Re: Futbol Manager
Keira Seright
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For those that have escaped this black hole of time it is a football (soccer) game that lets you manage a football team of your choice. The kicker is that it is reliant on a database of over 250,000 players and this database is adored by a cult following.
If you unwrap it, Football Manager is a training ground for any role that centres on the effective use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Players are searching and manipulating a vast data set with the objective of recruiting the best talent and building the most effective squad. You are expected to have some emotional intelligence when managing individual player scenarios and the most successful 'managers' spend a considerable amount of time analysing opponents, building training regimes and reviewing team performance.
What makes Football Manager (and before that the original Championship Manager) a CV highlight is the users appreciation of the quality of the database. Every footballer has their hard and soft skills listed, a comprehensive employment history, full details of their contracts are easily accessible and you can search on the likelihood that they will join a certain employer. I am not alone in saying that it is one of the most comprehensive talent databases in the world.
So what should a 'Football Manager' put on their CV? Probably avoid boasting that you have won the World Cup with San Marino but a simple mention goes a long way to demonstrate that you know your way around a CRM and that you are comfortable with accessing, analysing and acting on data. As a hiring manager that relies on data, imagine employing someone that has spent hours of their life worshipping a database!
So back in the real world and adding some commercial thinking, with continued and increased discussions around how new technology and investment can harness the power of data, the one issue remains - is your data accurate. Defending my own lost hours playing Football Manager, at even the most basic of levels 'plays Football Manager' demonstrates your appreciation of data.
In association football, the manager is the person who has overall responsibility for the running of a football team. They have wide-ranging responsibilities, including selecting the team, choosing the tactics, recruiting and transferring players, negotiating player contracts, and speaking to the media. In professional football, a manager is usually appointed by and answerable to the club's board of directors, but at an amateur level the manager may have total responsibility for the running of a club.
The title of manager is almost exclusively used in British football.[3] In most other European countries and rest of the world in which professional football is played, the person responsible for the direction of a team is awarded the position of coach or "trainer" is known as head coach.[citation needed] For instance, despite the general equivalence in responsibilities, Gareth Southgate is referred to as the manager of England, and Julian Nagelsmann is described as the head coach of Germany. Germany also has a team manager role that is subordinate to the head coach and is currently held by Rudi Vller.
Let's get the shameful business out of the way first. Every year on Football Manager, I choose to manage Manchester United. United - or, ahem, Man UFC - are the team I support here in the real world, and that's about as far as my thought process goes when starting up a new FM save. There are two philosophies, basically: the fashionable, hipster choice of managing somewhere a little trendy, a little half-step out of the limelight, an AS Saint-tienne, maybe, or for a greater challenge someone like AFC Wimbledon or your local ultra-underdogs of choice; or, you manage the team you support. There is technically a third way which we don't speak about (PSG), but broadly speaking, those are your options.
The reason I like Manchester United is because they straddle a bit of both. I know the club inside out, I'm desperate for us to win and loathe to see City win the race for another five attacking midfielders ahead of us, and frankly I just like having all my dreams fulfilled. At the same time Manchester United is a god awful mess of a club, and it brings me immeasurable joy to step into the breach every year and be the hero who comes and fixes it. So, like I said, best of both: favourite-team fantasy plus the pleasure of mending that which is fundamentally broken.
Where does Football Manager 2022 come in? Well, this year more than any other year before it has truly captured the experience of modern football management at the very top of the game. To both my immense joy and my not-insignificant anguish, playing FM22 makes me feel exactly like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
I'll come back to that, but first let's backpedal a bit. FM22 has changed more than you might expect at first glance, through a series of subtle but highly impactful tweaks to how things work under the hood. The biggest of those is a somewhat revolutionary change in the match engine. Animations, in those many hundreds and thousands of 3D matches you played through in previous years, were actually tied to the classic 2D discs - as in the ones from the classic view that your mate who still calls it "Championship Manager" insists on using. Now, according to developer Sports Interactive, players can move off of those discs in their animations. Most of the time this just results in a very pleasing curved run here or there, but it also enables things like Cruyff turns and more agile pivots for the players themselves - the type of thing you always thought was there but, if you went back to FM21, would suddenly notice as missing.
It also has knock-on effects to how other things work in-game, and the knock-on effects are amazing. This is one of the huge successes of Football Manager's years-long attempts at capturing the spirit of the real thing, because as some guy called Jose Mourinho once said, a given tactic is a lot like a blanket that's a little too short. You can pull it up over your shoulders, or down over your toes, but you can never both, and so every strategy, and every specific decision that goes into it, is about sacrificing one consequence for another, one benefit for one cost. In FM22 those consequences are harsher, more noticeable, more pointed, your toes colder than ever.
The big example Sports Interactive likes to offer for how this ties into the new animations is pressing. More freedom of motion for players means their movements can be more freely impacted by your tactical preferences, and the whole system of how your team presses has been reworked to reflect that (and, probably, to make sure it's a little more balanced). Much the same as how an Antonio Conte might scream at a player for being half a yard away from their man and march onto the training pitch to reposition him, you now have to pay attention - a lot of attention - to the little details if you want your press to really work at the highest level. This means the obvious things like the line of engagement and defensive line, but also the defensive width is more of a strategic tool than a literal one. Previously, in my experience, it bas a basic trade-off between trying to stop crosses and wing play, at the expense of being stretched and easier to play through centrally, and so I'd set my team up to press aggressively, but still show players outside on the defensive because I backed big old slabhead Maguire to win any headers from those extra balls into the box.
Now, at least in theory - this stuff takes real-world months to pin down, I find - it's seemingly more about the directions from which your players approach when pressing, the angles of their body cutting off certain passing avenues and funneling play to certain areas. Opposition instructions, too, now factor into this much more. I always found these slightly vague, more of a trap to fall into, where you can set your players up to do something contradictory just by taking the advice of your gormless assistant manager, and I still do to some extent - but a lesser one, crucially.
The intention now is for them to reflect your overall pressing approach. Wording has been rejigged to reflect the modern lexicon - pressing triggers are the new name, rather than whether or not to simply "close down" a player - and the objective is more for you to use these instructions to tie into the whole tactic. If you want to press a team down to the touchline, then use a narrower defensive setup then it's not a good idea to show a left-footed left-back onto their weaker foot, because that'll get your players running at them from an angle that opens up the inside of the pitch. Still a bit of a trap, then, but one that does make a bit more sense.
More importantly, stamina - or the lack of it, in plenty of cases - is now much more impactful. AI improvements mean players now have "awareness" of their own sprint capacity, which sounds a bit Judgement Day but generally just means they won't press if they're already exhausted. They also get tired much, much faster, I find - even those that can normally run all day - and although I haven't personally got to the end of my season yet, the impression is that this will only get worse as the games stack up, with my players, despite some heavily micro-managed rotation, already brushing up against some accumulated fatigue.
Had this system been added to FM21, I would have been worried. FM21 brought some brilliant new data analysis systems into play - notably the obvious one, expected goals, but also a few others that span off from that - but in terms of actual, actionable data beyond the broad strokes of knowing whether you're creating enough chances or conceding too many, things hit a bit of a limit. Building on the foundations of last year, FM22 adds a new Data Hub, its other big headline addition (with apologies to the new Overlapping Centre-Backs - you guys are neat but I am allergic to playing three at the back).
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