Football Manager 2012

FM12 news here

Key new and improved features


Transfers and Contracts - significant changes to the transfer and contract systems, including loyalty bonuses, better implementation of amateur and youth contracts, an improved transfer centre and ability to lock areas of the contract negotiation when you aren't prepared to budge. This helps you to manage your budgets and gives you flexibility in what you offer money hungry players, or agents, as incentives.

Scouting Improvements - Using several real life scouting reports, a new in-game report has been dvised which includes squad analysis, tacitcs information and information about goals scored and conceded alongside lots of other scouting improvements, giving you all the information you need to prepare before kick-off and throughout the season.

3D Match Improvements - New animations, a whole new crowd system, improved weather system, more stadiums, plus two brand new cameras - "behind goal" and "director cam" as well as all other camera angles being reversible - meaning you can watch and analyse every aspect of every game.

Manage anywhere, anytime - The ability to add or take away playable nations in your saved game as often as you want. Manage in that country at the start of the next season - meaning you don't have to stay in the nations which are chosen by you to be playable at the start of your career.

Tone - A whole new level has been added to team talks and conversations, with the new tone system, which allows you to specify the way you want to say things - be as cool as a cucumber by saying things calmly or throw tea cups around by saying things with passion. There are 6 different tones to choose from with specific comments per tone.

Intelligent Interface - A new adaptive layout system, which means the higher your screen resolution, the more info is easily at your fingertips. The new interface also contains new filters, customisable columns, a new tactics, and lots of new overview screens.

Brand New Tutorial - Standing separate from the main game, a mode to help new players find thier way around the game easily, whilst also offering tips to experienced managers on how to get the most out of the game, as well as a new in-game "how to" system.

On top of these key innovations, there are lots of areas of the game that have had huge improvements, such as the media system, press conferences, the youth system

The contract changes sound great, the ability to take away and add playable nations is amazing! And the Tone will hopefully deliver what was needed to a dull interface.

Looks promising!

Release date October 23rd so demo should be out in a week or two.

The new interface looks awesome! ( at Laptop people)

http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/274388-FM12-blogs-Release-date-amp-Scouting?p=7066361#post7066361

First Blog about Scouting reports among other things

Youth teams and Regens

Today’s is about changes and new features regarding youth players and “newgens” which are the players that come into the game over time to ensure that there are a stream of players available for your whole career.

We often talk about how FM 2012 is part evolution for the series, and part revolution. So let’s start out with some revolution…

In previous editions of the Football Manager series, you didn’t have much control over the youth squad. Each year you’d find a bunch of players dumped into your youth squad at the start of the season. Not any more.

With FM 2012, we’ve given you more control over which players make it into your youth squad. Towards the end of the domestic season, you’ll get a news item in your inbox to inform you that your youth candidates are now ready to be assessed. Your coaches will already have assessed them and will be able to give you a scouting report for each one, as well as your assistant making recommendations to you on who you should, or shouldn’t, give a youth contract to.

Your staff will also arrange a match between your current youth squad, and the youth candidates so you can watch them in action, and you can also choose to have a further look at the players by allowing them to play in normal youth team matches for the few weeks when you are making your decisions on who to take on.

They are initially treated as an extra squad, so it’s easy to see who they are and scroll through them using quick flicks. After the youth candidates have played their evaluation match against your current youth team, they will stay on with your youth team as trialists for the following few weeks.

It’s a whole new level of control for those of you who want to micromanage to the lowest level– but as we know that this isn’t something that everyone will want to do, we’ve also made it so that your assistant can look after who to take on if you don’t want to go this in depth alongside the other things that you can ask your assistant to look after, such as team talks and press conferences.

One thing that we always need to balance when we’re adding in new features is that people play the game in different ways.

We know that some people will love the extra control on youth teams. But we also know that some people don’t bother with youth squads at all, just signing ready made players from other teams in the game. There are also many who manage at a lower level, and struggle to balance their finances between having a youth squad and the needs of the first team.

So we have an option for those people too.

So, for them, you can now ask your board to scrap your youth set up entirely. This will mean no new players coming through, and no need to try and get wages together to pay for the youth team. Your board may so no, of course, but if they’re looking to save money too, then it’s likely they’ll say yes.

