First, let’s get this embarrassing thing over with. I choose to manage Manchester United in Football Manager each year. My first thinking process when beginning a new FM save is centered on United, sometimes known as Man UFC, being the team I follow in real life. Essentially, there are two schools of thought: either you manage the team you root for, or you take the trendy, hipster route and manage somewhere a little trendy, a little out of the spotlight, like AS Saint-Étienne, or, for a bigger challenge, somewhere like AFC Wimbledon or your local ultra-underdogs of choice. Though, in general, those are your alternatives. There is a third method that we don’t discuss (PSG).
Manchester United is appealing to me because they are a little bit of both. I’m keen for us to win and hate seeing City take the lead in the hunt for another five offensive midfield players ahead of us because, quite honestly, I simply enjoy having my fantasies come true. I also know the club inside and out. However, Manchester United is a terrible disaster of a team, and I get immense pleasure from filling in the gaps year after year and being the one to save the team. As thus, it’s the best of both worlds—fantasy for your favorite team and the satisfaction of fixing something that is essentially wrong.
Football Manager 2022: What role does it play? Indeed, this year has encapsulated the experience of contemporary football management at the highest level of the game more than any previous year. Playing FM22 makes me feel just like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, to my great delight as well as my not-insignificant agony.
I will return to it later, but let’s take a step back first. The way things operate behind the hood of FM22 has been altered in a number of minor but significant ways, changing more than you would first think. The match engine has undergone a rather revolutionary update, which is the largest of them. Animations from the traditional 2D discs—the ones your friend insisted on using, calling it “Championship Manager”—were really connected to the numerous hundreds of thousands of 3D bouts you experienced in prior years. As of right now, players may move off of those discs in their animations, according to developer Sports Interactive. Most of the time, this merely produces an aesthetically attractive curving run here or there, but it also allows players to do more nimble pivots and Cruyff turns—the kind of maneuvers you always assumed were possible but would immediately notice as absent if you went back to FM21.
It also has remarkable spillover effects on other aspects of the game’s functionality. This is only one of the many triumphs of Football Manager’s years-long quest to emulate the essence of the actual thing, as, as a certain Jose Mourinho once observed, a certain technique is a lot like a too short blanket. You may drag it down over your toes or up over your shoulders, but never both. For this reason, every tactic and choice that is made in this regard involves surrendering one advantage for another. The repercussions in FM22 are more severe, apparent, and focused, making your toes feel more frigid than before.
Sports Interactive often uses pushing as a major illustration of how this connects to the new animations. Players with more range of motion allow you to more easily influence their movements, and your team’s pressing mechanism has been completely redesigned to take that into account (and, hopefully, make it a bit more balanced). You now need to pay close attention to the specifics if you want your press to perform at its peak. This is similar to how Antonio Conte would yell at a player for being half a yard away from their man and then march onto the training ground to reposition him. This entails not just the defensive line and line of engagement, which are visible, but also that defensive breadth, which is more of a strategic than a tactical weapon. Prior to now, in my opinion, there was a simple trade-off between stretching and making it easier to play through the center and trying to stop crosses and wing play. For this reason, I would set up my team to press hard but still show players outside on the defensive because I trusted big old slabhead Maguire to win any headers from those extra balls into the box.
Now, theoretically speaking—this stuff takes months to figure out in the actual world, I find—it seems to be more about the directions your players push from, their body angles blocking particular passing lanes and directing play to certain places. This now takes opposition instructions into far more consideration. These have always struck me as being a little hazy and more of a trap to slip into, where you might set up your players to do something contradictory just by following the advise of your stupid assistant manager. To some degree, I still do, but not as much.
Right now, the goal is for them to represent your overarching urgent strategy. The goal is now for you to utilize these instructions to tie into the whole technique, rather than just deciding whether or not to “close down” a player. The wording has been changed to fit the present language. It is not a good idea to show a left-footed left-back onto their weaker foot if you want to press a team down to the touchline and then employ a narrower defensive configuration since it will have your players racing at them from an angle that opens up the interior of the field. Thus, it’s still a little bit of a trap, but it does make a little more sense.
More crucially, stamina has a greater influence now—or, in many circumstances, less—than it did before. Players now have “awareness” of their own sprint capability thanks to AI advancements; this may seem Judgement Day-esque, but it just means they won’t push if they’re already tired. Even the players who can run nonstop get tired much faster, in my opinion. While I haven’t reached the end of my season yet, it seems like this will only get worse as the games pile up, with my players already showing signs of cumulative fatigue despite some extremely micromanaged rotation.
