Most of the time, Sports Interactive must feel a lot like Sir Alex Ferguson. They’ve been there, done that on the football management scene, running rivals into the ground and tweaking their winning formula for the better every time a new season rolls around. Sometimes the changes backfire, but for the most part they improve, always staying ahead of the competition even when the iterations feel small.
Football Manager 2013 is mostly comprised of small changes, with a biggie thrown in for good measure. The biggest, most welcome change comes in the online department, which finally brings Football Manager into this century, embracing technology that it should’ve welcomed years ago - conveniently mirroring FIFA’s own reluctance in real life to adopt certain game-changing technology. Network functionality is now linked to Steam servers, allowing you to easily host games for friends as well as join them. You can create specific games, or just set your own ones to allow new managers to join, so any friend can jump in at any time.
There’s also the new versus mode, which allows you to go head-to-head with a friend or set up confined tournaments. These are quick to organise and quick to play, and you can import any team you’ve got into the mode, be it the default Celtic squad or the 2019 Celtic squad who have won the Champion’s League and boast Rooney’s ageing body among its stars. It all adds a bit of spice to the game at the point you’d usually put it down and play something else, giving you real opponents to out-think and taunt instead of the same AI.
For those who don’t have enough time for the main career mode or a furiously fought online campaign, there’s the addition of a “classic mode” which waters things down, simplifying most processes and letting you access various time-savers. In doing so, it takes away what makes Football Manager 2013 so appealing, removing the depth and reducing the thought required, while also presenting things in a much chunkier and less welcoming UI.
Challenge mode, inspired by similar modes on Football Manager Handheld, is also for those with not much time, giving you specific goals to complete with specific parameters. You might have to achieve back-to-back promotions, save a team from relegation with only five games of a season remaining, or balance a club’s financial books while still retaining a decent league position. It’s a nice distraction from your main career games, letting you have a muck about with a new team, but giving it some direction.
The thing about Arsenal is…
On the actual management side of things, a number of tweaks have improved the experience, even if it’s nothing radical. It’s now simpler to assign coaching and scouting tasks to individual staff members, the match engine seems more consistent and highlights are more varied, and making tactical tweaks during a match is now easier than ever.
As seems to be the case every year, the main problem comes when you’re communicating with other people in the game. Conversations have been broadened, with more context-sensitive options when giving team-talks and when the press are quizzing you, but you’ll still quickly see most chat choices, and will soon tire of them and the little difference they seem to make to proceedings.
Transfer deadline day has been given a revamp, with the aim being to recapture that tension and drama that comes from the clock counting down on the real day. It doesn’t change much, just extending the amount of time you get to manage transfers on the final day and giving you an extra screen through which to monitor the latest transfers and rumours.
It lacks any real drama, though, because the other managers just don’t behave how their real-life counterparts would: there’s nobody swooping in to nab a deadline day bargain, and subsequently there’s no domino effect, whereby a team suddenly needs to plug a gap after selling, sending the transfer merry-go-round into full swing. However, the changes at least make it stand out from any other day on the calendar, so you do at least get a small sense of the occasion.
Sports Interactive have done what they’ve always done: taken their winning management sim and refined it and tweaked it for the better. The changes to the online functionality are the most drastic and the most welcome. While interaction with the press, other managers and players still feels stilted and dry, even with more robust, context-sensitive options than before. It’s not radically better, but the little improvements across the board do make a difference. It’s another year, another step forward for the Football Manager series
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