Football Manager 2010

  Football Manager 2010 is the latest installment of the top football/soccer management sim from Sports Interactive. Just like previous incarnations and Sports Interactive's other sports sims Out of the Park Baseball and NHL Manager, this game provides a deeply immersive experience, allowing you a chance to take over a club and lead them, using a wide array of tactics and an extremely large database of real players to acquire, to either glory or failure.    
 

Your Career Path 

The game starts by having you create the world you want to manage in. You can choose to either include just one league or up to 117 leagues from 51 countries to be available to manage in, or you can use their recommended settings to easily create a ready to play game.

 The next step is to actually create your manager, from your birthdate to your nationality to your level of play with an option to upload a picture of yourself, all of which (other than the picture) will have at least some effect on your game. Make yourself a more accomplished player and you will have more built in respect whereas unknowns have to earn it. Your nationality determines what language you speak which can have an impact on how well the team follows your directions. The game is filled with little subtleties like this throughout. After creating your character, it's time to pick where you want to manage. You can choose from super clubs like Real Madrid or Man Utd. all the way down to a club struggling to avoid relegation from the 6 tier of the English league system or your favorite national squad trying to make it to the world cup. With all the league and player licenses in the game, there is a nearly limitless amount of ways to play the game.

Tactics, Transfers, and the Public Life

After choosing a club, its time to prove your worth as a manager. You can choose Barcelona to manage and have superstar players and ~$100 million to use to improve the team or you can choose a team like Altrincham, which features scrubs and has $0 to acquire better players.  The advantages of choosing Barcelona are obvious, but choosing Altrincham creates a challenge because you have to mold it into a winning squad. How you do that is almost entirely up to you. You can choose the team's formation and the roles of each individual player to maximize their abilities that hopefully lead to victories. If the team's players don't fit the tactics you want to use, you have the option to search for players that will using either a searchable list of known players or you can send a scout out to find unknown gems. You'll also have assistants capable of helping you make tactical and personnel decisions should the whole process be troublesome for you, though I found their advice poor and they often seemed to be conflicted amongst themselves, making their input unhelpful even for novice players. 

I found both the tactics system and the scouting to be intuitive and easy to use while still providing a lot of options to choose from. The tactics section lets you choose the formation you want or you can copy from a large number of commonly used setups. The roles you can assign players are well explained in the game and even include a guide to the qualities a player needs to be successful in each role to help you find the right fit. As for the scouting, its easy to search for players using any variable you want and then to either attempt to sign them or watch-list them and the scouts provide reports on players that are easy to read.   

The one qualm I have would be your ability to interact with the media and your players. There are ways to praise or criticize your players publicly or to instruct them in some manner privately but the options seem limited. Its difficult to influence the player's expectations or to get them to change their game in small ways that you want. The other annoyance is the press conference system. The questions almost immediately become repetitive and seem to have little impact on the game. As much as I like trying to play mind-games with other managers, I am definitely glad there is an option to send an assistant and skip the whole process. 
 

In-Match Play

After setting your team up the way you want you need to put them on the field and see how they perform. You have the choice to watch the entire match or highlights down to just reading sparse commentary during the match. You will also be in charge of making substitutions and in game tactical changes. My personal style is to be more of a pre-game manager but there are a few options to change how your team plays during the match and maybe change the course of a game.

Watching the matches is like watching a real football game with super low resolution which is a huge advantage over similar games. The players move and play like real players and goals come from realistic run of play which gives you the feeling that your football tactics could actually matter. The only issue I have is that defenders still give up corners way too easy and with no pressure on them. A couple times per game an uncontested defender will bomb the ball behind for a corner and it is frustrating to watch each time. As for graphically, the game isn't that impressive but that really isn't what it tries to be so I feel comfortable giving it a pass in that regard. 

Competiton?

What else is out there? While FM has been widely considered the best game in its genre for the past several years, this year has seen challengers try to provide tough competition. The first challenger is the Eidos release Championship Manager. Eidos included a 3D match engine and improved features to compete this year, but more importantly ran a “pay what you want” promotion where the game could be pre-ordered for £2.50. While the game is playable, and the price is really attractive, game play still has a way to improve before it is the first choice for wannabe managers because the match engine is miles behind FM. However, if the game is available cheap again next year, it will definitely be worth considering. The other football sim available is Fifa Manager from EA Sports, featuring a match engine based off Fifa '09, whose main quality is that they have the might of EA behind them. Having not played the game, I can't comment. It does however look like Football Manager will continue to be the standard bearer for one more year.

Overall

If you're playing this game, you want a deep management experience and that is what it delivers. It has a ton of features that give you total control over the game world and you have a lot of chances to shape your team's future. The game is however only for the more hardcore soccer fans out there. A casual player who wants a pick-up-and-play game is not going to find what they want here and isn't going to get all that the game has to offer or much value from it. To be honest, I've played the game pretty hardcore for the past few days, and I think I have a lot left to discover. It basically comes down to: if you want a game you can put a lot of hours into and get deeply involved with, this is for you. If that is not the case, I definitely wouldn't recommend it at all. My rating of the game is 4.5/5.