Exclusive Football Manager 2011 Preview: It’s Better Than Ever!

Hello folks, this is a pretty special post so I hope you will enjoy it. As I said yesterday I already had the great opportunity of testing Football Manager 2011 this week, the people at Sports Interactive were kind enough to grant me access to a preview version of the game that you will all get on November 5th. It was an unexpected honor and I guess that tells something about how they appreciate good websites in the community and the hard work that is being done to keep such websites going.

Before we get into details about the game I’d like you to watch the FM 2011 trailer, I think it’s very well made.

And now let’s see why I think that Football Manager 2011 is… better than ever! However, you should be aware that I played only a preview version of the game so some things might be different in the final version what will be released on the market.

Social Networking

As it was announced by Miles a few weeks ago, FM 2011 includes social networking abilities. You can set it up to connect with your Twitter and Youtube accounts and then publish in-game stuff on those social sites. Some say that it should have included Facebook too but I guess I will use only the Youtube option to publish game videos for the stories.

Uploading to Youtube can be done right after playing a game, there is a «Upload Highlights» tab from where you can choose to upload a single goal or all the goals that were scored during a match. Notice that I tried the game with Universitatea Craiova and we managed to beat our fierce rivals Dinamo away from home, that didn’t happen in more than 10 or 15 years, I can’t even remember :)

Once you click on «Upload Highlights» the game will process the video and upload it directly to your Youtube account, you just have to sit and wait for a couple of minutes (depending on the resolution you selected and also on your computer specs).

And now the video is ready to be seen, check it out:

Match Analysis

Another thing that I loved in Football Manager 2011 is the new match analysis section, a lot more details are available and now you can also see the analysis for the whole team at once and not only for a single player. As you can see in the screen shot below «Scoring Chances» have been added to the analysis section along with a few other things that I will reveal later.

So you have seen the scoring chances analysis, now let me introduce the «Movement» section which shows the runs past opponent and the offsides too! This one is quite useful if you want to see how effective your players are, especially the wingers and the strikers.

Now moving on to the best part of the new match analysis screen: the average positions and the positional heatmap! This feature is probably one of the best and most useful of the new lot, you can actually see where your players spent most time on the pitch and that will surely help you to tweak your tactics. You can see how much space you are leaving between the lines, how deep is your defense and even where does your goalie stand most of the times.

For instance one of my central midfielders, the one who has defensive duties, took the perfect position inside the midfield circle. That’s exactly where I need him to be most of the times but as you can see he also went back to help his mates in defense now and again. Go to the next page to read about agents, board interaction, tactics and training in Football Manager 2011.

Go to the next page to read the rest of the post.

Agents and Contract Negotiations

As you already know from the previous announcements agents were added into the game to add more realism to the contract negotiations and transfer market. I was quite curious to see this feature at work and I can tell you that it could be very useful. Many agents will come to your club offering players and that could be annoying sometimes but it can also help a lot. For instance, my club only allowed me to send scouts in Europe but I managed to sign a player for Argentina because his agent came and offered him, otherwise I never would have found that particular player. The good thing is that you can set filters for the agent player offers, like only youth prospects, or only free transfers and so on.

Agents have their own profiles and attributes, some of them are greedy or  impatient negotiators and knowing that could help you to handle negotiations better. You can also make friends with them in time and that could bring some benefits.

When you offer a contract to a player his agent will want a fee, as it happens in real life football. That means more money out of your club but it also has a positive aspect: sometimes if you increase the agent’s fee you can get away with offering the player a smaller wage than requested! The contract negotiations screen is surely improved comparing to FM 10, you will have the impression of having a real negotiation in which you are giving and taking until reaching an agreement. Or until one of the parties storms out of the meeting in discontent :)

Board and Player Interaction

In Football Manager 2011 interacting with the board or with the players is one of the biggest improvements. You will have much more options to speak about to the board, including increasing the number of staff allowed or expending the scouting range. I required the board to expand the club’s scouting range at some point and they agreed, now I can send the scouts all over the world and not only in Europe. Another great thing is that you end the discussion whenever you like so you can discuss stadium expansion, transfer budget and parent club in one meeting!

Interacting with your players in much easier now and you can go in much more depth than ever before. There is a wide range of issues that you can discuss and it goes in a similar way with the board meetings, you can discuss several issues in just one meeting.

The best thing about it is that you can really feel it’s like a discussion, the player reacts instantly and then you can react too and so on. As you can see in the screenshot below you can speak to a player about his performances but you can also try to persuade a player to remain at the club when he feels that he wants to move on. You can also threaten players that they will get transfer listed unless they start performing, I couldn’t think about an issue that I would want to discuss and that is not already present in the game.

Training and Tactics

The training module has also been reworked, there are a few pre-designed schedules that you can use for defenders, midfielders and forwards but you can also create your own. The biggest change is the new match preparation section where you can train specific areas of the game. For instance, I used «team blend» during pre-season to help with the squad gelling, now I’m focusing on «attacking movement» to improve my team’s performances in the opposition half. As you can notice you can train up to three different tactical set-ups, that surely adds realism to the game.

The screenshot below explains a bit of that tactical training and the progress that my team has made in understanding what I require them to do on the pitch. By the way, I am using the same «Magpies 4-4-2 tactic» that I’ve designed for FM 2010, the tactics creator is absolutely identical. Back to the match preparation, you can see that the team is now comfortable with the formation but they are still trying to get used to the closing down requirements.

The tactics creator is exactly the same as in FM 2010 but there is a new feature called «set piece creator» where you can tweak everything from who takes a corner to where the players should be on the pitch. The roles that you can assign are basically the same but this gives you a much better idea of where your players are at a corner kick or even a throw-in.

Match Engine

Last but not least, the 3D match engine definitely looks better, especially in the «TV» camera mode. I have uploaded a video for you to see but it might give you just a taste of how the match engine looks like, it’s a lot better inside the game. And so far it seems that it does not require a top notch PC to run decently, I have a rather old computer but the matches worked very well.

That’s about all I could say about Football Manager 2011 for now but feel free to ask questions and I’ll do my best to find answers for you inside the game. You have to remember though that I have a preview version and the actual game that will be released on the market might have a few differences. What I can say from the bottom of my heart is that from what I’ve seen Football Manager 2011 is definitely worth buying. Miles Jacobson was right, it’s the best football management simulation game that they have ever made! I have already pre-ordered my copy, I’m sure that you will do the same soon :)

Pre-order Football Manager 2011 (PC)!