Football Manager’s most recent edition has been a sure-fire success, bringing millions of players into its socially negligent arms with many billion saves being scummed in the process. While Football Manager 2021 was just about the best antidote for boredom (unless you play a PSG save), there’s still plenty of places where Football Manager 2022 can improve.
To be clear, nobody’s expecting a grand overhaul of the formula next time out, even if 2021 had a surprising amount of changes considering how it was made during a pandemic and all. Instead, it’s be interesting for some dials to be turned, features to be tweaked, plenty of journalists to just shut the heck up.
Ahead of a release later this year, here are some of the new features and changes we’d like to see in Football Manager 2022.
1. More Granular Tactics
Football Manager isn’t a complicated game when you get down to it. Sure, you can get lost among the screens while figuring out the injury history of the Iranian wonderkid you’re hoping to take on trial, but FM is ultimately a series that can be as deep as you want it to be.
Where it’d maybe be better to add more granularity, though, is in the tactics. Really, when you step back from the sliders and look at it all, there aren’t too many tactical options in the game. While your choices can be influenced by things outside of the main tactics screen, such as your player’s role, the tactics themselves are a little basic.
How about the option for more intense tactics and tactical training for the players who want it? You could drill your team to work in different phases, pressing hard in the first ten minutes before stepping back into a different pattern. Or maybe it could be cool to have more options among the tactics we have now, like being creative or disciplined – just how much of either should they be?
2. Deeper Conversations
This is something that I’ve personally been wanting to see in Football Manager for a long time now and my bizarre dalliances with the recent We Are Football have brought it into focus again. Let’s get more outright role-playing next time, including how you talk to people.
Right now, there are tonnes of different conversations you can have, whether that’s with press, players, or the other needy people who want your attention, but it feels like you’ve burned through most of the conversations you can have within a couple of seasons.
In Football Manager 2022, being able to specifically just generally shoot the breeze with players or give them specific advice on parts of their game could go a long way towards immersion. Or talking to other managers to build a relationship can result in them being more likely to deal with you, because right now you can get a mortal enemy for life because of a misclick with few ways to fix it.
Apparently I’m best mates with Ole Gunnar Solskjær in my save. Somebody could have told me.
3. But Stop Asking Me Stuff
While Football Manager could do with more conversations in general, it could certainly do with fewer dumb questions in press conferences. I really don’t care about Partick Thistle’s decision to transfer list their fourth choice left-back, stop asking.
It would be great to be able to choose just how in-depth press conferences are as well, possibly with some kind of slider. Yes, you can walk out of them or just assign your assistant manager to handle them, but that takes away from the role-playing a lot.
For those who want even more from their press conferences, the ability to be openly hostile to the journalists you don’t get along with could be neat, as could cracking a joke or getting in and out of chairs like Steve Bruce. Press conferences seem to have some effect, but it feels intangible to results on the pitch, or even your dealings with people. Make them mean more and players might not just click through them constantly.
4. Financial Turmoil
This is a very morbid thing to ask for, especially at a time when so many clubs are struggling following the events of the past year and a half. That said, making free spending and bad money management have repercussions across your save could add a lot of dynamism to something that can sometimes feel a bit predictable once you’re a few seasons in.
What this means is that certain clubs will really struggle to buy players, which will then become headline news and be weaved into the “story” of your save, meaning that you can pick up players on the cheap maybe, or be reminded of your impossible job if you take over the reins at one of those clubs.
Clubs should stop short of going into administration or folding, but it would be fascinating to see fickle finances being reflected a bit more than they are. And while it’s clearly an absolute joke, FFP should really feel like a factor in the spending of the biggest clubs.
5. Better Player Relationships
This one is at least a little tied to the section about conversations, but it would still be amazing to feel like you have a genuine closeness to your favourite players, kind of like Carlo Ancelotti with James Rodriguez when he took him to Everton in what I can only imagine was some kind of tax avoidance scheme.
I will always remember a regen called Tim Taylor in my Football Manager 2020 save, an average wing-back on paper who somehow turned into Cafu thanks to the way I played him. I loved Tim and took him everywhere I went, though the game never seemed to make much of a deal of it. We were inseparable until he hit 30 and then he became worthless to me. The circle of life.
For Football Manager 2022, it’d be amazing to be able to talk to your favourite players about their life, maybe chat in their ear about moving with you when you go to a different club. Story-wise, having your clear affinity for them being reflected in headlines and conversations would also help with this. Just let me have the football Hooch to my Turner.
6. More Impactful Player Personalities
This is a random one, but it often feels like player personalities in Football Manager don’t hold that much weight or change too much. Especially when you’re a few seasons in, buying and selling players can feel like you’re giving Pokémon to the breeder in Pokémon Silver — you just want the end product and don’t really care about the Magikarp you’re giving to some weirdo.
Seasons have gone by where I’m basically just shuffling players in and out of the club without really getting much of a feel for the kind of person they are. To counteract this, Football Manager 2022 should make personalities feel like a bigger deal by having them reflected in conversations and dealings, as well as how they conduct themselves on and off the pitch.
Obviously this would cause some legal issues with real players, but it’d be amazing for regens to have some proper dramatic moments, like they start a fight with teammates because of their fiery personality, or are actual aliens like Cristiano Ronaldo who do nothing but train and want to win.
At the very least, some kind of tutorial on personalities or contextual info that shows when a player’s personality is changing some interaction or event would make them feel like their own person a lot more while helping to make sense of all the personalities the game has to offer.
7. VAR On/Off
This is the most basic thing on the list, but one that will save potentially minutes of your lifetime: let us turn off VAR.
After the first couple of times of watching the referee slowly waddle over to the VAR stand to check a goal, it becomes an annoyance that breaks the flow of your involvement and is even more annoying when you know the end result. You can see each decision coming after a season or two.
Instead, there should be the option to just outright turn VAR off or skip all of the waddling, something, anything to make it less of a nuisance. VAR might be killing the spirit of football in the real world, but that doesn’t mean it has to kill your fun in Football Manager.
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