There have also been improvements in the way that the newgens are generated, with country based positional “traits” now being used. In Brazil, for example, it’s rare that they have natural wingers in real life, with those players more likely to be wing backs, so you’ll see less Brazilian newgen wingers, and more Brazilian newgen wing backs.

The same can also be said of a players mental attributes. Players in Brazil, due to the way they grow up playing the game, are more likely to have flair. Players in Spain are more likely to play a short passing game. All of these traits are now reflected better in game.

We’ve also improved the way youth recruitment works at different clubs for their youth setup. The club’s youth recruitment network and youth facilities are not only linked to the quality of newgens produced by the youth setup, but also the scope of the recruitment. So clubs with excellent recruitment networks and state-of-the art facilities have the ability to attract youth players not just from the local regions, but from other continents as well.

There’s also been a big improvement in the way names are generated for all youth players, particularly in countries where there are lots of regions and names tend to be region specific.

So that’s it for the youth & newgens blog – there are many other improvements in this area too, but we’ll let you discover those for yourself when you’re playing Football Manager 2012 later in the year



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I AM EXCITED!!! Hopefully this means I can produce good Polish talent for once.

Media & subscriptions


Over the last few years we’ve added many news items into the Football Manager series so that you can get even more immersed into your own personal game world. Sometimes when you’re playing the game, there are so many that it can become a bit overwhelming.

Therefore one of the things we looked into this year was where we could avoid duplication of information, so you’re still getting all the information you need and want, but avoiding multiple news items about the same event.

We’ve called this project “The news merge”. And some of it will change the way you play the game. But I’ll go into that a bit later.

After going through all the news items in the game looking for ones where you might get multiple bits of information scattered across many items, or for ones where you essentially got the same information multiple times, we needed to look at the headlines of all of these, and other, news items, to make sure they properly described what was in the main body of the item.

There were some that were easy to do, like when multiple players are going to miss an important match, and you could just add the extra text to one news item, or when players are released at the end of the season, there are new news items for youth players and senior players that have been released by their clubs, or merging together the “Manager sacked” and “Club looking for new manager” news items.

Then there were some that will change slightly the way you play the game. Such as combining scouting recommendation news items, so that if a scout wants to recommend a few players to you after seeing a match, they’ll be in one item, with reports for each player, or combining international scout reports.

But the really big change is the way that transfer bid news items now work. If you offer a player out to clubs and get multiple bids in for the player, you won’t get all of these items individually, but instead get one news item telling you who has bid. This gives a lot more prominence to the transfer centre, but I’ll go into that in more detail in a separate transfers blog.

There are, of course, many, many news items that we’ve changed in this way, not just the ones described below. But it wouldn’t be much fun for you if we told you about everything in advance, so you’ll just need to see those for yourself.

We also improved a bunch of existing news items in other ways, such as when the transfer window opens and closes, more details of a players contribution after his debut, pre & post match text improvements, more informative player unhappiness news, an indication of how much money you’ll be receiving for one of your matches being on TV and improved monthly training news items to name but a few, and some entirely new news items as well.

Of course, all of the news items that you see are controllable via the subscriptions screen, which has also been improved for Football Manager 2012, making it easier to reset your changes, the ability to subscribe to players, staff and clubs via the search screen and the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe to awards news items.

And whilst we’re talking about media, we can’t forget about the press conferences. As well as lots of improvements to the questions already there, there are also a few new press conference questions, such as questions about players you’ve sold, fixture congestion, gaps between fixtures, and even specific questions and answers for when your players have hit the woodwork a number of times during the match, plus more besides.

Tactics look good. Carlton Cole as trequartista though.

Transfers and contracts

Non-contracts are very similar to amateur contracts in many ways, in that the players are able to move freely to other clubs if they are signed on non-contract terms. However, these players can earn money with appearance fees and bonuses possible.

Non contracts aren’t just for players either – you can offer non-contract terms to staff too.

Of course, these options are only available to you should the team be likely to use them in real life, so don’t expect these options if you’re managing a top division club!

One thing many of the community noticed from the original announcement and screenshots from a few weeks ago was the “loyalty bonus” which has replaced the “signing on fee”. This has been changed based on feedback from both our agent and chief executive contracts, as signing on fees are now paid throughout the length of a contract, and not all upfront.

