I’m writing this after losing my first game of the season. I’m managing United, as always – I’m an ‘always manage the team you support’ kind of FM player, as opposed to your Bundesliga hipsters or local club saviours, whom I have infinite admiration for but not a shred of envy – and of all teams to finally collapse against, I’ve lost away to Liverpool.
The first two goals were an injustice. Two penalties, both awarded by VAR, neither – and I mean this, – were anything close to a pen, and yes I’m aware of the irony and yes that does make it worse. The first was a clean tackle, a Wan-Bissaka classic, the second about a yard outside the box. After that the lads collapsed, as they have been alarmingly wont to do in the real world, and that was that. A good 20 games unbeaten and the one match I care about we lose 4-0, all thanks to some VAR nonsense and United bottling it. Once again, Manchester United brings me only pain.
Football Manager 2021 reviewDeveloper: Sports InteractivePublisher: SegaPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC and Mac (Epic, Steam), Xbox One and Series X/S Dec 1st. Touch and Mobile versions on phones and tablets.
But that’s football! And that’s Football Manager. With FM21 the two are closer than ever and, Klopp-inflicted drubbings aside, the result is pretty special. The team at Sports Interactive has had to weather an especially turbulent year, what with football itself being as disrupted as the studio trying to simulate it, but nonetheless they’ve excelled with FM21. It’s a wonderful effort. Much of it down to that incredible closeness to the real thing.
On the surface this year’s headline changes seem largely cosmetic. Almost all of them tie into your perception of the game and how you interact with it, from new press conferences, to new conversations, to new data visuals and a shake up to matchday presentation, and so a cursory look might leave you with the impression that FM21 is FM20 with some extra finesse. That would be a mistake. Those new features have a cosmetic impact, yes, but part of what makes this series so special is its mastery over the user experience. In Football Manager, the UI is the game, and so while the decision to implement so many UI-focused changes at once is largely a response to the pandemic, the result is anything by a stop-gap. The improvement over FM21 is actually quite dramatic.
Arguably the largest change is to interactions, the collective name Sports Interactive gives to all of the conversations, meetings, and the like that you’ll have throughout the game. For more than a decade these have been organised as a kind of multiple-choice set of responses. Answer a question at a press conference or summon a player for a chat about their training efforts, and you’ll have a handful of preset things choose between saying, and six ‘tones’ with which you can say it: Calm, Cautious, Aggressive, Assertive, Reluctant, and Passionate. Now, tones are out and gestures are in, and there are thirty of them that the game pulls from each time you have an interaction. That alone isn’t too significant – if you’re a long-time user it’s possible to reverse-engineer what probably counts as Aggressive (throwing a water bottle in a half time team talk – frankly irresistible), or whatever else – but it combines nicely with other changes.