I would have been concerned if FM21 had included this method. The implementation of FM21 introduced several innovative data analysis tools, most notably expected goals, but there was a limit to the amount of useful information that could be obtained beyond the general notions of knowing if you’re creating enough opportunities or giving up too many. Building on the success of last year, FM22’s second major feature is a new Data Hub (sorry to the new Overlapping Center-Backs, you guys are cool, but I can’t play three at the back).
The Data Hub performs really well. I can honestly say that there are genuinely more functions than I could possibly dream of utilizing for the first time since I can recall. One that helps you see where you lose most of your possessions and another that helps you visualize where you get them back has been very helpful to me while I worked on my early-season pressing trials. While different management styles will value different kinds of analysis, it has taken some proper detective work for me to figure out why, despite my players’ high passing ability, I can’t keep the ball in possession during my own attempts to win while attacking football and appeasing a picky board. The secret is that, if you know where to search, the knowledge is readily available to you.
There are a couple more significant, important modifications after that. Deadline Day is one that I can’t say I adore. Now, on this holiest of football days, Sky News’ distinctive warning yellow is used as a sensory overload throughout the game. Unfortunately for those football supporters who detest the tasteless, sickening money-worship of the real game (yes, I do support Manchester United), it is genuinely quite enjoyable to play through. It has a whole center devoted to last-minute transfers, and there is a genuine sense of hustle and temptation in the game. The fact that we care about this kind of nonsense, that Fabrizio Romano is the new messiah to so many fourteen-year-olds, and that News Corp. has triumphed is awful for football and, quite simply, horrible for humanity. However, it is a reality. It’s also a lot of fun.
Speaking of nauseating, agent conversations have become more common than ever. When they were first introduced last year, they acted as a kind of cheat code, giving you access to useful information about asking prices and whether a player is interested in moving to you, but there was little cost or consequence after that initial exchange. Now, there’s a trade-off: after speaking with an agent, you may indicate that you’re “not interested” or that you’d only made a half-promise to purchase the player. Saying the former will irritate the agent more than if you don’t immediately follow up with a significant offer. Putting it like that will irritate the agent. Though it makes sense from a purely gaming one, my very indecisive personality would like something a little more ambiguous. It’s annoying to be forced into a binary decision that looks somewhat random when I could simply say “We’ll think about it” in the real world. Calling up every agent you see to inquire about athletes now has a consequence: you have to be prepared to back up your claims.
That brings us to the other two minor adjustments. Transfer values, happily, are no longer an arbitrary figure independent of both what you’re ready to pay and what the selling club is willing to take; rather, they now reflect what the selling club will want for the player, or, economically speaking, their true worth. Less pleasantly, scouting reports increasingly include analyst reports as well. Since they were first launched a few years back, I’ll be honest and say that I’m not that impressed with what analyst reports in Football Manager give when compared to the Data Hub business. They are minor, but they need some work, since at the moment the most important information they may provide is that the new center back you’re snooping about is ranked seventh in his league for winning headers. That quickly informs me that: it would be helpful to know which six players are more adept at winning headers. However, it doesn’t identify those six players or indicate where, if anyplace, I may get information on them.
However, it’s a minor complaint among a plethora of significant, noteworthy, and innovative new adjustments that all eventually revert to my original argument about poor Mr. Solskjaer. Football Manager has rewarded you for your dedication since the potentially all-consuming training makeover was introduced a few years back, while it’s still functional enough for those who want to instruct the players to simply go out and express themselves.
It’s bringing it to a whole new level with FM22. Adding a few extra Endurance sessions doesn’t quite equal the severity of Pep Guardiola slicing up the whole field with cones and instilling that grid into each of his players’ subconsciouses. In a perfect world, maybe it could include that training makeover. However, we are making progress. The traditional “headless chickens” counterpress just isn’t effective anymore. There will be a hint of doubt, but you could make it through a few games in the beginning. a bitterness to the flavor of success. a little amount of glass jaw visible through the flagging guard. a feeling of imminent disaster.
Similar to the real world, there are times when the extreme pressure results in a beating. This is true not just of anomalies like the United-Liverpool game but also of all the other recent, less-than-strange outcomes. The 7-0 Bayern Munich victory over Barcelona, the 7-1 Germany victory over Brazil, and the Aston Villa 7-2 Liverpool match. like to the actual world, FM22 now requires a very meticulous management to remove such flaws, and like to the real world, a substantial quantity of high-quality data is required to support it all. While it’s not impossible, it’s undoubtedly more difficult to succeed in Football Manager 2022 with just feelings. And I’m enjoying cleaning up my own club’s mess more than ever.