Football Manager 2022 - Not a short-nosed victory | PC review

Sports Interactive is a guarantee in terms of simulation games.
The British Software House has always stood out, since 1994, for the ability to create the most intricate and engaging football simulators. Who does not remember the immortal "Scudetto?”.

- Bar chat fans like me they idolize Sports Interactive because allowed the whole world to put into practice all the crazy summer ideas that came up during the transfer market, when the story between friends is always the same: "Juve must sell 3 midfielders and buy a great striker, while Milan need a central defender ".

Every year SI Games constantly improves its foundations and, even if at times there are peaks of genius that "change" the game by adding revolutionary features, the usual modus operandi of Football Manager is to perfect - and not revolutionize - by introducing numerous smart fixes and improvements to what was the previous season's product, to offer an experience that overall makes the end user satisfied.

What is described here on is just what it was done with Football Manager 2022: The latest installment of the series brings with it a couple of brilliant ideas, but overall it stands out in the way it makes small and targeted improvements in all aspects of the final experience to refine and improve it further.

Modern coaches take notes on the bench

Obviously Football Manager is not just a few clicks here and there to decide the strongest formation to field and then let the AI ​​take care of it by staring at the PC screen. Woe to think of it like this: the heart of the simulator has always been to react to the different situations that develop during a match and change tactics or make changes on the fly to get an advantage over the opponent and bring home victory. In FM 2022 all this is more engaging thanks also to one complete rewrite of the pressing system.
While until chapter 2021 we had to rely on the reading of the statistics and the interpretation given by the match engine of the 1 and 0 binaries, the new pressing system makes the process totally different and gives it more facets.

FM 2022 takes into account, in the cauldron of one million data analyzed in each game, the conditions of a player when he has to press - is he 75th and is he too tired to run? certainly his pressing will not be as effective as in the first 10 minutes of the game - as well as the weaknesses and strengths of the opponents. Heck there is also the possibility to choose in which area of ​​the pitch to leave open spaces - on purpose - to attract opponents in an attempt to recover the ball.

Choosing the right tactics in Football Manager 2022 is not straightforward. The game knows, ed encourage all coaches to experiment during the week leading up to the game and the game itself, until you find the most suitable combinations for the type of game you have chosen to play; because, whether the winger has exhausted his stamina, or the central defense has been injured or because the opponent has changed his disposition on the field, the instructions given to his players must be constantly monitored and updated .

Notebook 3.0

Another great addition for all managers in this new version of Football Manager is the Data Hub. Literally a deluge of information, statistics, graphs, diagrams and anything else you can expect from any management simulator.

From the Hub, which can be called up from the sidebar of the game menus, you can deepen the performance of the team to understand what is working during the 90 minutes of the game and what needs to be done. There is also the possibility to analyze individual players and their performance on the pitch, so that you can focus on specific areas during personalized training for each champion in their squad.

Le new data views, as the dynamic graphs and reworked heat maps make it clearer and easier to see how the decisions made in-game affect the progress of the match and the chances of final success. Furthermore, for the more completists, you can dig deeper into the Data Hub and ask the team analysis team to compile tailor-made reports on a plethora of different topics such as the percentage of air fights won by a single defender compared to to the rest of the championship or the number of passes the attacking midfielder managed in the game compared to those attempted. Football Manager 2022 aims, therefore, to give free rein to the imagination of all those players who have always imagined themselves as tactics geniuses. And he succeeds!

Best of all, the one that gives an immense sense of satisfaction is that the changes made based on the discoveries in the Data Hub have a tangible impact.
Discovering that the center forward has a very high percentage of successful head shots in the match and deciding to opt for a game that prefers many crosses in the center of the area can actually lead to scoring more goals by exploiting the aerial ability of the player.
A team that loses a lot of duels in midfield might need a nice hound in the middle, and seeing that after the game the data has changed positively is really a unique feeling: knowing that you are not excelling in a particular area of ​​the pitch, the user can focus solely on the data of interest and think of new ways to improve team gaps. Without forgetting the rest of the group of course.