Another thing that was mentioned then was contract locks. These have a huge effect in the way that contract negotiations are done now, particularly when you’re on a budget!

Say you’ve got a limited wage budget and a maximum of 5k a week, yet the player you want is demanding 7k. Rather than getting frustrated going backwards and forwards without movement, you can lock the 5k offer, and the agent will then look at other ways to make the player happy, such as looking at some of the other bonuses available, or asking for a percentage of any sale on the player. Or they could just accept. Or walk away. But at least you all know where you stand in the negotiation.

There are some other tweaks to contract negotiations too, such as making it easier to withdraw or change your contract offer, including the chance to re-negotiate terms with a player after the agent has provisionally accepted, in case another club comes in for them that might be offering them more wages.

And you’ve also got the chance to have different minimum fee release clauses, for higher division clubs, domestic clubs and foreign clubs, as well as a new contract clause – “pay increase after x international caps”.
What about when players don’t want to be at your club anymore?

We’ve increased the chances that players might ask for mutual terminations, such as when a team gets relegated, or if they are near the end of their contracts and transfer listed.

You can also, via a conversation, issue an ultimatum to a player who hasn’t agreed a new contract with you in the last year of their contract to sign, or they’ll be put on the transfer list.

And also via a conversation, can tell a player why you’re transfer listing them.

A change with agents sees them better servicing the needs of the club – if you suggest that you’re looking for a new goalkeeper in a press conference, for example, then expect to be offered more goalkeepers from agents.

You also now get much better feedback in the game on why a club that was interested might not put in a bid for a player.

As mentioned in the blog that included the news merge, I wrote about the revamp of the transfer centre.

This really now has become the hub from where you sell players – rather than it just having basic information there, it now has more information by default, and by clicking on the more info button, opens up to give you the full information on the screen. It’s really easy to compare all the different offers, and you can accept, reject or negotiate, them directly from the transfer centre screen, either grouped together, or separately.


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Sounds like BIG improvement.

Say you’ve got a limited wage budget and a maximum of 5k a week, yet the player you want is demanding 7k. Rather than getting frustrated going backwards and forwards without movement, you can lock the 5k offer, and the agent will then look at other ways to make the player happy, such as looking at some of the other bonuses available, or asking for a percentage of any sale on the player. Or they could just accept. Or walk away. But at least you all know where you stand in the negotiation.

There are some other tweaks to contract negotiations too, such as making it easier to withdraw or change your contract offer, including the chance to re-negotiate terms with a player after the agent has provisionally accepted, in case another club comes in for them that might be offering them more wages.

Me likey.

For todays’ blog I’m going to go through a bunch of new and improved features for Football Manager 2012 that don’t fit into other categories.

For a start, we’ve improved the modelling of pre-defined stadium moves, meaning that when a team like Brighton have a stadium move defined in the database, the researchers of those teams are able to estimate the new attendance once the stadium move has happened, rather than it sticking to the attendance at the old ground.

At the start of each season, your board give you their expectations and, where possible, you can negotiate these to and get a higher transfer budget, or lower if you want less pressure. We’ve now added in some extra levels to these expectations, such as qualifying for different continental competitions – for example, you could say that you’re going to try and qualify for the Euro cup, rather than the Champions cup.

Football Manager 2012, as always, comes with a free data editor, which allows you to edit the games players, clubs, competitions and add new competitions. Here are some edited highlights of things added to the editor this year.

You can now add international competitions as well as league ones, you have the option to edit currency exchange rates, an option to add a league split in regionalised league groups, the ability to add squad rules for continental competitions, such as having to register a certain amount of players by a specific date and all the new contract clauses that were added into FM11 are now editable in the editor. As with everything in the blogs, there are more new things in the editor too, but we’ll let you find those out for yourself once the game is released on October 21st.

There have been a few changes in the control you have over training facilities too. For a start, if you don’t have any training facilities of your own, your board can now rent some for you. And if your club get into serious financial trouble, you might find this very useful, as you could find your board selling your owned training facilities!

There is also now another use for your training facilities that can help the club earn a bit more money, but only if an international tournament is going on in the country where you are managing – your board may well hire the facilities out to a nation, should they be good enough, and should your ground be near one of the stadiums being used for tournament matches.

