Football Manager’s beta and release are just around the corner, which will be one of the most highly-anticipated releases since the disastrous cancellation of FM25.
The collapse of the FM25 release schedule was blamed on the amount of work required to create a new engine, but beyond graphical updates, we’re now told that it will be fundamentally based off the architecture that has been in place for over a decade.
Football Manager’s Broken System
This same system has led to single-tactic dominance and ludicrously imbalanced patches that can make tall strikers go from useless to scoring 40 goals a season in the middle of a save. Half of the player attributes make no difference in-game. Players fundamentally have little control, with the game being something more akin to a dressed-up choose-your-own-adventure novel than a hardcore football simulation.
Unfortunately, fans are starved for alternatives. No credible challenger to FM has even threatened to emerge, and if that’s your favourite genre, you’re stuck with Sports Interactive. If FM26 doesn’t get roaring reviews, it will be painfully obvious that their dominance is built on sand, and the possibility of a competitor emerging seems likely.
Competition Makes or Breaks Franchises
Gaming history is full of moments where seemingly unassailable franchises rested on their laurels or annoyed their fanbases, inviting in competitors. Sometimes, this ends very badly for the series. Sim City is functionally dead as a franchise after it moved steadily away from the realism its core fanbase demanded by seeking a more casual audience. Cities: Skylines stepped in to fill the void, and that was all she wrote.
Sometimes, of course, it lives on to fight another day. Virtually every game in the Sid Meier’s Civilization series has had detractors, with VI also being criticized for a more cartoony aesthetic and gimmicky game modes.Many challengers came in this period, most notably Humankind and Millenia, but none could quite capture the secret sauce. The main series limped on, despite another heavily-criticized release.
But Civilization is quite different to FM. Almost no game has so few of its fans adopt the next edition, and even versions from back into the early noughties are still widely played. For many Civ players, saying a new game has come out is akin to telling Magnus Carlsen that Chess 2 is coming out next fall. They see the game as having essentially been perfected at some point, which is also probably true of FM players, but The Assyrian Empire aren’t going to sign a new winger for the upcoming season, and Chelsea will. Database updates are required.
How Pro Evolution Soccer Saved FIFA
Ideally, the best comparison would be to FIFA. Not only do the two games share a sport, but FIFA also had many of FM’s flaws – every new version making one tactic far superior to any other, repetitive gameplay, and a feeling of a lack of control from the player.
That changed when Pro Evolution Soccer started eating FIFA’s lunch, providing a far more realistic and reactive simulation. Fans didn’t even mind the lack of licensing. Yet in the end, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to FIFA, which quickly learned its lesson and been kept on its toes ever since. Barring a miracle on the game’s November launch, Football Manager desperately needs the same medicine.
