Football Manager Live

If you’re a Football Manager fan, you’ve no doubt been dreaming about this day. For years you’ve been waiting, longing, wishing in misty-eyed hope that the world’s favourite and longest running football manager series would receive the MMO treatment, allowing you to play against managers from across the world. Well dream no more, as that day is today.

After countless months of beta testing, Sports Interactive’s first foray into the world of MMO gaming has finally been unleashed on the world. A hybrid of the Football Manager series and eBay, this massively multiplayer online managerial experience allows you to create a football team and enter one of several highly populated servers and experience the thrills of football management as you attempt to prove to the world that you are the greatest virtual manager on the planet.

Purists be warned: this isn’t Football Manager quite as you know it. The first difference between this and Football Manager 2009 is that Football Manager Live doesn’t feature its cousin’s flashy new 3D engine, instead sticking to the series’ old 2D perspective. Much of the hardcore micromanagement of the single player series has been stripped out and replaced by more streamlined and community-driven features, with the result likely to irk hardcore FM purists, but delight the majority of less demanding fans.

Setting up a team is simplicity itself. You begin by selecting a team and stadium name, after which you can use an intuitive kit creation process to define the colours and patterns of your team’s home and away shirts. Next up is a quick and easy squad creation process. You can either select your players manually (by ploughing through an exhaustive list of real world players and handpicking each one) or let the game do all the hard work for you by auto-generating a squad.

A stringent initial wage budget restricts the type of players you can start out with, and it’s unlikely you’ll have many recognisable names on your first team sheet. Instead, you’ll find yourself trying to mould a collection of solid journeymen, bruisers and has-beens into a well-oiled footballing outfit that’s more Jossy’s Giants than the Galácticos. Flashier players like Gerrard, Ronaldo and Kaka are tantalisingly out of reach until you amass enough cash to woo them to your club’s banner.

One of the most striking differences between Football Manager Live and the Football Manager series is the RPG vein that runs through this online offering. As well as your own personal managerial prowess, you must learn a series of skills that unlock tactical options and bonuses. You begin the game by selecting a specialist skill that enables you to unlock certain skills and perks more quickly.

Opt to specialise in the Club Doctor skill category and your players will heal in less time, while the Fast Learner skill speeds how quickly you learn new skills. Talent Spotter is ideal if you’re a bargain hunter looking for that next up-and-coming kid you can boldly (and probably misguidedly) proclaim as the new Pele, Maradona, Zidane (delete as appropriate). Rounding off your options are the Strictly Business ability (financial boosts), Tracksuit Manager (improved coaching skills) and Blackboard Manager, which speeds your ability to learn new tactical tricks.

Mastering new skills requires you to select the desired ability from a truly exhaustive list (annoyingly you can’t queue new skills) and then wait for a designated period of time before that skill is learned – anything from minutes to days. It’s an interesting system that adds a new element to the Football Manager mix and provides newcomers with a gentle introduction to the game’s myriad tactical options. However, purists of the singleplayer series may find it irritating to be forced to wait set amount of time to play each game. Fail to play a game by the designated date and your opponent will get to play the match against an AI opponent instead, or vice-versa if they do a no show. Though this isn’t always a bad thing if you’ve had a string of poor results.

The odds of you and your opponent being online simultaneously are increased by the presence of Football Associations – groups of clubs whose managers play at similar times. The game recommends the association best suited to you, though you’re free to join any association and even change your mind if things aren’t working out. When both you and your opponent are online, either one of you can issue a challenge, after which you both have five minutes to set up your tactics before the game kicks off.

Football Manager Live’s 2D games possess all the realism that we’ve come to expect from the singleplayer series and can be watched at three match speeds (slow, medium or fast), mutually decided upon by you and your opposite number. Matches are broken down into key highlights detailing the most important and controversial moments, including near misses, disallowed goals, fouls, bookings, sending offs and substitutions. While the lack of real-time match options may disappoint the ultra hardcore FM fan, and while the highlights-only mode doesn’t allow you to identify your team’s weaknesses quite as accurately as in Football Manager 2009, the quality and sheer realism of the match engine ensures there’s sufficient feedback to identify the tactical changes you need to make. And if you can’t work it out from the highlights, a mass of statistical screens are on hand to fill you in on details ranging from team possession to decimalised performance scores for individual players. The quick-fire games create an impressive momentum, as it’s possible to play several matches in under an hour.

Match fluidity is ensured by a limited number of timeouts, during which you and your opponent can make tactical switches. All other strategic tweaking must be made while the game is in progress, though the action can be watched from the mini pitch view nestled at the bottom of the Tactics screen. Unless you’re a managerial genius, it’s unlikely you’ll ever reach the upper echelons of the ranking table without earning enough money to buy some decent players. Cash can be accumulated from two sources: from your ranking position and from success in competitions. You can splash the cash on new players either by bidding on transfer listed talent in an eBay-style auction or by entering into a 24-hour wage auction for a free agent. At the end of an auction the highest bidder walks away with the player’s signature. However, free agents also come with the added outlay of a signing-on fee. If you’re after a player already under contract to another team then you can send a direct transfer offer to your rival manager, at which point a haggling ritual will ensue (or if your bid is insultingly low, expect derisive laughter instead).

While wheeling and dealing is entertaining, it’s all too easy for more dedicated players – or even those who have entered a server first – to snap up the best value players, leaving you to struggle with second rate players or attempting to sign overpaid megastars. This, coupled with the slower unlocking of tactical options and bonuses, can make it extremely challenging for the more casual player to make any sizeable impact on the rankings.

Spending indiscriminately is another pitfall to be wary of. Fall too heavily into debt by snapping up a legion of overpaid superstars and your smugness at having a team of headline hoggers will be short-lived once the administrators move in. If you’re from the Arsene Wenger school of management though then this won’t be so much of a problem, as you can channel all your energies into creating a youth football team instead. However, having a squad of kids on your books isn’t a mandatory requirement and you can completely ignore this part of the game if you so wish. Though, again, you’ll be at a disadvantage compared to the more dedicated players who will find new talent from within.

Football Manager Live is a surprisingly pacey game, one which places competition above all other things. The game’s sprightly season progression results in a free-flowing yet still satisfyingly deep management experience. Each season lasts four weeks, with a one week pre-season period breaking up the competitions. There’s no press or minimal player personality issues to concern you, just good old fashioned tactical tweaking and wheeling and dealing. You never need to worry about getting bogged down by minutiae such as responding to press questions or worrying about how popular you are with the fans.

Despite its aesthetic and navigational shortcomings, Football Manager Live truly is a well-crafted product that brims with realism and immerses you in a thriving community-driven world – maintaining just enough essence from the single-player experience to satisfy all but the most hardened Football Manager fan. With its diluted approach to management, it may not be quite the online experience we’ve been dreaming of for all these years, and the subscription fees do seem a little steep, but as far as finding a symbiosis of hardcore and mainstream management mechanics goes, FML must go down as an excellent first attempt by Sports Interactive. A first attempt which proves that the London-based developer is still very much the master of the sports management genre, both offline and on.