Football Manager 2022

[Mobius]

The early access is out for those who pre-ordered, and the full game comes out on Nov 9th. If you buy it now you get immediate access to the early access.

Anyone buying or currently playing? I've played every CM/FM since Championship Manager 97/98, doubt I'll ever stop.

I've played quite a bit of the beta and am really enjoying it. Minimal changes as usual but the match engine feels more real than ever. There's a new data hub section which gives you all the xG stats and things like that which people like nowadays.

Newcastle have 200 million quid to spend.

[imitationleather]

I'm still playing Championship Manager 01/02. Not even taking the piss. Last week I loaded up a 93/94 database that someone made and have been caning that.

[Mobius]

Yeah the oldies are still really popular. People make up to date transfer patches for the older games which is very cool.

I do wish there was an option to just disable all the media shit in newer FMs. I'm sick of pre-match, post-match interviews, chatting to journalists after every little thing. You can delegate it to your Assistant but then they say the wrong thing and your player gets the arse. My assistant just told the media he's open to bids for Saka. Are we fuck!

But so far I am enjoying the new game, although honestly if I'd opened FM21 by mistake I probably wouldn't have noticed.

[Wonderful Butternut]

I usually buy them on a 2 or 3 year rotation. The incremental advancements year on year aren't worth popping another €50.

So I'm still on FM21 trying to win the Champions League as Cork City. To be honest, I don't enjoy playing as Liverpool or another top club in the newer games. It's just too easy. More fun to try and build up a shit club, you get much more attached to the players.

[Mobius]

I wish I could do that but for some reason I've never been able to play FIFA or Football Manager as anyone other than Arsenal. I just can't get invested if it's not my team. Daft I know.

[sprocket]

So I'm still on FM21 trying to win the Champions League as Cork City.

Good man, proper order.

More fun to try and build up a shit club, you get much more attached to the players.

Hey!

[Waking Life]

Anyone buying or currently playing? I've played every CM/FM since Championship Manager 97/98, doubt I'll ever stop.

I know it's a bit dismissive and adds little to the chat about the new game, but I never really made it beyond 97/98. I got a couple of the later ones but I found them too bloated.

I presume they still have modern updates for this one too? Although perhaps I'd find it overly simplistic now.

[Wonderful Butternut]

I wish I could do that but for some reason I've never been able to play FIFA or Football Manager as anyone other than Arsenal. I just can't get invested if it's not my team. Daft I know.

I had that issue myself up to about FM13 because Liverpool usually struggled with the AI in charge and it was hard not to go in and 'rescue' them. But because the game now rates most of the squad as completely OP, they have a manager that uses a high press, which was also completely OP in FM21, and the financial effects of COVID weren't put into FM21 so they have loads of money, they've won something like 5 out of the last 7 league titles with the AI managing them whilst I'm chipping away with Cork.

I did a Liverpool save first, but abandoned it after a season and a half basically because there was little room for squad improvement and it wasn't interesting. You'd have to play as them for at least 3 years for the likes of Salah to start aging out of their usefulness.

Hey!

Well to be fair, I abandoned my attempts to do it with Wexford FC instead. They're the same division, but at least Cork are set as a fully professional side, get decent numbers at the gate and can have a usable wages budget if you get them promoted quickly. Whereas with Wexford, the team only trains half the week and you get 200 people turn up most weeks. I'd be ten years trying to win the League of Ireland with that.

I presume they still have modern updates for this one too? Although perhaps I'd find it overly simplistic now.

There's definitely a 20/21 database for cm97/98.

[imitationleather]

CM97/98 was the first version of the game I ever played, but I tried that out again and it's far too limited for my liking these days. It's way more basic than even the most barebones football management mobile game. You can download CM01/02 and all the patches etc. for free from www.champman0102.net. There's something on there called the Starter Kit, which is great. It works on PC or Mac (and even tablets I think), and includes loads of different databases you can choose from. Getting the game to run on a Mac was the biggest ballache for me, so it was excellent to find something that had been set up to work on everything.

