Media questioning and team talks are still a little repetitive, if given an overdue rewrite, but as a whole these changes give a more layered and nuanced edge to conversations that can have an impact on players performance and relationships. Club execs will also encourage you to answer or avoid certain topics. Now the attendant media are laid out in front of you and react to each of your answers differently, while your press officer will give you a feeling of the atmosphere in the room. Press conferences, in particular, are more in depth. You might argue it is window dressing, and to a certain extent it is, but it also comes with more feedback. In private chats with players you might offer an arm around the shoulder or a pat on the back, depending on your relationship and intention. Now you can storm into a dressing room and throw water bottles, or bang the table during a presser. Most eye-catching of which is a new ‘gestures’ system, which allows you to display more specific body language when talking to players and press than the previously broader ‘aggressive’, ‘assertive’ and ‘passionate’. Instead, the game is an impressive smorgasbord of smaller changes that focus on two things: bringing more humanity to your day-to-day operations and more pizzazz to match-day. This remains key (perhaps even more so, given the financial differences) and there is no similar grand change to FM21. Last year’s ‘club vision’ was a major introduction that untangled the different priorities of different clubs, allowing you to build a variety of narratives. While the game is constantly getting better at telling those stories, bringing more humanity to a game sometimes pejoratively described as a glorified spreadsheet.
It remains a remarkable pleasure that FM is capable of producing such different challenges and varying narratives. The bewildering balancing act of trimming the wage budget, keeping antsy players happy and retaining a squad strong enough for a promotion push. Any thought that the lack of Covid might strip FM21 of its latent realism was put to one side as I had to revisit the (very real) stress of will he/won’t he transfer sagas involving Ismaila Sarr and other star players. Depending on your choice of club budgets may not be what you are used to.Īnd so it was I found myself yet again in charge of Watford, facing the double-whammy of relegation to the Championship, a non-existent transfer budget and a clutch of players looking to move on. But a dedication to realism remains, with the fixture list shunted back to our current melee and many clubs facing the harsh realities of the financial impact. Coronavirus exists only as a ghost in FM21 fans pile into stadiums, squads are not ravaged with illness or periods of self-isolation, press conferences notably take place in packed media rooms rather than on Zoom (more on that later). So where to go with that? A conundrum the game’s director Miles Jacobson addressed by (rightly) saying: “people have always used FM to create their own fantasy world and now, more than ever, they need something to take them away from reality… not to remind them of it.” Covid-19 not only led to the brunt of the game’s development being done remotely, but changed the face of football as we know it. What’s striking about Football Manager 2021 is that developer Sports Interactive needed to deal with these particular issues on an altogether more profound level. The Champions League remained elusive, alas, as I escaped into the previous Football Manager as a glorious respite from real world travails both on and off the pitch.
How else is it that I can create a glorious alternate reality in which -instead of my beloved Watford being miserably relegated at an empty Emirates Stadium in the midst of a global pandemic- Norwegian wunderkind Erling Braut Haaland instead fired my Hornets to a spectacular domestic double double in front of thousands of fans? Despite its extraordinary detail and intrinsic link to the real world, Football Manager remains one of the finest fantasy video games there is.
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