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Yet another installation of the undisputed champion of football coach simulators, this time with discreet improvements. Have we reached the point of maturation or was it just a less good year?
Text by: Cláudio Araújo
In a segment of football simulators where there is a lack of competition, it would be easy for Sports Interactive just update the rosters and change the number from 22 to 23 to remain profitable and entertain those who have the FM pet. This was not the path defined by the company. However, despite the efforts, the improvements compared to last year’s version continue to be little known. This is the main conflict for any studio that works to release games in one-year cycles. I also noticed that, although there are usually translation bugs in the game at this time of the championship, this time the number is much higher, and in situations where they did not exist in previous years, which leads me to believe that the programming code must be much more confusing and rushed this year.
The main news in Football Manager 2023 are Recruitment, the return of UEFA competition licenses and changes to member support making it more personalized. In addition, there are small touches here and there on issues such as data analytics, celebrations, movements in the game engine and a few new game modes that are unlikely to pique the interest of the most hardcore fans.
I’ll be honest: this year there aren’t any big news that I’m excited about. Changes to the prospecting and recruitment process are very welcome, as the previous system was already dated, but I am very old school regarding this process. I like to look for players, buy my favorite players or simply find online listings of those who, almost certainly, will be stars and can be purchased at a bargain price.
Also, the process is boring. Meetings here and there, loads of reports – which are actually even useful to unmask the attributes of those who activate the option to hide them and to check the cohesion with the personalities of the team, even if the predictions are not 100% right . Here I must highlight the fact that, in several saves, it was impossible for me to hire the player Endrick in the early seasons. Although he starts in the game at 15, I think it’s only possible to get it at 18 (a faithful representation of the player having assumed in real life that he doesn’t intend to leave the palm trees soon), making it noticeably more expensive. I don’t know if it was like that in the first versions of the game, but this is the current situation, being a good job on the part of Sports Interactive in reducing the cheese in the game.
The new recruiting tool is based on real-life processes, as Sports Interactive got in touch with people from the football world to try to make this tool as realistic as possible, and part of the Squad Planner allows us to plan the squad for the next three years. The Experience Matrix allows us to get an idea of the composition and depth of our squad by showing what stage of their career each player in our squad is in. It is, in essence, a notepad within the game.
As for the UEFA licenses, they are a good addition, but, once again, they add little or nothing other than in terms of sounds, as changes in the appearance of the game, photos of players and other licenses were already possible to obtain online as a result of several community members who, luckily, dedicate themselves to this aspect of the game for free. I say “fortunately” because watching the same screens all year long becomes punishing, even more so when the current FM design, full of purple backgrounds, has followed the same pattern for at least three years, which is not corrected by this UEFA licensing, as it only changes the graphics within the competition screens. In my opinion, it’s a nice plus, but not essential. And believe me, this was one of the reasons I chose the club I chose for this year: playing Europa League and then the Champions League.
The other reasons were to test the aforementioned new prospecting and recruitment module, so it should be a club that bets on young people. Given my personal preferences, it also has to be a club that plays well or at least likes to try to play good football, and it’s also advisable that it has a very personalized fan base so that I can verify that change I mentioned above about the fans being more realistic. .
Now that the “to do” list is done, it’s time to choose the club for our coach Echo Boomer. This time the Arsenal seems to fit our preferences perfectly, that is, if we manage to qualify for next year’s Champions League.
In addition, the club’s players have excellent attributes given the club’s incredible form in real life, there is still an acceptable budget for signings (which we can always stretch a bit with installment payments) and an even better budget for the second time that we can improve with the sale of a lot of surplus players who were loaned out in the first year.
In this version of FM, I decided to delegate many tasks to the staff, such as renewing contracts for youth players and other staff members, all to focus on signings and on reaching 4th place in the championship to play in the Champions League and see licensing results. Spoiler alert: we managed to get to Champions in time for this review and test everything.
I’ll be short and blunt: the new “Fan confidence system” is nothing more than a set of graphs about the types of fans at the club and that in no way captures the emotion that exists for the club. Instead of this new feature, Sports Interactive could have dedicated its time to solving old problems, such as Gegenpress still being too effective or the set pieces module being a nightmare. If you want to see what hardcore Arsenal fans are like instead of a fancy graphic, check out an episode of Arsenal Fan TV no YouTube.
There isn’t much to write about this year, not even an exciting story divided into three seasons chapters. I’m not saying that the changes weren’t well-intentioned, they just don’t change the way I play, so this FM is more of a refinement than a new or innovative game. It remains the best football simulator with small technical improvements in the AI, graphics, updates in the tactical options to be more modern (bye bye trap of the offside), a new licensing and two “big” changes that, in practice , change nothing. I understand the challenges of releasing a new version every year (do they really have to?), however, and for the first time in a long time, you know little, especially for the price of a new game.
Copy for analysis (PC Steam) provided by Ecoplay.