A few finance changes have been made to the game this year too. Although the financial fair play rules are such big news at the moment, we’ve always made it harder in FM to get into debt than it is in real life, by limiting transfer budgets accordingly, but clubs in administration will no longer be able to get a license to play in continental competitions in the game.

Travelling costs to games are now better modelled, as are the cost of sending scouts out.

The cost of running your youth setup is also now tracked in more detail and you can ask the board to alter the level of money budgeted for your youth setup. If things look very bleak financially, the board can also ask if you want to scrap your whole youth setup if you decide not to enter your youth team into the youth league.

There are also some new “debt types” in the game, which are also in the new data editor, such as a debt repayable on promotion to the top division.

However, there are some positive financial changes too. For a start, should your players be off playing in international tournaments, your club will now get paid just as they would in real life. It’s only a small amount of money, but every little bit helps, right? And you never know – should they get injured whilst playing for the national side, you might even get some of their wages paid for the period they’re out injured for...


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Lots of good changes being made...

From the FM Tutorial video:

Team Meeting - Should you wish to address multiple players in your squad in one go, the easiest way to go about this is to call a team meeting. This will allow you to interact with your group and let them know what is on your mind, be it positive or negative.

Team Policy - The Team Policy menu allows you to specify what roles, if any, your assistant manager carries out.

polska. wrote:

Key new and improved features


Transfers and Contracts - significant changes to the transfer and contract systems, including loyalty bonuses, better implementation of amateur and youth contracts, an improved transfer centre and ability to lock areas of the contract negotiation when you aren't prepared to budge. This helps you to manage your budgets and gives you flexibility in what you offer money hungry players, or agents, as incentives.

Scouting Improvements - Using several real life scouting reports, a new in-game report has been dvised which includes squad analysis, tacitcs information and information about goals scored and conceded alongside lots of other scouting improvements, giving you all the information you need to prepare before kick-off and throughout the season.

3D Match Improvements - New animations, a whole new crowd system, improved weather system, more stadiums, plus two brand new cameras - "behind goal" and "director cam" as well as all other camera angles being reversible - meaning you can watch and analyse every aspect of every game.

Manage anywhere, anytime - The ability to add or take away playable nations in your saved game as often as you want. Manage in that country at the start of the next season - meaning you don't have to stay in the nations which are chosen by you to be playable at the start of your career.

Tone - A whole new level has been added to team talks and conversations, with the new tone system, which allows you to specify the way you want to say things - be as cool as a cucumber by saying things calmly or throw tea cups around by saying things with passion. There are 6 different tones to choose from with specific comments per tone.

Intelligent Interface - A new adaptive layout system, which means the higher your screen resolution, the more info is easily at your fingertips. The new interface also contains new filters, customisable columns, a new tactics, and lots of new overview screens.

Brand New Tutorial - Standing separate from the main game, a mode to help new players find thier way around the game easily, whilst also offering tips to experienced managers on how to get the most out of the game, as well as a new in-game "how to" system.

On top of these key innovations, there are lots of areas of the game that have had huge improvements, such as the media system, press conferences, the youth system

The contract changes sound great, the ability to take away and add playable nations is amazing! And the Tone will hopefully deliver what was needed to a dull interface.

Looks promising!

FM12 is going to be fantastic because of that feature done in italics.

I'm going to be able to play this in touch screen

Let’s start with friendlies, for which there are significant additions with Football Manager 2012.

One thing that’s become more prevalent in football over the last season is clubs scrapping their reserve team squads due to the standard in reserve leagues not being good enough, and preferring to send players out on loan to get lower league first team football instead, and playing behind closed door friendlies instead to help get those players returning from injury fit, and giving some of the youngsters and squad players a chance to prove their worth.

Youth teams also now arrange pre-season friendlies too. And not just against other youth teams – you could find a big club youth team being quite happy to play a friendly against a lower league side’s first team.
In FM12, should the country you are playing in have reserve teams, and should you decide not to enter them into the reserve competitions, and should you have your assistant manager set in the team preferences to arrange friendlies, throughout the season you’ll find reserve team friendlies being added to the calendar.
Something else that’s become noticeable over the last few years has been pre-season tours where high profile clubs will go to far flung countries to have friendlies against international sides, or “best of the league” sides. And you can now arrange these in Football Manager 2012 too (should those nations have “best of the league” sides, of course).