Mino Raiola gives me a mustache

Where you can't get there with the simple work of data analysis and training, you have to get there with the transfer market. Always the spearhead of the series, as well as the dream in the drawer of every aspiring Bar coach.

"Marotta has to buy this, sell that and then he needs a leg of X with the head of Y".

All good at words, myself included. But at the end of the fair?
Football Manager 2022 is what comes closest to the real transfer market.

Precisely in this period of transfer market scandals between inflated contracts, players who do not renew and letters disappeared - don't want to, I'm Juventino too eh - FM's market dynamics have improved so as not to make some tricks and tricks possible anymore that still happen in the real world.

Where in past games it has been relatively easy to "fix" the budgets thanks to sudden sales of players immediately after their purchase, FM 2022 is much more intelligent and uncompromising.
The market budget, to start with, is much more limited - in line with the current global situation - and this is something that places much more significant restrictions on how active you can be at the transfer market.
Furthermore, selling unwanted players to make money has become much more difficult: if until last year it was enough to "offer" the player to have some offers delivered by return of post, this year the game takes into consideration various parameters such as age of the player for sale, the amount of games played and the overall evaluation received in the match. Because, let's face it, no one in the real world would ever be able to sell the 36-year-old former champion who plays a game every 7 to 20 million euros. Now it can't be done in Football Manager either. Everyone is free to sell players at any price, but the offers that will arrive will always be unappetizing perhaps and related to all the cauldron of data available.

also the interactions with agents have improved because rather than being a simple means of getting more details about a player's likely price and contractual requirements now, after contacting an agent, the game forces you to declare a potential interest in a player. It goes without saying that in the event of a positive or negative response, some of the dynamics of the transfer market game will change. The most striking example? The price of a player I had expressed interest in increased immediately after my in-game bid.

Classic Mino Raiola.

Perhaps better than the ipTV

Of course there is room for improvement also for Football Manager 2022 which brings with it one of the most frustrating and persistent problems of the franchise: the interactions with the media and with the players.

These are systems that, unfortunately, have remained unchanged compared to previous iterations of the simulator and which are always repetitive and of little impact: answering a journalist with a calm tone or yelling at him has no tangible effect on the game - in spite of who, how me, he would have liked to recreate the famous fight live on TV between Zenga and Varriale - as well as promising more time to a player who complained of little use will keep him good for a few more weeks on the bench.

The problem of repetitiveness also comes up in the constant e-mails received from the scouting staff and from the team reports that rarely add anything new compared to the report sent 3 days earlier. Obviously, it is possible to reduce the frequency of sending these “work” e-mails but, in my opinion, there would be work to be done on the impact and usefulness they have for corporate management purposes.

Last "Little problem" that Football Manager carries with him for as long as I can remember is given by uploads.

I played with a Big Database and on a PC rated 4.5 out of 5 stars by Sports Interactive - so everything had to be pretty fast - but inexplicably, but I repeat by now I'm used to it, even FM 2022 has infinite waiting and loading times .
The first start of a new game is really long and even jumping through the internal game calendar to another day of the week results in too long loading times. This is a defect that the British software house has never been able to fix. Pass the large databases to be loaded every time, the tactics to import and export at each save and all the data of the new Data Hub, but with the computing power of the PCs currently on the market more needs to be done in this respect.

Triple Whistle

The Football Manager series was, and remains this year, the pearl of Football Simulators. The 2022 version of the game also transports the end user to the bench, a few steps from the green rectangle, and offers a whole series of features worthy of those present at the J-Center and Milanello. The new Data Hub is an immense source of data that the most scrupulous can exploit to understand where and how to improve, and the new pressing system gives the feeling that every action really corresponds to an equal and opposite reaction. Even on the pitch!
There remain those defects that the game, unfortunately, has been carrying with it for some time, such as long loading times and useless press conferences with journalists, but the hope is that the 2023 edition of Football Manager will bring improvements in these aspects as well. then, in all likelihood, we will have the perfect football management program in front of us.