Football Manager 2020 manages to improve upon last years outing in enough areas to justify an upgrade for owners for FM 2019 or before. However, I do feel it's getting closer to the point where a marquee feature will need to be introduced or an existing one improved dramatically such as the 3D match engine.
Football Manager 2020 marks the series’ sweet sixteenth birthday. Since Sports Interactive’s separation from Eidos, and with it the Championship Manager name, the rebranded, yet utterly familiar series has marched ever onward as the unchallenged king of football management. Normally, being the only title in your field can lead to complacency — we’re looking at you WWE 2K20 — but fans of the series can rest assured that SI Games have been busy at work improving on last year’s efforts.
When I reviewed Football Manager 2019 I was impressed by how more accessible things had become. Whilst I’m no “wet behind the ears” newbie there are many aspects that even I still find daunting. After introducing a new approach to building tactics last year you can now get extra advice and suggestions from your Assistant Manager on what might work best for the personnel at your disposal. You may have a particular playing style or formation that you commonly use but often when you start at a club they may not have the right players. Sure, the transfer market can solve some of those problems but unless you’re like Man City and have a (seemingly) bottomless pit of money, that can take a few seasons to rectify. This year, however, when setting up your tactics a small icon indicates which tactics and play styles will suit your current squad the best.
It’s not a massive addition in the grand scheme of things but it’s a small quality of life improvement that makes tactics that touch more welcoming. Tinkering will still need to be done to adapt to your opposition as well as your players’ preferred roles but it gives you a base to build from. Alongside last year’s redesign and adequate feedback from your backroom staff, developing strategies for success isn’t quite as daunting as it used to be. That being said not every match will go as planned, doubly so if one of your players gets sent off. Whilst you’ve always had the option to discipline them for being a bit naughty I’ve rarely, beyond a warning, had them happily accept their penance. It’s always baffled me that, when I once had a player who got sent off for the fifth time in less than ten games, he was a bit miffed when I fined him a weeks’ wages.
Now, right from the start, you have the opportunity to devise, with your players, a code of conduct. Here you can set your disciplinary standards and, should one of your playing staff breach them then the appropriate action is taken. It makes more sense, it fits with what you’d expect to see in a professional football team and, most importantly, means I no longer have to save, fine a player and reload just to get the achievement for fining a player. There are other, minor tweaks to player interactions that combine to make this area of Football Manager feel far more rounded. Key among these is the playing time pathway. Found a young star that you feel can contribute to the first-team but not necessarily a starter? During contract negotiations you can make promises, split by season, in relation to their squad status which will affect how often they feel they should be playing.
When it does come to game time you’ll see another new feature appear in the form of a suggested squad. Your assistant has always been more than happy to help here but now it comes with a bit more clarity. It’s mostly limited to statements like “strong in the air” or “better suited to this position” but they’re sensible and often made with your next opponent in mind. Whilst this might not be used too much by seasoned veterans it’s yet another feather in the welcoming cap that Sports Interactive seem keen on wearing. Things have come a long way from the sliders era of tactic creation and squad selection. Put it all together with the tweaks Football Manager 2020 has made to the strides last year’s outing took and it’s a much less daunting prospect than before.
One of the other things Football Manager 2019 did rather well at addressing was making a few things more realistic. Not so much on the pitch but more in how a football club operates and where you, the manager, fit into all of this. The biggest beneficiaries of this focus in Football Manager 2020 is the interaction between you and the board. Before now your board were mostly shadowy figures you only dealt with if you needed a better training ground or wanted them to give you more money for that wonderkid your scouts have uncovered. They’d tell you what they expected of you and you were left to go and deliver on those expectations. Some boards were more patient than others but, aside from the introduction you got at each club, I rarely dealt with them.
When you sign for a new club in Football Manager 2020 you’re still treated to the entrance meeting albeit with a new, sprucy, boardroom like background. It doesn’t seem much until you hit upon the new club vision aspect of this introduction. Here you and your board set out what the goals are for each competition and where you and the board see the club in the future. As you progress through your current and subsequent seasons this area will report back much more clearly how the board views your performance as manager. You can always adjust things but at the end of the day you’ll be judged on these promises and if you fail to produce the board will likely find someone who will.
As such it’s important that, as a manager you’re finding the right mix of transfer and youth talent to drive your club forward. Finding and developing top class youth players has never been an easy task but it’s made a little easier with the introduction of the Development Centre. This one stop hub is for all things related to development of your players. From here you can follow more closely how your loans players are doing and whether or not their loan deal is developing as you’d like. Any youth sides your club has can also be found here. However, it’s the main overview page that yields the broader overview which allows you, at a glance, to see who may be a worth a punt in the first-team for that upcoming Carabao Cup tie.
It doesn’t quite demystify the entire process but for those who are useless at judging potential like myself it’s a welcome addition. This new approach to development seeps into news items too. Often being included in youth match reports, your backroom staff may suggest moving players up whilst still leaving them available for their current squad. If you’re hands off in this area as much as I am it brings just enough focus back to it so that you’re not completely ignoring one of the cheapest ways of developing a squad. Of course there’s never any guarantee that any of your youth players will turn out to be the next Messi but at least you’ve got a better chance of doing so with this more focused approach.
I could yarn on about little niggles here and there or the fact that I still believe the referees are awarding too many yellow cards. However, I know, from being a long-time player of the franchise that over the next nine months or so Sports Interactive will patch Football Manager 2020 to within an inch of its life. The 3D match engine has been improved again but still, for me, lacks true fluidity. That’s not to say it isn’t watchable but I wonder, after a decade of tweaking, whether it’s time to try a different approach.
To quote a famous football cliché, at the end of the day Football Manager 2020 continues to expand and build on a very solid foundation. The new headline features bring even more realism to the series and, in certain departments, make things much more welcoming for new players. I still believe that, slowly but surely, the team at SI Games are going back over long-time neglected areas of the game and bringing them to where they should’ve been all along. I just hope beyond hope that sooner rather than later they do something with press interviews because they’re as naff and repetitive as they’ve ever been. However, despite my dislike of press interviews Football Manager 2020 takes the series to new heights and is well worth your time should you feel you’ve done all that you can in a previous version.