We’ve also made it easier to arrange friendlies, with a better user interface to help arrange them, should you want to do this yourself.

Right – that’s enough about friendlies. How about a new option to help you configure your game to have the players in it you want to? There are lots of little configurable options when you first start a game of Football Manager 2012 to help get the database to a size that you’re happy with, such as being able to load up all players from a particularly nation, but this year we’ve added the option to load all players from a particular league too.

There aren’t too many changes to the network game this year, but you are now notified when you get chat messages from other managers and you aren’t in the chat room. And we’ve made it more obvious on how to start a network game, by adding a “start new network game” option on the main menu screen.
There are big changes with match analysis though.

Match analysis is something that has been in the game for a few versions now, and gives you lots of information about how you and your opposition have done in a particular match using stats to show you where passes and shots have happened from and the like. But comparing matches has always been a complicated process of going backwards and forwards between the different matches. This year, you can now analyse two matches side by side by picking the matches you want to compare, putting them into the match analysis comparison screen, and it’ll show you the difference between how your team performed in the two matches.

Whilst we’re talking about analysing matches, we’ve also added in some new post match stats. So after a match is finished, you can now see stats for shots, shots on target, shots off target, blocked shots, hit the woodwork, clear cut chances, half chances, other chances, long shots, possession, corners, free kicks, throw ins, fouls, offsides, passes completed, passes completed – defence, passes completed – midfield, passes completed – attack, crosses completed, tackles won, headers won, yellow cards, red cards, distance run and average rating.

And whilst we’re talking about stats, there's also a new subscription-based competition news item which tells you who the top performers are in various stats on a regular basis. And some new goalkeeper stats, which you can see for yourself when the demo of FM12 are released.

And finally for today, have you ever wanted to compare your star striker in 2040 with your star striker in 2015, only to find the player has long retired and you can’t see his stats anymore? Well, you can now set any player in the game to have their history “retained” by the game, meaning that their player history won’t ever vanish. All you need to do is click on a little tick box, and he is immortalised in the game forever – the game also chooses some key players to keep stored too.

All of us at Sports Interactive pride ourselves on making the Football Manager series the most indepth and accurate simulation of the real football world released.

One of the really important parts of this is to ensure that all countries whose leagues we represent in the game are represented as accurately as possible.

This is something that would be really easy if all leagues followed the same structure. But, of course, they don’t! Whether it be the English pyramid system, the Scottish league break, the Brazilian state and national pyramid system, regional divisions all over the world and the B-teams of Spain, we try our best to get it right, even though it leads to lots of work that’s only needed for one countries league.

I’m not going to go into all the different changes that have been made to league rules this year. There are, literally, thousands of them. Even changes that were only announced in late August, such as the Turkish play off system, have made it into the game, or having to add special code so that clubs that have punishments and are having to play games behind closed doors are inside the game too, or code and data fields so that clubs who are banned from playing in continental competitions (or go into administration into the game) are dealt with properly.

But there are some countries where a lot of special attention has to be given because the rules there are so different to those elsewhere, such as the MLS in the USA and the A-League in Australia.

So if you aren’t interested in the changes to those 2 leagues, look away now! Or, rather, come back tomorrow for another FM2012 blog.

But if you are interested….

Let’s start with the A League, where there have been significant changes to the marquee player rules inside Football Manager 2012.

For a start, we didn’t have a way for our Australian head researchers to identify the marquee players in real life to ensure they were treated correctly by the game, which we now do have with support both in the database and in game.

This was perfectly timed with the A League deciding to allow 2 adult marquee players, rather than one. So you can now have 2 of them, as long as one of them is Australian

We’ve added support for the Youth Marquee player too, which is an Australian marquee player who must be under 23 years old. These are also now reflected in the game, the database, and therefore the data editor too
There’s also a new schedule in place for the Australian season, alongside big changes to the roster rules for the teams, to ensure it’s more realistic and easier to understand.

Hopefully these changes, alongside lots of others, will make the A League even more fun to manage in.

