FIFA Manager 12

Football fans intrigued by the man-management side of things as opposed to obsessing over stats have plenty to look forward to with EA’s latest gaffer simulator for PC.
Forged in Germany, directed from the UK, the ‘FIFA Manager’ series has been building momentum for EA since 2005 when it changed from being known as ‘Total Club Manager’. Its purpose has always been to offer a more action-oriented alternative to the other management simulations around, namely ‘Championship Manager’ and ‘Football Manager’, the latter still top of the pile.
This season ‘FIFA Manager’ brings numerous revisions to a strong formula, most notably pre-match speeches suggested by fans. Last year EA invited fans to vote in a Your Feature campaign, with new ideas chosen from a short-list of seven. Pre-match talks came out on top, so it’ll be fascinating to see how much of an impact this could have on manager performance.
A lot of team success rides on morale in ‘FIFA Manager’, the artificial intelligence working behind the scenes to engineer believable outcomes from all elements surrounding match day. If you’re pre-match speech fails to push the right buttons, or you make promises you cannot keep, it could all go horribly wrong. On the flip side, tactics that work will garner belief from your boys and the press.
Another fan suggested feature is Open Trials for New Players, simultaneously allowing new signings or youth-squad hopefuls to prove their worth while putting pressure on senior guys to maintain their standards for a place on the first team. Trial Day allows managers to see exactly what he has to work with, who to take chances on and who to invite to the office for a one-to-one career discussion.
The Your Feature campaign also brought a motivational tool called Manager Challenges, bite-size tasks that’ll add Manager Points when completed. Expect these to be along the lines of keeping a clean sheet in key games, or modest unbeaten runs. Manager Challenges could almost be thought of as the Trophies and Achievements in PlayStation and Xbox games but specific to ‘FIFA Manager 12’.
In terms of building literal foundations on which to base future success, ‘FIFA Manager 12’ has a new Club Facilities mode, tempting would-be Arsene Wengers to invest in youth soccer academy or first team training grounds, whichever you think will reap the biggest rewards. But if you’re more like Real Madrid you might need to make the Marketing Department a priority.
And still the new additions keep on coming! Related to the above are Sponsorship deals that go beyond the shirt sponsor to second and third tier partners, all of whom demand the right blend of charisma and business smarts at the negotiation stage to secure the most lucrative and long-standing support. Also integral is the calendar with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface allowing training days to focus on individual and team development without leaving players fatigued.
Although ‘FIFA Manager 12’ works hard to take the fuss out of decision making, if at any time you wish to offload responsibility to an assistant you can do this too. New in this particular area is Squad Analysis in which an assistant writes a report advising on Potential for the Future, or more chillingly Without a Great Future for each individual under your wing.
The real-time 3D match mode is the main attraction, the thing you’ll spend most of your time viewing. From here the game can be paused at any time by clicking anywhere on the screen, after which clicking on players will reveal all their current stats and give options for substitutions or a change of strategy such as man marking or zone marking all via a drag-and-drop system.
Last but, as you can see, not least ‘FIFA Manager 12’ brings all of last season’s premium online content for free – such as in-depth stats analysis and an avatar editor. There’s also a premium feature called Live Season that allows subscribers to choose a point from anywhere in the season (most likely where it all went wrong!) and, based on the real-world situation see if you could handle things differently, ideally much better. The Live Season mode is being offered as a freebie to anyone who pre-orders. Since the game is looking great, making strides according to what the community specifically requested, we strongly suggest taking advantage of that deal.
‘FIFA Manager 12’ is released 21 October in the UK, exclusively for Windows PC.