Playing successive yearly updates can be a bit of a tough ask when you don’t have a year in between. For FIFA I have a system, and more to the point it’s possible to get both a feel for each new iteration and some straightforward enjoyment from just playing a handful of games. Football Manager is a series whose players are more inclined towards things developing slowly over time. I do not really have the chance to do justice to Football Manager 2011. I could have handed over to someone else, but I fucked that one through being in no state to deal with the social aspects involved when I would have needed to do that. So here are some even rougher impressions than normal, and some wider context.
Mostly, it is much the same game as Football Manager 2010. The weight of information is once again super impressive. I did some speculative searches for players whose success was much more recent, and a remarkable number of them came up, if not always in their later position. The experience of being able to obsessively control minor details until it gets to the match where control is forcibly taken away from you is still there as a driving force. The match engine is tweaked a bit for the better, with more replay angles and fancier bits, as well as a number of things which tread the line between imperfection and cynical realism, like how bloody long the goalkeepers take to do anything with the ball.
Treading a slightly different line, and the most noticeable change in my short go, is the further implementation of populating the world with people and institutions. Players have agents as an extra layer to deal with and watch news on. Press conferences step up a level in complexity. Opposition managers stick their oar in. Here the balance is between realism and comedy, and I’ll take the high level of the latter. Steve Bruce mocking my Arsenal team for trying to walk the ball into the back of the net is just perfectly on-the-nose enough to feel specifically scripted without taking requiring a suspension of belief in the procedural generator.
As for the response to more of the same with those tweaks, its publisher Sega reported sales as slow, and Football Manager 2011 is to date the final Football Manager game to have reached #1 in the UK sales chart. That tells nothing like the full story, though. The charts I’m using throughout are based on physical sales only. In 2020, during one of the rare times when digital charts have been widely published (albeit with gaping omissions, like any data on Nintendo’s games), Football Manager 2021 reached the top spot.
Instead, the fact of Football Manager not reaching the top of the charts any more is more a tale of an effectively almost twenty-year-old series phasing into modernity even better than the charts themselves. With its established audience on the PC rather than the weird split ones its rivals like Premier Manager once had, Football Manager seamlessly moved to a digital age. With its central purpose regained after a brief wobble before being freed from Eidos, and a relationship with its fanbase rebuilt, it could continue along the same winning path.
Top of the charts for week ending 6 November 2010:
WCRobinson
My football-mad friend loves Football Manager – I could never get into it, I think I’d have to be really committed to the sport to embrace the impressive detail of it. I’d probably be more inclined to go for the recent F1 manager, which definitely intrigues me!
iain.mew
I played Grand Prix Manager back in the ’90s and enjoyed it but it was a lot more basic and more like some of the other football manager games. I would be interested to try the new one too if I thought I would have enough time for it!