The year is 2049.

My avatar, managing Tottenham Hotspur, is 67. Harry Redknapp is long dead. Chris Smalling is my assistant manager.

Now, as I finally wind down my Football Manager 2012 playthrough through an unholy combination of bugs and, well, having won everything, the future beckons. I m having an existential crisis and the line between real and fictional is melting.

But let s start at the beginning.

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When you re working on annual iterative titles, it is difficult, says Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive. You re always going to get people turning around saying you haven t added anything. And no matter how much you add, you re still going to get people saying that.

That s the challenge that the Football Manager series faces every year. It remains, as it always will be, a game about being a football manager. It will always be about selecting a team to manage, creating tactical systems, crafting squads of players and sending them out onto virtual pitches in the pursuit of glory. And it will always, to quote SI s Director of Development Marc Duffy, aim to achieve suspension of disbelief in the player s mind.

The question then, as with all annual series, is the extent to which the game advances on its predecessors. In the case of Football Manager 2019, the studio is bullish about their ambitions for this year s release. (more…)

After over a decade of leading Football Manager, watching from the sideline and becoming increasingly animated on the box art, series mascot Manager Man has been fired. Just as his dramatic poses (from the nostrils down) seemed to confirm his leadership was finally steering the series right, becoming cheers and fist-pumps over the past few years, he’s out the door. It’s scandalous. Publishers Sega have given Manager Man the boot and gone for a first-person perspective they call “a manager’s eye view of the pitch” with Football Manager 2019. It’s bang out of order. Let’s at least give Manager Man a good send-off with a look back at his many faces, moods, and hot racing vehicles.

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Another year in the Football Manager series means another set of tweaks and revisions to the well-established formula, as we’ll see in the newly-announced launch of Football Manager 2019 (and its streamlined sibling Football Manager Touch 2019) on November 2nd. Expect the addition of Germany’s DFL Bundesliga and the shock firing of the series mascot, Manager Man. This mysterious sportsdad, also known as Ian Football (lore deep cut: he’s canonically the son of Manfred Mann but wanted to make his own name off his own work), has graced the box art of every game since FM2005 but now… he’s fired. It’s a scandal.

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Tomorrow heralds the most heart-stopping moment in English national football since John Barnes bravely claimed to know how to rap. England face Croatia in the World Cup semi-final; if they win, they make the finals. If they lose, nobody sings that Lightning Seeds song for at least another two years. It’s win-win!

But which will it be? The answer lies in science. Or the closest approximation thereof, which is simulating the match in Football Manager 2018 ten times and seeing what the most common outcome is. Computer, come home. (more…)

We’ve just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It’s a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you’ll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.

2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets. (more…)

Foot-to-ball is returning to its origin! A trio of lethal predators on a jersey!

I T ’ S C O M I N G H O M E

And what better way to celebrate England’s passage into the World Cup quarter-finals than recreating soon-to-be knight of the realm Gareth Southgate within Foot-to-ball Manager 2018?

Something… something is very wrong.

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Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games.> But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol’ breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.

Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.

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Football Manager 2018 isn t just about playing for a season, giving up, then starting over it s about building a legacy, relationships and a squad to be proud of. With that comes the need to sign people who are still legally children for more money than most of us will ever see in our lives. Wonderkids, then.

With that in mind, I ve trawled through the game to find 36 of the best young players in the game, across all positions, and for a selection of budgets. The days of genuine bargains have faded into near obscurity, but you ll still be able to put together a winning squad for a reasonable amount. Just remember they probably won t be winning anything until 2023 at the earliest.

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Imagine what would happen if Plunkbat weren’t to be at number 1? Could anyone even cope any more? Has all of gaming started operating on this as a foundation, forgetting that it could, one day, not sell more copies than everything else? What if I’m writing this as a bluff because it’s not at number 1 this week? What if I just wrote that to imply the bluff even though there isn’t a bluff?! OH MY GOODNESS EVERYONE QUICKLY READ THIS NOW!

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