The perfect soccer simulator

One more year we have a new installment of Football Manager, the Sports Interactive franchise, which has emerged as one of the video games that has seen its popularity increase the most thanks to the quarantine. And it is a game that you have to spend hours in to enjoy a complete experience, so the period of home confinement was key for more players to join the cause, and in fact, Football Manager 2020 was placed in a free for several weeks, taking advantage of that popularity, and adding new players to a saga that was created 15 years ago.

This number of players who have come into play has been taken into account by Sports Interactive, offering, perhaps, the Football Manager installment that has the most news compared to the most recent ones. Many changes that aim to strengthen that new player base that has taken an interest in the series, while the regulars enjoy a more dynamic experience. The premise is already more than defined, and even achieved: to offer a complete experience when managing a soccer team. However, and although it seems difficult to improve the formula, Football Manager 2021 goes further and outlines many options for the future, being a great step forward compared to previous deliveries.

One step further

While it is true that the room for improvement in a game from the Football Manager franchise is complicated, the truth is that Sports Interactive, understanding this point, has done everything possible to file its diamond and offer certain comforts to the player, which although at At the beginning they can clash a lot, especially if you are a regular player of the saga, they end up penetrating the gameplay, making the experience much more pleasant than in other installments of the franchise, no matter how against the changes.

In this sense, the news is infinite and very difficult to quantify, but a large part is focused on the menu system and the distribution of the information on the screen. To mention some of the ones that have seemed more successful, the press conferences are amazing. In Football Manager, no matter how seriously you wanted to take the game, conversations with journalists were very boring, and after a few hours spent playing the game, you already knew which were the answers that benefit you the most in the face of the press, and the 'submachine gun' mode, answering all the most positive options, was the most common mechanic.

However, this has changed, and it has done so in the simplest way imaginable. The journalists each stand to one side of the screen, making it seem that, from your position where you choose the answers, you have a line of journalists in front of you. This is the same in the locker room, where the team talks are given. If before this was one more screen, which did not transmit practically anything, now the players are distributed around your response selection, a very simple mechanic, but that gives you the feeling of being surrounded by your players. In addition, gestures and expressions have also been added with which you can complement the response both in front of the press and your players, another simple but very effective mechanic.

Yes, it still takes imagination to complete all that experience, but this is a common factor in strategy games, and in this edition, Football Manager takes it to the next level. I have taken these two examples because they are very representative of the approach of the game for this installment: everything counts, not only what you communicate, which in the end will always be subject to what works best and best results, but also how it works. Whatever you do, the way you decide to face a certain climate, and that is very marked by the dynamics of the team and by your background. Sports Interactive tries with these novelties that each player turns his personality into his manager, and that he is able to understand that in football not everything is formality and diligence, but that feelings often precipitate other types of behavior.

Before we talked about the game having had a great surge in the quarantine period. While it is true that the interface had not changed much in recent years, in Football Manager 2021 it has. It may seem that this is a measure aimed at getting new players to settle into the game faster, but curiously, being a regular player in the series, I have found these changes very welcome. Everything is destined to 'cut paths' within the management. In fact, certain things that were previously done mechanically, no matter how expensive, have now been simplified to levels that even feel like a lack of effort.

In this sense, one of the most notable novelties that greatly speeds up the arrival to a specific team are the recruitment meetings, where we will meet with our technical team to find out position by position the status of the team, as well as the contracts of the players. of said demarcation. A great facility that previously had to be done manually, and once well into the game. Football Manager renounces, little by little, the typical complexity of the strategy genre and opts for a more simplified version in favor of fun, making the game not so slow and that it is increasingly dynamic, a point very in favor .

A stream of information

Although before we talked about that one of the objectives of Football Manager was to show that in football there is also a lot of claw and heart, the video game also offers us that other way of facing it. If you are one of those players who conceives the world of soccer as a jumble of statistics with which to outline the style of your team, as well as mark your way of working within the club. For this we have the implementation of the xG system, a tool that allows us to know that other side of football in which numbers and probabilities mark the performance of the team on the field, and the truth is that it is another great success. Reports, statistics, analysis ... and best of all, if you don't believe yourself capable of tackling this complex world, you can always delegate tasks, and it will continue to be a useful tool for your day-to-day management.

Football Manager 2021 is not only a great step forward in the saga, but it is also a twist to the management concept, giving it a very gratifying emotional and personal component, which makes this installment one of the most powerful of the last few years. A natural evolution within the franchise that lays the foundations of the perfect simulator, where not only what matters, but how also carries a lot of weight.

Sports Interactive has refined its jewel, not only to make it more accessible to new players, but also to reward those fans who already understand how the mechanics work, and are granted the right to give up complexity for the fun of it. Football Manager 2021 is the longest step the franchise has taken in years, and it feels like Sports Interactive, with some to-dos, is close to the perfect soccer simulator.