Football Manager 2010: The secret of success

I have been playing Championsip Manager since 1997. Why 1997 someone may ask. Because it was the first time that a non-English league was featured in the game, the Italian Serie A (people who know me are aware of the fact that apart from Liverpool, I do love Juventus A LOT). It was also the first time that the Bosman ruling was implemented into the game.

 

 

When Sports Interactive and Eidos decided to split, I had no doubts on who to follow. Eidos kept the brand name and the interface but Sports interactive kept the developers (=base code, database, programming). All that S.I. had to do was to find a catchy name and a new publisher, a role that Sega gladly "accepted". And it couldn't had been a better name that Football Manager (S.I., thank you very much for not naming it Soccer Manager :P )

 

And so it was... S.I. released Football Manager 2005, which wasn't the best they could have done, but it was clearly better than the first attempt of Eidos to create a Championship Manager game on their own. Year by year the game developed slowly but steadily, with 2009's version making the breakthrough, the 3D match engine.

 

 

And here we go with this year's version. It's one of the games I bought with eyes closed because I know that the hundreds of volunteers had done their job again and that is add realism to the game. How? But of course by sending their realistic stats from their countries to the mother company of S.I. This is exactly what had made this game such a great success and takes hours and hours from our personal life. Realism...

 

This year's 3D match engine has been expanded, having more animations, stadia, even pitch degradation!!! You wanna shout to your players and change your tactics during the game? Yesssssssssssss you can :D The editor has been improved a lot as well. And realism... What can I say lads, you did a FANTASTIC job once again. For the hardcore gamers, the real challenge is to get a small team and make it big with hard work year by year, something that I'm currently trying to do with Darlington.

 

 

FIRST STEPS FOR STARTERS :

 

- Once you install the game, the first thing to do is download and install the first patch (v10.1.0).

 

- As you may notice, FM2010 doesn't have the real names of FIFA and UEFA competitions, as well as some of the names of domestic leagues, plus the German and the Dutch national team. Sites such as FM-Base, Fm Scout, FMEurope and Sortitoutsi will give you the solution.

 

- The sites I have mentioned above, will help you fins official logos, kits and also facepacks from the world's most popular leagues and competitions, something that will definitely add depth to your game.

 

- Last but not least, there are plenty of training methods to find and download (if you're lazy to create your own), plus some very good search filters in case you want to manage a big team and you want to search nothing less than world class players. A good thing to do is to set the basic attributes to 15 then start improvising.

 

Song of the week: Ten Sharp - Ain't my beating heart. It's a single released in 1992, the year of the first Championsip Manager, created by Sports Interactive. If my memory is correct, it only reached number 15 in the U.K. charts. Most of you may remember their first single "You" which was a fantastic song. I have special connections with this one, I hope you like it.