Which young players are worth keeping an eye on?

Football Manager 2008 is set to invade bedrooms, work computers and social lives across the UK when it is released on PC in two weeks. To mark the end of our spare time, Pro-G sat down with the game’s creator, Miles Jacobson, MD of Sports Interactive. In part two of our interview Miles talks about the changes made to this year’s PC game and which young players are worth keeping an eye on.

Pro-G: Back to the PC version, how difficult is it from a design point of view getting people interested in a new version of FM and not just view it as an update?

Miles Jacobson: The biggest issue we really have with the game is how subjective it is. My favourite new feature, the feature I use the most in the game is being able to move the transfer and wage budgets around. But that took someone around two hours to code. It was a very simple thing to do. The confidence stuff inside the game took quite a long time, as did the advisor stuff. Now confidence I use a lot, the advisor I don’t use at all. So it’s different people’s perceptions. But there are well over 100 new features in the game this year. If you were to ask some of the action games how many new features they have in this year there might be four or five, and yet they have much larger teams than we do. We’ve always got piles and piles of ideas but we do have a finite team size.

We made a big mistake with Champ Man 4 in that we bit off more than we could chew and that’s why it was late and that’s why it was so buggy when it came out. We didn’t even realise that it was so buggy because we’d lived with it for so long as had a lot of journalists. And we were getting nines and 10s for that game. We shouldn’t have been; we should have been getting sevens and eights. We fixed it by the 17th patch I think. We’re realistic about what we add in. If I stood up and said ‘It’s a revolution, look at all this!’ people would have gone back and said no it isn’t, so I would rather be honest with everyone and say the long term plan for Football Manager is for it to evolve each year. We’re not planning to go away and do what we did with Champ Man 4 when we had a completely new engine. Everything under the hood and above the hood was new. We don’t need to do that any more because the engine that we’re working with is usable. The way it’s been set up is quite modular. We can take out chunks and replace them with new chunks and that’s the way that we develop now.

So there are revolutionary features both to our game and to the genre of sports management games as whole but I’m not going to sit here and go ‘it’s a brand new game!’ because it’s not. We’ve taken FM 2007, which was a great game, and we’ve made that better by adding some other stuff on top of it and tweaking some other stuff that maybe wasn’t perfect. I’d rather be honest with it than trying to do the normal PR bull***. It’s how we make the game. It’s evolution every single year but there are features that the different people who play the game are going to find revolutionary to the way that they play it but I fully expect that those features will be different for every single different person who plays the game. Or every different category of person who plays the game. Some are transfer whores, some are tactics whores, some are training whores, although those people are insane as far as I’m concerned. But then they probably think I’m insane for being a transfer whore. But that’s how I play the game. Transfers to me are the most important thing inside the game. For Paul Collier the tactics are by far and away the most important thing and he’ll sit there for hours tweaking the slide bars. For me if I’ve got a tactic that’s doing all right then I’m cool. I’ll stick with that until I start losing with it because the best managers have worked out what I’m doing. So, we’ve got to keep on this path. We understand that some people don’t like it. We understand that some people would like us to make a whole new engine every single year but that would be absolute idiocy.

Pro-G: So as creator of the game, what’s your inside tip on some really good young players people should buy in the game?

MJ: Well I was absolutely gutted when AC Milan bought Alex Pato because him on a free transfer would have been absolutely astonishing but they ended up buying him for quite a lot of money. I don’t like giving too much of this stuff away. We are going to release the names of some players for people to watch out for. I’ve got to go through and make sure that I keep some of them for myself for when I’m playing networked games.

Pro-G: Can you give us one?

MJ: OK, I’ll give you a centre back, definitely worth picking up, he’ll be difficult to get because of work permit problems – a centre back called David who’s playing in Brazil, he’s a young Brazilian guy. He is rock solid. Certainly good enough for a Championship team in the first year and good enough for the Premier League in the second year. I’ll give you a midfielder as well. Hatem Ben Arfa who’s a player who’s been a bit of a legend in FM for the last couple of years because he does get good further down the line. He’s now good from the off. There are some very, very good young players out there in the real football world and that’s why they’re good inside the game as well.

Pro-G: Thanks for your time.

For more on Football Manager 2008 head over to part one of this interview. Football Manager 2008 on PC is set for release on October 19. Expect a review soon.