Manager's publishers, in the place of Eidos, who published Sports Interactive's Championship Manager series until their split in 2003.

The original Football Manager series

Football Manager was originally developed by Kevin Toms for the ZX Spectrum in 1982. The game was to start a whole new genre of computer game: the football management simulation. The game was a huge success and was ported to a wide range of systems including the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, BBC Micro and Commodore Amiga - the Amiga version memorably using the machine's speech function to read out match results. Most of the programming involved in converting Kevin Toms original code to different formats was done by Jean Frost and Peter Lunn, who worked for Addictive Games at the time.

Due to the success of the game it was followed by several sequels: Football Manager 2 (1988) and Football Manager World Cup Edition (1990), both written by Kevin Toms, and finally Football Manager 3 (1993), without Toms' involvement. Football Manager 3 was poorly received, and as a result the series came to an end.

Paul Robson developed a remake of the original game. This remake has since been ported to the GP2X by Jonn Blanchard.

The official fourm for Football Manager related talk is http://community.sigames.com/

Football Manager 2005

Main article: Football Manager 2005

On 12 February 2004, after splitting from publishers Eidos Interactive, it was announced that Sports Interactive, developers of the Championship Manager game, had retained the rights to the source code but not the rights to the title Championship Manager, which were held onto by Eidos (who previously acquired the brand rights from Domark upon their merger in 1995). These developments led to a further announcement that future Sports Interactive football management games would be released under the famous Football Manager brand name. Whilst the Championship Manager series would go on, Eidos no longer had any source code, or, indeed a developer for Championship Manager.

Having been left without a publisher for its football management series, Sports Interactive teamed up with Sega and later, in April 2006, Sports Interactive was acquired completely by the publisher in a continuing trend of consolidation within the games industry.

The first game released under the newly acquired Football Manager brand was Football Manager 2005. Commonly known as "FM 2005", it competed directly with Championship Manager 5 from Eidos-funded Beautiful Game Studios.

Football Manager 2005 included an updated user interface, a refined game engine, updated database and competition rules, pre and post-match information, international player news, cup summary news, a 2D match engine, coach reports on squads, job centre for non-playing positions, mutual contract termination, enhanced player loan options, manager "mind games" and various other features.

Football Manager 2005 was released in the UK on 4 November 2004 - closely followed by releases in many other countries around the world - and it became the 5th fastest selling PC game of all time (according to Eurogamer). The Apple Macintosh version of the game comes on the same dual format disk as the PC version, so its sales are also included.

Football Manager 2006

Main article: Football Manager 2006

Football Manager 2006 for PC and Mac was released in the UK on 21 October 2005 (2 weeks earlier than the originally stated November 4 release). On the same day as the game's release, Sports Interactive also released a patch to fix some bugs discovered during the Beta and Gold stages of development. In its first week of release, it became the second-fastest-selling PC game of all-time in the UK.

Essentially just a season update of FM 2005, it does however, include many small adjustments and improvements to the general gameplay. These adjustments include team-talks, simplified training and in-game help screens. As well as this, the game is updated by its many researchers (unpaid fans of the game augmented by in-house collaboration). The database is usually updated twice in the period of the release of the game. The first comes with the game and the second is usually downloadable in February as a free data update to reflect the changes which take place during the winter opening of the FIFA transfer window. As has been customary with the series a beta demo of the game was released on 12 September 2005. This was later followed on 30 September by a gold demo. This is a cut-down, limited time version of the full game which is sent to the game manufacturers.

Football Manager 2006 Xbox 360

The Xbox 360 version was released on 13 April 2006 and is the first home console game in the Football Manager series. The full 50 playable league systems are included, as well as a 250,000-strong player database (very near to the figure of the PC version), but due to the large save files of the game, the Xbox hard disk drive is required. The game is also region free.

This version also makes use of the Xbox Live functionality, allowing players to create online leagues and cups with up to 16 human-controlled teams using team data they have exported from their offline game. Voice chat is fully supported during online play. It has also been confirmed that SI will release new content through the Marketplace system.

Football Manager Handheld

FM Handheld was released on 13 April 2006. The game is a milestone for Sports Interactive as it is their first ever game for any handheld console. Due to the obvious hardware constraints of the PSP platform this game is a cut-down version of the standard FM 2006 with a choice of just 6 playable leagues/countries and a total of 15 playable divisions.

Below is a list of leagues that are playable within the game.

• England - Premier, Championship, League One, League Two, Conference National
• France - Ligue 1, Ligue 2
• Germany - Bundesliga 1, Bundesliga 2
• Netherlands - Eredivisie, Eerste Divisie
• Italy - Serie A, Serie B
• Spain - Primera División, Segunda División

Key difference from the PC/Mac version of the game include the following:

• There is no multiplayer mode in FM Handheld, but it is being looked into for "next year's version".
• There is no 2D match engine like its PC counterpart. This is due to the technical limitations of the PSP.
• Team squads are limited to 36 players - again due to technical constraints.
• There is no database editor, though this was included in Football Manager Handheld 2007.
• Each game is playable for a maximum of 30 seasons.

