Football Manager 2011 Review

Last year Sport Interactive saw off resurgent rival Championship Manager with an impressively polished iteration of its footy-franchise. With Eidos' sim now out of the picture for the time being (on the PC at least), it seems the Football Manager team have been content to remain in the comfort zone this season.

Perhaps we should have expected as much when the most trumpeted new feature for the 2011 version was the dreary sounding 'dynamic league reputation'. Sexy new updates are at a premium, and it's mostly more of the Football Manager that we know and love.

That's not exactly a bad thing, and Football Manager is one of the PC's most successful franchises for a reason; every year developer Sports Interactive deliver a virtual version of the football world so detailed that real clubs use its database to scout players. Marry this scope and detail to an intuitive interface and you have an experience so engrossing and ridiculously addictive its responsible for more break-ups than the combination of cheap beer and rampant libidos.



This version is no different. Our first sitting - at the helm of unlikely relegation candidates Liverpool FC - ended up lasting five hours (and resulted in one very angry girlfriend). All the features you'd expect are present and correct, and the polished-looking interface introduced last season remains as simple to pilot as ever. On first impressions you could be playing last year's game - which is all well and good until you encounter some of the weaker elements of the series that SI has once again failed to update.

For example, press conferences remain as dull and repetitive as previous years. They involve answering effectively the same questions from Football Manager 2009 with the same unsubtly tiered responses. In a game where everything else is so customisable, and a world where our sense of a manager's personality is defined by their dealings with the press (think Jose Mourinho or Ian Holloway), such neglect is baffling.

Ditto team talks, which again involve selecting one of five rallying cries to bellow at your players (in our experience it's usually "Do it for the supporters!"). It's a tedious element of the pre-match rigmarole and it's not clear or ever quantifiable what effect they have on your team.

Another misfiring element Sports Interactive appear content to sweep under the carpet is that damn 3-D match engine - which remains as worthless as ever. Some new player animations have been added and it looks marginally better than before. But it's still uglier than Blackburn vs. Stoke on a wet Tuesday night and generally gets switched off mid-way through the second pre-season friendly. It's about time SI devoted some serious time to making Football Manager's 3-D worthwhile.

Luckily there are a couple of fairly ingenious new additions to be found in Football Manager 2011 that help atone for its oversights. One favourite is the new way of negotiating contracts; as recent events at Manchester United have shown, getting big name players to sign on the dotted line can be more difficult than teaching Joe Cole how to do long division.

In previous versions contracts were sorted thus: you would offer a player terms, and a few days later his agent gets back to you either agreeing, refusing or continuing negotiations in order to fund their addiction to high-end sportscars/mock Tudor mansions/elderly prostitutes. Now this process has been changed into a much quicker back-and-forth between you and the agent as terms are hammered out; sometimes they play hardball and ask for ridiculous money, only to climb down if it looks like they won't get it, and sometimes they are eager to do a deal if you offer terms quicker than your rivals. It's a step forward and it certainly feels more realistic and exciting.

Speaking of agents, this time around the most loathed specimens in the football universe are now not just nameless abstract entities but distinct personalities in their own rights. The hundreds of agents in the game (sadly all made up as far as we could tell) all have lists of clients, as well as stats for their willingness to tout players, the fees they demand, and how much patience they have in talks. Our favourite was Rodolfo Paz - a fiery Uruguayan (or so we imagined) - who aggressively pimped his roster of Latin stars and stormed out of negotiations if you didn't give his clients exactly the terms he wanted.

A similar approach has been taken to the way you communicate with your players. Again the Football Manager team has essentially taken the same options you had before when talking to a squad member; 'recommend me a player', 'don't shoot on your weaker foot' etc, and made these questions the basis of a more natural conversation.



This extends to when your players are unhappy with you. For example, during that ill-fated spell in charge of Liverpool, Fernando Torres knocked on our virtual door and told us we showed him a lack of respect after he received a rollicking for a listless performance against Slovak minnows FC Zilina. Our retort: "Maybe we should both get on with our jobs". Shame-faced, he replied "Perhaps I've made too big an issue of this."

It's not the deepest of banter, but it's more personable that's what's gone on before and it makes managing your player's happiness a much more involved process. It also highlights the different personalities in your squad more clearly. We discovered our underperforming reserve left-back Danny Wilson had a massive ego when he demanded a transfer after an innocent request to stop bombing forward so much.

It's a feature - as with the new contracts - that injects more personality into proceeding and helps sustain the illusion that you're in the real-life football world, not a turn-based spreadsheet. It points to potentially what the future of Football Manager holds - maybe players will get the chance to natter with a Project Milo-style Danny Wilson in FM2020.

It's just a shame SI weren't so bold with the rest of the game. The basics of Football Manager are so right, and the title sells so impressively, that it's understandable the developer is so careful about tinkering too much. Nonetheless, it would be refreshing if Sports Interactive threw off the shackles and attempted a few more radical shake-ups of the Football Manager formula for 2012.