Football Manager 2010 is the latest in Sport Interactive‘s long line of football management games. Other historied franchises fall and fade away but this one only improves with age. The series began as Championship Manager in the Nineties before a change of publishers saw the developer lose the rights to the title. It is perhaps a change for the better. You can have a grand time with this game without ever getting close to winning a championship.
The game can be drily described as a football management sim but that would be akin to describing football as a game of 22 adults in shorts chasing an inflated bladder of air. Long-time fans appreciate Football Manager best as a role-playing game.
No other game gets to the heart of a football campaign like this series, no other game gets you in the mindset of a football manager as well as this one does. This is the game to get if you really want to know what could possibly turn a celebrated 68-year-old knight of the realm into a red-faced screaming lunatic, why a professorial Frenchman might want to kick a defenceless bottle of water with venom.
Role-playing games are fundamentally about stories and Football Manager has them in spades. There are the shared talking points — mention Ibrahima Bakayoko and you’ll get a chuckle out of series veterans — but each Football Manager campaign is a unique story with its own epic highs and crushing lows. There will be the thrilling come-from-behind victories, the devastating defeats, the bargain signings, the betrayal of star players, the drama of the final day of the league.
As a sterile sports simulation, Football Manager does reasonably well since the results are more or less what you might expect. You can merely shrug when FM2010’s number-crunching predicts Brazil will win the World Cup this year because you could certainly see it happening.
(Just as in real life, amusing Bizarro-land outcomes will occur, however. FM2010 seems convinced the 2009/2010 season will end with Liverpool winning the Champions League and Mark Hughes leading Manchester City to the league title.)
The delight comes not from discovering how accurately the game simulates the 2009/2010 season; it is exploring the what-ifs and could-bes in years to come. Winning the Premier League in 2009/2010 as Manchester United will be satisfying; winning the Premier League in 2016/2017 as Torquay United will be something to shout about.
The latest game in the series has been widely described as the finest yet and having spent almost 23 hours completing my first season, I can only agree. Sports Interactive has taken all the awkward and unwieldy aspects of the game, shuffled things around and made everything coherent and presentable. Though neophytes will still likely find it inscrutable, FM2010 has enough to make the jaded fan fall in love with the series all over again.