With a special download from Sports Interactive, you can play as the fictional football team, Harchester United from Sky One's series Dream Team.

The user interface for Football Manager Handheld was created using the P.I.S.D. Ltd platform libraries. These ensure that it is easily portable between multiple platforms.

Football Manager 2007

Main article: Football Manager 2007

On 8 June 2006, Sports Interactive published details on Football Manager 2007. "Packed full with more than 100 new features, Football Manager™ 2007 is set for release on PC, Mac and Intel Mac, as well as the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft. Football Manager Handheld on Sony’s PlayStation Portable handheld entertainment system (PSP) completes the format line-up, with all platforms set for a Christmas 2006 release."

On 24 September 2006 it was announced that Football Manager 2007 would be released on 20 October 2006.

On 1 October 2006, Sports Interactive released a Gold Demo of FM 2007, available in two versions, vanilla and strawberry. Both versions allow users to play 6 months into a season. The strawberry version contains a larger collection of quickstarts so users can try out more leagues. It also contains more graphics than the vanilla version.

As a result of certain retail outlets ignoring the official release date, Football Manager 2007 was actually released on 18 October 2006.

New Features in the 2007 version of FM include the ability to include pictures for you as the manager; substantially increased media interaction such as approaches from national newspaper journalists about the upcoming match or asking for comments on a player's performance in recent matches; new varying degrees of criticism or praise for players (happy with form or very pleased with form rather that just one generic good term), a similar feature has been included for such actions as admiring players or attempting to unsettle transfer targets. Improvements have also been made to board request interactions.

The main improvement lauded by Sports Interactive for this version of FM is the improved scouting system. Scouts' and coaches' experience is now shown graphically via bar charts and scouts gain knowledge from areas they have scouted previously. To go with this it is now possible to get feeder/parent club status which allows you to either send your players to lower league teams to gain experience, make it easier to get work permits, merchandise sales in other areas etc or, as a lower league team, to receive reserve and youth team players on free, season long loans and to generate extra revenue through associated 'fees' and friendly matches. In turn the parent club gains scouting knowledge for the area that the feeder club is in if it is in another country than that club.

A patch has been released to combat some of the main bugs in the game, such as unrealistic scout reports and high amounts of injuries sustained whilst playing on the pitch. The latest build of this patch is 7.0.2 94768.

On 27th July, the Football Manager website was updated with a new Football Manager 2008 section.

Football Manager Quiz Mobile

On 23 February 2007, Sports Interactive released details of Football Manager Quiz Mobile.

The game included four different playing modes; Match - A one-off game against the computer, League - A whole season playing each team twice home and away, Quickfire - 3 minutes of quickfire questions and Quizmaster - perfect for playing with friends.

This game has attracted widespread criticism from customers on sigames.com's official forums, as a large percentage of the questions are either long since out of date due to transfers, or simply provide no correct answer among the four options. many have also encountered serious reliability problems. Sports Interactive have pointed out that the game is not programmed in-house, but have refused to apologise for misleading customers.

Football Manager Live

Main article: Football Manager Live

On 20 April 2007, SEGA Europe Ltd and Sports Interactive released details for Football Manager Live which will be a brand new massively multiplayer online game. Scheduled for release in Spring 2008, Football Manager Live has its roots set in the best-selling and award-winning Football Manager series, but has been designed specifically as a massively multiplayer online game.

Football Manager 2008

Main article: Football Manager 2008

On 3 October 2007 SEGA Europe Ltd and Sports Interactive announced Football Manager 2008 to be released 19 October. However, the release date was brought forward by a day to 18 October 2007, due to some retailers shipping the game early.

My Football Manager Team

• ""Gk)"" Eros Corradini
• ""Lb)"" Breno
• ""Rb)"" Falzi Koçabas
• ""Cd)"" Cristian Zapata
• ""Cd)"" Alessandro Tuia
• ""Cm)"" Hedwiges Maduro
• ""Cm)"" Miguel Veloso
• ""Rm)"" Giorgino Wijnaldum
• ""Lm)"" Sergio Mota
• ""St)"" Salvatore Foti
• ""St)"" Klaas-Jan Huntelaar

References

• EuroGamer.net review of Football Manager 2006
• TrustedReviews.com review of Football Manager 2006
• Pocket Gamer review of Football Manager Handheld
• Mansized review of Football Manager 2007

External links

• FootballManager.net - Official game website from SEGA and Sports Interactive
• Sega Europe - Sega's site showing a brief summary of the game.
• Affliates section for Football Manager fan sites