Hello everyone, and welcome, to the Football Manager 2012 blogs. This year we’ll have a selection of written blogs and video blogs to show you many of the new features that are in this years’ forthcoming release.
My name is Miles Jacobson, and I’m studio director at Sports Interactive, the development team behind the Football Manager series of games. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be guiding you through the changes and new features in this years’ PC & Mac release for Football Manager 2012.
This year we’re not only providing the blogs in English via our forums at community.sigames.com, but we’re also very happy to have the blogs available from lots of partner sites around the world, in lots of different languages!
In Spain, you can see the blogs at
www.marca.com
In France, at
www.sofoot.com
In Australia, at
http://au.fourfourtwo.com
In Italy, at
http://corrieredellosport.it &
http://blog.guerinsportivo.it
In Noway, at
www.vg.no
In Denmark, at
www.bold.dk
In Sweden, at
www.fourfourtwo.se
In Turkey, at
www.sporx.com
And in Russia, at
www.sports.ru
Before I start talking about what has changed and been added in this years game scouting wise, I have an announcement to make.
(drum roll please). Football Manager 2012 now has a provisional release date!
No longer just “before Xmas 2012” as we’d previously announced, but we’re working around the clock to be able to release the game on Friday, October 21st.
Right - now onto the new features!
There have been significant improvements this year with scouting. Some of this was briefly mentioned when we originally announced Football Manager 12 a few weeks ago, but we can go into more detail now, as well as give you a few new nuggets.
One of the biggest improvements to the whole game this year is the new team report. We’ve very luck at Sports Interactive to have a large number of fans in amongst football, including many scouts who, with permission from their employers, give us the real scouting reports that they put together for teams when watching them for the manager.
And with FM12, we’ve implemented as much of this information as we can!
Not only do you get these reports when scouting the next opposition – you can get a team report from any club in the game world just by asking one of your scouts to scout them.
So what, exactly, do the team reports show you?
Let’s start at the start, and the first screen you’ll see if the “strength overview” screen which shows you the top 3 players at each position at the club, with star ratings for each player.
If you want to go into even more depth than this, just click on the “position strength” options, and you can then see the ratings and rankings for every player and position in the oppositions (or your, if the team report is on your team) squad.
The next option is “team comparison”. This allows you to compare various stats between the two clubs, such as average age, height, weight, caps in the squad, wage bills and how many players are unavailable.
When you are looking at your own team report, the team comparison option will allow you to do a comparison with any team within your own division.
Clicking on the “all positions” tab gives you a comparison of average stats amongst your players, and if you then look at the following tabs to look at goalkeeper, you’ll see a comparison specifically for goalkeeping stats. And with the defenders tab, you see a comparison specifically for defenders. And for midfielders, and attackers.
The “last match” tab gives you information about the clubs last match, with stats such as shots, shots on target, possession etc., and the ratings, goals, and status of each player in that match for both the team you’ve scouted, and their opposition, plus a text match report. And the option to go and watch the match.
Tactic analysis gives you information on how you’ve fared when using specific tactics, with information on how many times you’ve started with those tactics, how many minutes you’ve used them, how many goals you’ve scored & how many you’ve conceded. As well as a breakdown for goals scored and conceded against different rankings of team – higher rated, similar rated and smaller rated. Along with a paragraph of analysis. For each tactic used.
Tactics faced gives you the same information, based on the tactics you’ve played against.
Next up is goal analysis – this shows you at what time in the game you have scored and conceded goals, and where your assists have come from, the types of goals you’ve scored and conceded, and the type of assist for or against you.
It’s quite comprehensive, and isn’t just available for first teams – it’s also available for international teams and your youth and reserve teams.
There are also improvements and new things with player scouting too.
You now have the choice of using a scouting pool to scout players. This would send a scout or member of your coaching staff to go and have a look at a player without you having to designate someone specific.
The scouts are also more intelligent, and will even tell you if they think the scouting mission you’ve sent them on is a waste of time. And if they’re a decent scout and you hire them, they might even bring a ready-made scouting list with them.
They’ll give you feedback on a players best tactical role, will directly compare them to others in your squad in their scout reports, give better feedback on player weaknesses, can be assigned to scout all your feeder clubs & ask them to scout for specific attributes.
But don’t think they’re always clever. If you just scout a player once, and they aren’t famous, you’d better keep scouting them every year or so, or else you might just find some of their stats become hidden again.
I'll be back with another blog around midday tomorrow.
