Football Manager 2022 Review

Synopsis:
Football Manager 2022 brings new and progressive ways for managers to find their winning edge, instil their footballing style and earn success at their football club.

Publisher: Sega
Reviewed on: PC (Intel i7-9750H, RTX 2070, 16GB RAM)

Developer: Sports Interactive

It started with Premier Manager 2. The game was part of a four-pack of different PC games my parents bought my brothers and I, but Premier Manager 2 was the one that I devoted many a day to on my old PC as a 9–10-year-old. It was not a very complicated game (my very successful strategy was to train players as hard as possible until they gained a 100 rating, injury worries be damned) but I would pump hours into getting my team from the conference league up to winning the Premier League. That’s where my love of sports management games began.

Then I got into Championship Manager 4. Deeper than Premier Manager, I once again found myself putting hours into the game even though it ran incredibly slow on my PC at the time. My brother and I would spend a Sunday taking turns managing our respective teams, changing tactics, chasing new recruits and watching dots on a screen kicking a ball around a field.

Then came Football Manager, the new series by Sports Interactive after losing the Championship Manager name to Eidos Interactive when they split. Hours and hours have been spent in many of their yearly titles since, from as early as 2008 to as recent as 2020. This is all to say that this is a series and type of game that I enjoy and am under no illusion that this isn’t a niche game. Football Manager 2022 is unlikely to win over anyone who has tried these games before and disliked them or anyone without at least a passing interest in football (or soccer). But this is the best Football Manager to date, with a number of small but good changes—even if returning players may feel they’re mostly paying for an updated roster.

Football Manager, like most annualised releases, sees incremental improvements and changes over the years. Last year’s edition saw the introduction of the Expected Goals (or xG) statistic into the game, reflecting its wider use in football coverage. This year has seen that expanded even further with the introduction of the Data Hub. If you are a player who loves the statistical and analytical part of the game, this is for you. In this hub, you have access to all sorts of game data, from your general performance in comparison to the league average to the assisting rate of your team’s midfielders based per 90 minutes. It is worth investing in a good analytics team as they will not only give you good stats but explain the data as well. All this information makes it easier to see what is and isn’t working tactically and to see how individual players are performing beyond the game rating.

Another change to the game is the revamped Deadline Day, the final chance teams have to transfer players. Deadline Day gets its own individual hub, with lists of all the different players who have shown interest in being transferred, what rumours are going around for players to come in and out of your club and any last-minute scout reports. It definitely makes the day feel important each season and as close to the real thing as it can get.

As someone whose most recent entry was 2020, there are a lot of UI and visual changes that have been made this year and last. The addition of different backgrounds like the press room when you are giving a press conference or the team’s locker room when you are giving the team talk add a little more immersion to a game that is mostly numbers. One change that has irked me is the removal of the squad comparison rating from players’ profiles. While it makes sense to use that space to showcase the player’s individual analytics, I wish I could still quickly check where a player sits in their position’s pecking order.

There have also been tweaks to the matchday engine with players moving around the field more smoothly and with an improved range of motion. It feels like players are actually playing rather than positioning themselves for the scoring animation to play.

Play

While Football Manager has one of the most extensive player databases and the largest offering of leagues in any sports game, I couldn’t help but feel the absence of one part of modern football: women. While managers have been able to be women for a few iterations now, there are no women’s leagues or teams in the game. While I imagine it would be no easy feat to add everything they would have to have to be up to the Football Manager standard, the omission of women makes the series feel like it is lagging behind games like FIFA and NBA 2K which allow players to play as women’s teams. With the women’s game getting bigger by the day, this surely has to be an addition in the next year or two, so people can manage the Matildas or USWNT to a World Cup or Olympic victory.

Football Manager 2022 is the best in the franchise so far and makes sure that it’ll continue to sit at the top of the (small) mountain of sports management games. The increased focus on analytics and stats is sure to be a big hit for players who appreciate realism and who love this game that is mostly about numbers. While I can’t say that you need to buy this year’s edition if you bought it last year, if it’s been a few years since you’ve played one, this is a good year to jump back in. While it won’t change anyone’s minds on the genre, it is another step in the right direction for this franchise and I will likely put many, many, many hours into it.