In my mind, the Football Manager series has always been a tycoon game. While it does a great job of simulating all the aspects that make up the footballing world, it excels in the depth and detail that tycoon fans ve. And it is all about the money.
The only way to build your local club up to a rival for the big names in football is money. Invest wisely and that forward might net 40 goals in a season and add a substantial amount to your bottom line. But buy that keeper and fail to get him to play well, and you find your club getting nearer and nearer to the red line. Forcing you to cut your losses and bench the goalie or to spend even more money on a suitable replacement.
Obviously, the simulation goes beyond money. The game itself is deep, so deep that you can have easily clocked hundreds of hours and still struggle to get your team to success. The longrunning series builds on its rock-solid base year after year. This year a lot of focus went into the training system. That system had been neglected for a while and was no longer up to par with the rest of the game. It has been revamped and improved. The options you get to finetune your training are abundant. And at times overwhelming. There is so much to choose from. Just a quick check to see how your central midfielder is doing leads down a rabbit hole that just keeps throwing options at you. And so a 2-minute overview of how he is doing turns in to nearly an hour of tweaking individual schedules ever so slightly. At least when I am playing.
And that is both the strength and the weakness of the Series. For those like me who love the depth of simulation, the abundance of statistics and the way all these interlock into a very precise simulation is a joy. For those looking to play more casually and just have fun managing their favourite club, the depth is at times as scary as hell.
Luckily the game comes with the more streamlined version FM Touch, where the depth is a bit less, but you might actually have a life besides the game.
Tactics
Money can get you quite a distance towards your goal, but there is more to it. The game has an insanely deep tactical system, where you can tweak anything from the general formation of your team to the way an individual player should behave in certain situations.
The tactics system has been made more accessible by the addition of presets. Want to play like Barcelona? There is a preset for that. With the click of a button, your team will play the famous Tiki-Taka football. Well…. they will try. It turns out that my squad of Roda JC, playing in the second tier in Holland and the club where 10 year-old me got bitten by the football bug, doesn’t get beyond trying. The board and I are still discussing whether I asked to much from them or if they simply aren’t as great as I thought them to be. Let’s agree to disagree.
Verdict
I could go on about this game for hours. It is one of my all-time favourite games, ever since I played Championship Manager 1992. But I won’t. I find FM 19 to be a worthy new installment in the series. With the revamping of the tactics and training systems the game has yet again improved upon itself. The presets make the game more accessible and the addition of the VAR makes it even more real. While playing I found some weird behaviour in the match-engine, leading to many goals from crosses. Untill Sports Interactive patches it out, you can either ignore it or try to devise a tactic that exploits that. It’s up to you.
