One of the longest running franchises in the not so popular genre of football management simulation games is Football Manager (initially known as Championship Manager), a franchise that was born in the mid 90s and continued to improve until today when it is considered by many the best football management game available on the market.
One of the main reasons that make Football Manager titles so successful is the focus of the developers of delivering a game that’s as close to the real thing as possible, as opposed to delivering a spectacular but unreal experience. The virtual manager actually gets to feel like a day-by-day manager of a real football club and less than a player. Actually, most of the gameplay is text-based, with tons of statistics and player ratings to be seen and less “action” as we know it from generic video games. However, even though this is clearly not something to please the thrill seekers, it’s actually how a real life football management job would feel like: reading through notes, learning new things constantly, creating new tactics or tweaking them, analyzing your opponents and so on.
Football Manager also has the biggest players database in the genre and they are all so well researched that real world clubs have signed deals with the game’s developers to use the database in order to search for new players to sign. In the real life! So this reason only should be big enough to prove how well researched this game actually is and how realistic you must feel when you play it!
Since Football Manager is a game after all, no matter what you might be thinking: after the player goes through all the numbers and stats and picks the starting 11, you finally get to see the match being played and there’s actually a pretty nice looking 3D match engine showing you exactly how your team is playing! And even though the virtual manager can’t control the players on the pitch directly, there is still a chance to change the tactics or the line-ups and shout instructions from the bench, from changing the passing style to turning the team into a more aggressive and offensive unit. For example, if your team is getting hammered and they can’t seem to get out of their own half, you can change the passing style to a more direct and instruct the players to hit longer passes and this might solve the problem! It’s that real!
But Football Manager has many other features that turn the game into one that blurs the line between the real thing and a computer game: you are allowed to scout players on all continents, you can promote youngsters from the youth team and train them into tomorrow’s superstars, you can even build new stadiums or improve the training grounds of the team. You can really do anything that’s football related that a real life manager can do and feel great about it – so if you ever wished to become a football manager and never got the chance, this is the closest you can get to the real thing!
You can begin your virtual manager job right away and become a Football Manager Freak and you’ll never be alone! Even better, to help you get begined and prepared for the future, there’s also a list of Football Manager 2012 wonderkids that will surely help get your club forward!