One of the early Football Manager games was my absolute favourite. Can't remember if it was 2006, 2007 or 2008, but it was around then. After that it just seemed to get increasingly more involved and took far too long to get through a season.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Best part of 97/98 is how it regenerates players.

Dunno how many on here know this, cos I only found out in the last couple of years despite playing the game for 20+ years, but when a player they retires, the game respawns them either the following season or the season after as a 16/17 year old with a different name and slightly different stats.

And all the older players on the wane (Barnes, Beardsley etc.) have their potential set to how good they were at their peak, so their regenerated versions can be as good as those guys were at their peaks. Hoovering up all the quality regens is a fun activity for long saves.

You ever wanna test this, Arnor Gudjohnsen (Eidur's dad) is a good one to look at. He's 36 at the start of the game, so he's usually retired and regenerated by season 3. You won't get other Icelandic DM / FCs with really high stats for heading, influence and determination, so he's easy to find.

[Gurke and Hare]

There was at least one earlier version where you could put the player about to retire on your shortlist, and then when all the end of season stuff had been completed the regen would be on the shortlist instead.

[gmoney]

I do wish there was an option to just disable all the media shit in newer FMs. I'm sick of pre-match, post-match interviews, chatting to journalists after every little thing. You can delegate it to your Assistant but then they say the wrong thing and your player gets the arse. My assistant just told the media he's open to bids for Saka. Are we fuck!

Agreed, I hate all this. I just delegate to my assistant and forget about it, but I'm pretty sure some of the options to choose haven't been updated in nearly 15 years. Also, I didn't understand the new mentoring thing they introduced a few years back so I ignore that too.

I do buy it every year, but some years it doesn't grab me for some reason, others I'll put hundreds of hours in. Last years was a non grab year. It's a good game to play while listening to podcasts.

[Chollis]

I do wish there was an option to just disable all the media shit in newer FMs. I'm sick of pre-match, post-match interviews, chatting to journalists after every little thing. You can delegate it to your Assistant but then they say the wrong thing and your player gets the arse. My assistant just told the media he's open to bids for Saka. Are we fuck!

yeah same, it's overwhelming.

I'm also one that buys these every few years, but the last version I think was 2019 and i only played it for about 10 hours. i do the same thing every edition - take Cambridge United to world domination. only ever play in the lower leagues really, that's where the fun is.

What I'll usually do is immediately sign half-decent scouts, look to shift off my big earners and get scouting young Premier League loanees, academy rejects and usually some out of contract Algerian striker who will bang in 30 goals for 2k a week. But in the latest edition I just could not scout anyone for shit, not sure what they changed but I just couldn't seem to build any scouting network at all before the season had started and the transfer window closed. Weeks would go by and my scouts would just be serving me up dog shit, if anything at all. Felt like they'd just made scouting as a lower league club a lot harder, and the transfer window is most of the fun in these games for me.

I've never used any external databases for FM, do they have an equivalent of sofifa.com where you can basically see every player, their stats and potential at the click of a button? might have to use one of them this time round if the lower league scouting is still fucked

[Inspector Norse]

Still playing FM19, it's 2032 and Oldham have just won the Premier League for the first time and the board have agreed to expand the stadium to 53,000 capacity, while my other manager (I always do the double-manager thing) has won the league ten years straight with Roma and has just claimed a third Champions League title. Star striker Marco Russo is coming up on Totti's goals record.

They have an official editor thing you can pay an extra fiver for which I find is pretty useful for the regenerated players - after a few years you might notice that 90% of decent players are now coming from Argentina and Brazil while all the top clubs are just full of geriatricos and keep doing shit like spending £45m on a 33-year-old Ryan Sessegnon, so you can spend half an hour just boosting the youth rating of all the other countries in the editor and you get a better spread of new talent, or just go into every country's U19s and edit the potential ability of half a dozen players, etc. It's cheating if you then buy those players yourself though, of course, you have to let your scouts find them in the natural course of the game.

Agree that the media stuff is badly-implemented but can't you just refuse to take part in most press conferences?

