Football Manager 2015 Review

The sense of helplessness felt by managers at times of strife can be overwhelming. Bombarded left, right and centre with pressing media questions; hounded by the board asking why their big-money signing isn’t performing; the endless knocks on the door from fringe players demanding more time on the pitch. With increased dialogue variety across the board, improved UI, and a tweaked match engine, Football Manager 2015 delivers more ways than ever to deal with the pressures of running your team, but it also gives the wolves many more opportunities to come howling when things don’t go your way.

Football Manager 2015 is not a gargantuan leap over 14; you’re still managing a database that generates seemingly endless spreadsheets of information, desperately hoping you pick the people with the right numbers to help your team do better than the others. However, the improvements to the user interface make for a more accessible entry, allowing users to get to the parts of the game they’re interested in faster, coupled with a greater emphasis on interpersonal relationships with players, the board and press.

As a new boss, you can customise your attributes and approach to best suit your philosophies. If you’re one who prefers to be out on the training pitch, helping players evolve their physical skills, then you’re a tracksuit manager. For the pragmatists, there’s the tactical, suit and tie managers, who prefer to evolve a player’s mental attributes. You can also choose your starting coaching qualification and past playing experience, but can always let the game allocate these based on your chosen club. It’s a nice new feature that pays off the longer you stay with a team, enabling your skills to have a real impact on player development.

The new user interface means that navigating, and more importantly, accessing the areas of the game you personally like to tinker with, is far easier. Once you’ve dished out responsibilities amongst your staff, quickly jumping between your jobs is a doddle thanks to the new sidebar and search function at the top of the page. Sometimes the search engine can fail to find who you’re looking for despite the correct spelling, but this is rare.

For the obsessive-compulsives, filling out a backroom staff can be just as important as signing that world class striker. Spending 45 minutes searching for a perfect under-18s assistant manager for Charlton Athletic like the board has requested may be considered unhealthy, but Football Manager 2015 offers the same tools for both tasks, making it easy and accessible to find the right person for the job.

Scouting has also seen massive change. Depending on the breadth of your scouting network, some players won’t have all their stats ready to peruse. Without a scouting knowledge of a particular region where a player is based, you’ll have to deploy someone to cast an eye over him to learn if he fits the bill. There are also more options for how long to watch a player, from one game to three months, so you can spend a season evaluating an up-and-coming prospect before deciding to buy them for next term.

Another great new feature of scouting is the ability to find replacements for outgoing players or search for a player by position, sending your scouts out on a general hunt based on desired traits. If you want the next Michael Owen, you can ask your scouts to search the globe for a small, quick striker with a poacher’s instinct by selecting the attributes that suit that style.

The increased variety to dialogue means that interactions across all areas feel more meaningful. Guaranteeing a youngster a run in the first team after a long negotiation period to keep him, or promising the board to turn around the club’s fortune over the next month now carry more weight thanks to the new “Promises” section, which tracks everything you’ve said to players. Journalists will now be far more pressing for an answer, especially on transfers or potential bickering between yourself and a fellow boss. Learning how to deal with reporters can help boost your players, or lose credibility amongst the team, which can lead to a very dicey group meeting.

The problem with dialogue is that, in spite of the added depth to what is written on the screen, it’s too easy to predict the consequences of your choices. I ended up settling into an answering groove, and rarely was the outcome unexpected. Some more ambiguity in how the other party will respond to your answers would spice up this part of the game, and keep you on your toes.

Heading into a game, there have been some improvements to the 3D match engine, which is always fun to watch in order to see where your team is struggling against the opposition. However, while the match engine has made some strides, it’s still a very basic representation of football, and can be misleading in interpreting how to adjust tactics based on the flow of play. As a manager of four different teams, my full backs were caught high up the pitch, leaving us exposed to wingers on the counter attack. Each time I adjusted the roles of the defenders to compensate for this supposed weakness, creating limited full backs with a covering centre half and defensive midfielder, but was still suffering against wingers. If given a 3D match engine to analyse a game, it should at the very least allow me to see exactly how to adjust my strategies to win a game, but this only adds to the sense of managerial helplessness.

Football Manager can be the most delightful and yet frustrating, soul-crushing experience any football fan can have. When you’re winning, you’re untouchable. On a losing streak, now more than ever, you feel the weight of the world upon your shoulders. FM15 has created a great feeling of the everyday responsibilities of being a manager, no matter how much extra stress that’ll put on the armchair gaffers of this world.

Second opinion – Tom Orry, Editorial Director

I’m now a member of the Football Manager Classic club, having realised that it’s just impossible to give up enough time to play the full-fat edition. While I’m sure the many improvements to the ‘main’ game are excellent and thrust you even deeper into a surreal episode of Faking It where the outcome is near insanity (I frequently used to blend real life football with events happening inside my current FM game), Classic strikes a better balance for me.

You see, it’s fast but nowhere near as stripped down as Sports Interactive’s mobile and tablet versions of FM. If you’re new to the series it’s a great starting point that lets you get on with the vital parts of being a manager, while glossing over the stuff that can take hours. Tweaks to the interface make the game even quicker to play this year, with the navigation being smarter than it’s ever been before.

Classic mode still lets you feel like you’re having an impact on your team’s performance and individual player improvements, and the transfer market and dealings can absolutely suck up hours of your time, but progress is always made. Would I prefer to be playing the game how its creators most likely want me to be playing it? Sure. Is Classic mode still highly addictive and a brilliant way to play FM? Absolutely.