Developing annual sports games is hard, no matter what anyone says. As soon as a new game is released, you need to move onto next year’s edition and try to innovate while also making sure the most current one remains relevant and interesting to its community across its life cycle. It’s a difficult balancing act that that not everyone gets right, and it unfortunately feels like Sports Interactive hasn’t quite kept the scales level this year with Football Manager 2023.
Make no mistake: FM 23 is still a fantastic sports sim that offers brilliant value, as it’ll likely soak up hundreds of hours of your time without the need to put down any extra money. As a pound for pound investment, it’s hard to beat, especially if you haven’t picked up FM in a while. But it’s an iterative follow-up to Football Manager 2022 at best, itself extremely similar to Football Manager 2021. It’s really hard to see much difference at all when you load up your save for the first time, and even after dozens of hours I can’t say there’s much here to excite. In fact, I had to double check the headline features to see what’s new this time out.
Probably the biggest new feature for FM 23 is the Squad Planner, which is basically a fleshed out version of the Squad Depth mechanic that lets you see depth in positions and how potential signings will compare. Elsewhere, scouting has been overhauled to allow you to be much more specific with your scouts, though I’ve found it to be quite clunky and a bit overly complicated so far. Then there’s the Supporter Confidence System, a fun little insight into what fans think of your tenure that shows how dumb football fans can be as they often want you to play injured players.
However, the single most significant addition to Football Manager this year is official European competition licensing. The dedicated fans who wear a suit for in-game Champions League finals now have a whole other level of immersion for their lunacy, with the iconic theme blaring out before matches and the UI bearing official branding. This will definitely be a big deal for a lot of people, and it seems as if Sports Interactive are highlighting it as the most meaningful addition this year. However, the novelty does wear off pretty quickly — it’s neat, for sure, but not exactly worth your money on its own.
There are other tweaks, of course. The match engine is less predictable with quite the back and forth in highlights, and the animations themselves are improved, if still kind of rudimentary. The Dynamic Manager Timeline also adds extra flavour for the truly committed who want to see their managerial story stretched across years and years. But that’s really about it — there isn’t one major mechanical change that completely changes the game this year, it’s just really more of the same.
This wouldn’t be so bad if last year wasn’t also such a familiar release, but it feels like Sports Interactive is either spinning their wheels or building to some huge overhaul or change in the future. As mentioned, it can’t be easy to develop games annually (especially one with so much data constantly being crunched under the hood), but Football Manager 2023, Football Manager 2022, and Football Manager 2021 all feel so similar that it’s hard not to feel like the franchise is in need in some kind of spark.
What could that be? Well, the women’s game has been mentioned as being on the way for a future FM installment, so that may be taking up some resources as we speak. International management could also do with some serious renovation to actually, you know, make it even a bit fun. However, it feels like it’s more than time for a major graphical overhaul of the game. Football Manager has never needed to be top of the line visually, but it’s getting to the point where the match visuals don’t line up with the year on the cover. Yes, lots of people experience FM via older tech, meaning they couldn’t feasibly get terrorised by Haaland in 4K. However, it might be worth offering the option of newer, more contemporary graphics to those who can muster it, while those on less powerful setups could stick to the kind of experience we have now.
Whatever the innovation may turn out to be, it feels like Football Manager sorely needs it. I’ll still be taking Tranmere to the absolute top of the football pyramid this year, as the underlying experience remains as deep as ever, but the compulsion to actually play the game just isn’t there like it has been over the years. I’m dipping in and out, playing a match here and there, but never truly feeling absorbed like I was even a couple of editions ago. It’s just all too familiar.
There are so many open goals for Sports Interactive to aim at. It’s time they took a shot.
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