[eagle_bearer]

I try to get into these every few years and end up feeling overwhelmed. I don't know how anyone plays these if they also work. I preferred LMA Manager back in the day on consoles. Not as detailed and whatnot, but you didn't have to take a week off work to negotiate a player's contract. Would it not be possible to release a more basic version of FM? I don't actually want the simulated stress levels of being a manager because I am not making 20 million a year for my trouble.

[Mobius]

I try to get into these every few years and end up feeling overwhelmed. I don't know how anyone plays these if they also work. I preferred LMA Manager back in the day on consoles. Not as detailed and whatnot, but you didn't have to take a week off work to negotiate a player's contract. Would it not be possible to release a more basic version of FM? I don't actually want the simulated stress levels of being a manager because I am not making 20 million a year for my trouble.

There's this one https://www.footballmanager.com/games/football-manager-2021-touch

Might be worth having a look at

[Wonderful Butternut]

What I'll usually do is immediately sign half-decent scouts, look to shift off my big earners and get scouting young Premier League loanees, academy rejects and usually some out of contract Algerian striker who will bang in 30 goals for 2k a week. But in the latest edition I just could not scout anyone for shit, not sure what they changed but I just couldn't seem to build any scouting network at all before the season had started and the transfer window closed. Weeks would go by and my scouts would just be serving me up dog shit, if anything at all. Felt like they'd just made scouting as a lower league club a lot harder, and the transfer window is most of the fun in these games for me.

You can get around that a bit by trialling any half decent free agent for 2 weeks for a perfect scout report [nb]Doesn't seem to cost anything, but does fuck up your training if you get loads of them. Cos your coaches can't pay proper attention to your players if you have 20 trialists in training as well. But that for a couple of weeks will have no long term impact[/nb], but you have to find them first and there's a limit on what players you can 'see' in a player search based on the scouting package your club pays for. Doing stuff like filtering the search for only frees who have some international caps or something.

The caps might be for Angola or St. Kitts & Nevis, but at League One level that might be enough to be useful.

[kngen]

I try to get into these every few years and end up feeling overwhelmed. I don't know how anyone plays these if they also work. I preferred LMA Manager back in the day on consoles. Not as detailed and whatnot, but you didn't have to take a week off work to negotiate a player's contract. Would it not be possible to release a more basic version of FM? I don't actually want the simulated stress levels of being a manager because I am not making 20 million a year for my trouble.

Yeah, I'm much the same. My glory days were the late 90s when I could find myself playing season in a night (and early morning), but even the simpler modes for dunces like myself seem to have way more depth and options than I can be arsed with.

However, I do remember some rival game from the mid-90s (Tracksuit Manager, perhaps?) where you had to phone up every individual player just to ask them to come to training. Every. Fucking. Day. That got un-installed pretty sharpish.

[Utter Shit]

However, I do remember some rival game from the mid-90s (Tracksuit Manager, perhaps?) where you had to phone up every individual player just to ask them to come to training. Every. Fucking. Day. That got un-installed pretty sharpish.

Ahahaha surely not!?

LMA felt like the best management game in the world for about a day, until you realised that the highlights were (obviously, in retrospect) just pre-recorded clips rather than contextual to your tactics, and you very quickly started seeing them repeat.

[kngen]

Ahahaha surely not!?

Think it might have been this - Ultimate Soccer Manager. Maybe I chose 'incredibly immersive and tedious mode' at the start by mistake. But, by christ, it was a chore. Don't think I even got as far as an actual game.

[gmoney]

Don't think it was that one. That was a cracking game. You could bribe teams to lose, take bungs and all sorts. You could also upgrade the stadium yourself, and I seem to remember you could choose the sponsorship on the advertising boards as well. Hmm, maybe it was a bit micromanage-ey.

[kngen]

Don't think it wasn't that one. That was a cracking game. You could bribe teams to lose, take bungs and all sorts. You could also upgrade the stadium yourself, and I seem to remember you could choose the sponsorship on the advertising boards as well. Hmm, maybe it was a bit micromanage-ey.