Then there’s the MLS. A league where clubs are franchises, not clubs. A league where the league own the players and a draft system is used to assign them to the clubs. If you want a really different experience, then try managing in the MLS!

There are a lot of changes and new features for the MLS this year. So many that I don’t really know where to start! So am just going to list some of them in a list below in no particular order…

MLS Academies now create newgens as they would do in real life.

MLS Combine teams now have their real names, alongside improvements to news about players in the Combine teams, to help you as a manager know which of them you should be looking to draft.

The salary cap now increases each year, and the person playing the game gets a news item to tell them what the new salary cap is.

New news item for the MLS All Star game that announces the squad, and highlights the players from your team.
Guaranteed contracts have been improved and are now working as per real life.

MLS rights when a player is sold are now better modelled.

We’ve also added in the weighted lottery draft process into FM this year, with 3 or 4 a year – it’s up to you if you want to take part or not though.

Improvements have been made to the roster confirmation screen, so that players aren’t accidently released.

Improvements made to the designated player code, so that 2 of them cannot be traded, with a 3rd slot available for purchase, with the money spent divided by the clubs in the MLS who decide to not have a 3rd slot.
And finally, we’ve added in the MLS Discovery signings, so you can sign 6 players from foreign clubs or free agents per season. Or 10 if you’re one of the 2 new clubs – the MLS expansion is in too, so we welcome
Vancouver and Portland to Football Manager 2012.

To be clear, these are not the only changes, new things and improvements for the MLS & A League. But hopefully you can see from these the kind of level of detail we go to just for these specific leagues. As we try to do for every league in the game.

Today I’m going to talk about international, rather than club, management, and the new features and changes we’ve made in this area.

For a start, we’ve tried to make it so that there’s a little bit more to do, and see, when you’re managing an international side. This includes an increased amount of news, and a better replication of what an international manager does between matches, as well as making the build up to tournaments a bit more exciting.

As an example of this, we’ve added provisional international squads to the game for the first time. This means that in advance of the major tournament, you can name a squad of up to 30 players, where applicable.

But how do you choose which of the players to then drop from the 30 to the 23? By having friendlies before said tournaments, of course. You should be able to fit in 3 or 4 into the time allocated to these in advance of having to name your final squad.

The media in real life love speculating about who is going to be in the squad, so a week before the preliminary squad announced, you’ll get a news item telling you who is injured or suspended, so might not feature.

You’ll also find increased news items during the tournament too, but I’ll leave you to discover those for yourself!

Both in and away from tournaments, there’s a lot more feedback on how the youth international teams are doing and who is performing well, so help indicate who you might like to move into the main squad.

There are also lots of new international manager press conference questions, to add more depth to that part of managing an international team.

In time for the Olympics, we’ve added in under 23 managers, and tried to improve the squad selection process so that overage players are included, but still with the club managers being allowed to refuse for them to be in the squad.

Nations also now have an overview screen, with information such as the countries nickname, population, rival nations, formation year, when they joined the world governing body, the managers profile, when the next match is, their current world ranking, major clubs in the country, major transfers, top players and a world ranking history throughout the time you are playing Football Manager 2012.

We’ve also added in a few new international competitions, and not just inside the game, but have also added the ability to put more of these kinds of competitions into the game via the data & competitions editor. Some examples of these would include the East Asian football federation cup qualifiers, the Pacific games, an expansion of the Gold Cup, the ASEAN football championship and the Asian Games.

And we’ve added the new rules regarding international allegiance for players, so those that have only played in friendlies can still choose to declare to play for another nation that they qualify for.

One thing that’s become more prevalent in real life is also the bidding process for tournaments, with more interest from both the media and the public regarding bids for international tournaments, with 3 different types of news for this process for the invitation for putting in bids, the bids deadline, and the host announcement – plus some club related touches which I’ll go into a little bit in the miscellaneous blogs.

The successful bidders in these tournaments even look at building new stadiums now if their country is selected to host a major tournament.

But my personal favourite of the international management new features is one that was, erm, ripped off from something that we at SI did for the mirrorfootball website in advance of the previous world cup, providing you information on players to watch out for in the forthcoming big tournaments depending on which nations or competitions you’re subscribed to.

