How Football Manager is tackling the strangest of seasons

It’s not been an easy year for football, and that means it’s not been an easy year for the people who make Football Manager. In fact at times it’s been “incredibly painful,” as Sports Interactive’s studio head Miles Jacobson put it to me, referring to the features that had to be postponed, and the decisions that had to be made. Football Manager is a rare game that’s tied very closely to real life, and real life’s been a mess.

Somehow, FM21 isn’t – in fact, after a good few hours with the alpha, it’s actually looking great. The new features are impactful and in most cases long sought-after, breathing life into some slightly dusty old systems and adding new ones that instantly seem to work.

Football Manager 2021Developer: Sports InteractivePublisher: SegaPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Releases 24th November on PC, Xbox One and Series X/S. Beta coming soon.

But making a sim is always going to butt up against problems, especially problems in the real world, and the way they tend to get in the way of the fun. For reasons that are self-evident, this year’s pushed that tension quite a bit further. For a start, the obvious question is scouting. Football Manager’s a series that relies on its superlative database of players, maintained by hundreds and hundreds of volunteer scouts, usually hardcore fans, who each look after a single club and report up to their league or region’s lead researcher. The problem, obviously, is that scouting a game requires you to be able to watch it. And for there to be any games to watch.

Thankfully, that’s been less of a problem than you might have thought. For one, a lot of the heavy lifting for FM21 was done earlier in the season, in most cases, while the rest of the disruption varies wildly from place to place. “Taking the UK as an example, all games were on,” Jacobson told me, “and we’d seen enough of those throughout the year anyway. We also had special dispensation to go to stuff – I’m officially an employee of a few clubs – so I’ve been able to get to way less games than I would normally go to, I’ll normally do 50 plus live games a season, but I’ve been able to see a smattering of games.”