You could very well be right. It's just the description of the office with all the clickable bits on it that sounded very familiar (and the stuff about stands and sponsors etc). I just remember having to click on the phone, and then work my way through the contact book full of players. If there was a way to bypass that, I sure as hell couldn't find it.

[Wonderful Butternut]

You could very well be right. It's just the description of the office with all the clickable bits on it that sounded very familiar (and the stuff about stands and sponsors etc). I just remember having to click on the phone, and then work my way through the contact book full of players. If there was a way to bypass that, I sure as hell couldn't find it.

Go into the Chairman's office and flick his light on and off repeatedly.

[bgmnts]

Is there a mechanic where you can do a British Managers Club 'Destroy and Exit?' and the goal is end your career with the largest amounts of payouts possible?

[GMTV]

Immediately sign Stian Neset

[Famous Mortimer]

I played the original for the Commodore 64, and got bored when I got Chesterfield up to the first division.

[Inspector Norse]

Apropos of "classic" managerial games chat, I remember on Premier Manager on the Acorn, contract negotiations basically involved the player going "I want this wage" and you going "OK" or "can't afford it", except that if you couldn't afford it you could still agree to pay it and you'd just get sacked at the end of the season for being in debt.

So basically you could just start a game with two managers - you had to start in the Conference as I remember - and get one manager to buy all the game's top players, plunging his club into irretrievable, disastrous debt, before then selling them for nothing to the other, so that you ended up with Altrincham or whoever having a team with Lineker, Platt, Southall, Adams, etc etc.

This was the same game where any player who reached the age of around 34 or 35 would either retire to run a country pub, or die after getting struck by lightning.

[Wonderful Butternut]

This was the same game where any player who reached the age of around 34 or 35 would either retire to run a country pub, or die after getting struck by lightning.

Better than Sensible World of Soccer's manager career mode where players didn't age or retire.

Fowler and Romario still doing the business for me up top in the mid 2010s when they should've been 40 and 50 years old.

[Utter Shit]

Apropos of "classic" managerial games chat, I remember on Premier Manager on the Acorn, contract negotiations basically involved the player going "I want this wage" and you going "OK" or "can't afford it", except that if you couldn't afford it you could still agree to pay it and you'd just get sacked at the end of the season for being in debt.

So basically you could just start a game with two managers - you had to start in the Conference as I remember - and get one manager to buy all the game's top players, plunging his club into irretrievable, disastrous debt, before then selling them for nothing to the other, so that you ended up with Altrincham or whoever having a team with Lineker, Platt, Southall, Adams, etc etc.

Reminds me of Player Manager on PS1. As you can probably guess, you could manage the side but also play the games yourself.

The managerial element wasn't too bad...not a patch on rival management games like Premier Manager '98, but ok-ish. The problem was the playing element. It was so half-arsed and ridiculously easy, to the extent that you could just get the ball with any player and run the ball into the net. Which made the managerial element redundant, because any game where your tactics weren't working, you could just take over playing for the team and run in as many goals as you wanted.


EDIT: Turns out I've talked about this before, more or less word for word.

There was a decent management game on PS1 (I have a feeling it was Player Manager as Shoulders mentioned above) which suffered from the inclusion of a laughably basic and easy player mode. So easy that you could literally just pick up the ball and walk past every opposition player before rounding the keeper and walking it in. I remember the manager side being reasonably detailed for its time, but any time you were losing you could just choose to play the game yourself and score as many goals as you wanted.

[Gurke and Hare]

Player Manager on the Amiga was great. The game bit was just Kick-Off, which was the best football game there was at the time. You could just play the whole team, but there was an option just to control one player throughout the whole game, which was more of an interesting challenge. The management side was pretty deep too, it had what was at the time the best tactics editing section there was.

A couple of other Amiga ones I remember playing - one that I can't remember the name of, but I'd like to grab it again if I could - the main thing I can remember was that the game section played bits of commentary for incidents, and one of them was Alan Parry saying "Oh, that was a tremendous effort" when you almost scored. The other one was a load of shit that was programmed in Amiga Basic and crashed when you scored too many goals in a season, which you usually did because it was far too easy.