Oh, and don’t forget that the team report which was discussed in the recent scouting blog is available for all international managers too. And there’s a new international round up screen for club managers, so you can see more information on how your international players have performed whilst they’ve been away playing for their country!

When you have a game with as much detail, and as many options in it like the Football Manager series, the interface between the person playing the game and the computer, known as the GUI (Graphical User Interface) is very important. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to find anything on the screen, so it’d all be a bit pointless.

I’ve often spoken previously about the work that we do with usability companies to try and improve the interface and make it easier for you, the people who play the game, to navigate around, and of course we’ve done that this year. We also have some code that has been tracking our testers and beta testers use of the interface, to see which screens they visit and how they get there, and all of this work has led to what I think is a more streamlined experience.

For those who’ve been playing the series for years, this years’ interface might take a little while to get used to – a few options have moved, there are some new menus, and a clearer split between “club” actions and “squad” actions and screens, but, essentially, everything is now more obvious to find.

We’ve also added something we dub “adaptive layout”. You can see a video of this at https://www.youtube.com/sigames#p/u/19/9iTXka94ePc, but this means that the higher the resolution you play the game in, the more information you can get on screen, with less “white space” in the game. We encourage you to change the games resolution until you find the right amount of information on the screen for you.

The key screens where these changes are noticeable is on the overview screens. These are like the manager homepage that was
added a while back, but now include profiles for clubs, players, nations and more, and add more or less panels according to the resolution. These new profiles have also been made the default for player profiles, for example, but if you want to be a luddite and live in the past, you can change it in the preferences to go to the player attributes screen instead.

On the squad screen, and most screens with columns, you can add and remove columns to your hearts’ content, to really have the interface the way you want it to.

In the spirit of configurability, and as we’re regularly asked on our forums how to change some of the text colours in the game and in particular the colours of the attribute values, we’ve now made this easier too.

The way to do this before was by manually extracting and editing an xml file which isn’t the easiest to explain to people who just want to change a few colours. We’ve now got a simple Attribute Colours panel in the Preferences screen where you can pick your own colours for these and some of the other colours used throughout the game.

We’ve also changed the way you navigate using the Back and Forward arrow buttons. Previously, clicking on them would go through the different players or teams etc. that you’d visited, rather than the different sections within each player or team. So, if you had gone from the team Squad screen to a player’s Profile, and then gone to look at his contract details, clicking on the Back arrow would take you back to the squad screen, which doesn’t really make much sense in this world of people being used to web browsers.

Now if you click Back, it will go back to his Profile, and then clicking it again would take you back to the Squad screen.

However, much like web browsers, if you hold down the back arrow, the last 25 panels you’ve visited are there, so you can just go straight to the one on the list you want to go to. Or, if you want to be a luddite, you can change the system back to what we had in fm2011 in the preferences…

There are also huge changes to way that you can search for players and staff in the game, with a much more powerful filtering system. There are some new ones in there, but it’s a lot easier, and quicker, to filter to find exactly the kind of player and staff that you want to sign.

This is one of those features that is quite difficult to describe in words so here are some screenshots that show you how it works.






It should also be mentioned that the list updates dynamically now as you change your search parameters.

And whilst we’re in screenshot mode, tomorrow’s blog will be a little bit different to the others. No video blog. Not much being written, just lots and lots of screenshots for features we’ve already talked about. And maybe some we haven’t, but will be in the coming weeks…

Game sounds amazing.

So far, no news about improved Match Engine aside from some nice improvements with the stands and animations... That's ok though, I can live with FM11's graphics.

FM11 has good graphics.

Although we release a version of Football Manager each year, there are always some features that take longer than the one year cycle to get right. The 3d match viewer introduced in FM2009 was being worked on in various guises for 3 years before it was unleashed onto the world. Last year’s competition editor was in the works for a long while, as was dynamic reputation.

With FM12, we introduce something that has also been worked on for a few years, and it’s something that’s been requested a lot in the last couple of years, particularly amongst those that tend to have long term career games.

It’s always been the case that the more leagues you have running in the game at any time, the slower time will seem to move, due to all of the extra matches to be played, and data to process. That meant that, for people who want to be able to move around Football Manager’s 50+ playable countries leagues, they would be getting a slower experience than those who, say, just want to manage in the Scottish Premier league.

You now have the ability to add and remove countries to your saved game each season.

For those of you who have been following the different announcements for Football Manager 2012, you’ll know this already, of course. But we’re still getting lots of questions about exactly how it works so, hopefully, this blog will explain that!

Essentially, at any time during the season, you can go to the “add/remove” league, and choose a countries league, or a level of a countries league, and, err, add or remove it.

If you add a new league, or a new level to a league (and by that I mean that if you’d started a game running just the top division in a country, and wanted to add the next level down should it be available in the game), it tells you the date that the league will become active, which tends to be a few weeks in game before the league is due to start.

But where do all the players come from? Anyone who has played the game in the past will know that with inactive leagues, not all the teams have full squads like they do if the league is active. So if you’re 5 seasons into your career, and decide to add another league, surely those teams won’t have enough players and the whole game world will be imbalanced?

That was probably the hardest part of adding this feature in to crack, but crack it we have. What happens is that when the league is added, it works out exactly how players would have progressed in the game should they have been playing in active leagues. It doesn’t play out all the previous seasons’ matches, as that would make it a very slow and long process, but the players skills will change as though they were there all along – including youth players being released by clubs if they aren’t good enough, and players retiring if they get old.

Also, if you add a league some 20 years into your game, it is unlikely that many players from the original DB still survive, so the game also knows how to fill such teams with older newgen players, to simulate newgens that would have come through the club youth scheme if the league had been active all along.

Taking leagues away is also easy, so if you aren’t happy with the speed of your game, you can remove a countries league, or just a level of the league.

You can also use this feature with custom leagues, ones that you can make with the Football Manager data editor, or download others edited leagues online, although they need to be in place when you first start the game.

And if you are someone who plays the demo before release and then like to continues their demo saved game with the full game, you'll be able to add leagues to this save too.

That is a fantastic feature, and love the dark skin.

Every year the licensing team at SEGA trawl the world for official football licenses for the Football Manager series, and this year is no different.

We have a plethora of licenses for the game, and are very grateful to all of our licensors around the world for the information and help that they give to us to make Football Manager as good as it possibly can be.

So today’s blog is a rundown of all of the licenses we have in this year’s game:

Australia – We again have a license with the Hyundai A-League, this allows us to feature both league and club logos, as well as the proper fixture list for the current season.

Denmark – Our second official license with the Superliga, with league and club logos, as well as player photo’s where we’ve been able to source them.

England – Official licenses from the Football League and Football Conference, with all of their other competitions covered too. Agreement includes logos for all competitions, players photos (where supplied) and real fixtures for the Blue Square Conference, Blue Square North & Blue Square South.

France – League licenses for both Ligue 1 and Ligue 2, with logos for the competitions & real fixtures for both divisions.

Netherlands – Licenses for both the Eredivisie and Juliper League, with competition logos, and player pictures where provided. We also have an official license for Team Holland, the Dutch national team.

Northern Ireland – License for the Carling Premiership, including logos and player photo’s where supplied.

Scotland – SPL and associated competitions, including logos, player photo’s and real fixtures.

South Korea – Official license for the K-League, including all logos, player photo’s where provided and real fixtures.

Spain – Licenses for both Liga BBVA & Liga Adelante. This enables us to feature team & competition logos, player photo’s for both divisions and fixtures for the Liga BBVA. Please note that some of these pictures won’t make it into the game for the boxed version, but we will deliver any player pictures that are sent to us between the game going into manufacture and the release date via Steam.

USA – MLS license, including player photo’s and the real fixture list. League logos too, obviously.

Wales – License for the Corbett Sports Welsh Premier League + Loosemores League Cup, including real fixtures & competition/team logos.

Italy – We have licenses in Italy with the following clubs, in alphabetical order… AC.Milan, Atalanta, Bologna, Cagliari, Catania, Cesena, Chievo Verona, Fiorentina, Genoa, Inter, Juventus, Lazio, Lecce, Palermo, Parma, Roma, Sampdoria, Udinese.

At last count, there are over 4700 player photos in Football Manager 2012.

We hope they add that little bit of extra authenticity to the game.


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Still no Germany. Though the Netherlands is great!

Wow! I am impressed!!