Probably many others of my generation who were, or even still are, similarly obsessed with football are no different than me; After you delivered slogans similar to the school table in the schoolyard, which the coach of your favorite club wouldn't have had to do differently, you went home, fired your backpack into the corner and started the PC. Quickly get the football manager from EA started and led his district league club to victory in the Champions League again with very simple tricks - the right training camp for a fitness effect for at least half a season? Check. Simply line up based on the overall strength of the players, must it be the best lineup? Check. If you don't forget to organize the obligatory celebrations at the opening and closing of the season, you can hardly go wrong. Read the detailed game test for Football Manager 2019.W below
Finally leading teams again
Despite its simplicity, these were good times, because you always achieved your goals. But the times were over in 2013, EA's focus was even more on FIFA and microtransactions, the soccer coach lost sight of the genre as there was always a lack of competition in the public eye.
An extensive game was buzzing across the screens of this world, even then, just outside of this perception, which could now celebrate its breakthrough in this country; the Football Manager of Sports Interactive. For the current season, developers secured the rights to the first and second Bundesliga and are now also allowed to distribute the game in German-speaking countries. But does this year's offshoot bring back the feeling from back then, when you thought you were one way or another the best coach in the country? The self-test will tell. First of all the hard facts. The game is relatively cheap to buy at around 30 EUR, the download on Steam took what felt like 2 minutes, which also surprised me, as the database in this game is supposed to be huge. After the brief loading screen, in the main menu you can choose between career, online game and draft mode, which is also intended for online play. In the test, however, the career is very classic. I want to throw my backpack in the corner again and forget everything around me.
Modern managers write emails
First you have to create a trainer profile, you can also optically adjust your polygon. Here, however, the FM surprises with pleasant simplicity, a few prefabricated faces, a few plastic-like hairstyles, a bit of color for its suit and that's it. If you want to create your alter ego here in Sims style, you are on the wrong side, if you want to get out on the pitch, even that will probably take too long.
Now you can choose which leagues should be activated in the game. All "important" leagues in the world are available for this. We're sticking to the top 5 in Europe - England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France. Quickly choose the club that you would like to lead to unknown heights and you will find yourself in a very sober screen.
This should represent the trainer's mailbox and will sooner or later become the main point of contact for the ambitious manager. This is where all the news comes together, the president greets you, the employees introduce themselves and make the first suggestions for improvement. All well and good, after five minutes I realized that you can't delete these emails at all. It doesn't matter, on it goes: quickly put together a list and click on the "Next" button, which lets the virtual week go on.
Theoretically, I could get to the result now, because after a few games, of which I couldn't win a single one and suffered some serious defeats, I was downright angry. Accordingly upset I closed the laptop and stared in front of me in a bad mood. The only good thing you could get out of it all was the fact that the game was never boring. It was frustrating, but time passed.
The programmer's lawsuit dismissed
It actually took me a day and a night until I decided not to sue the programmers but to give it another try. This time I'm taking it seriously. The default settings remained the same, but now I actually worked a little more intensively - with the interface, but also with the depth. Clicking on “Team” showed me the entire squad or a list of the players. This brings me straight to the most common point you read when you want to find out more about the FM; “A playable Excel list”. And it's true. A lot of it is laid out in table form and therefore comes across as dull. This Office application is probably the most comprehensive of all for a reason. Behind almost every value or word, another screen opens with even more information. That's just incredibly overwhelming at the beginning, especially when you think about it EA-Recalls the manager who felt like he was getting by with five screens. Because of this (re-)overwhelm, I clicked on “Tactics” and got to the heart of the game. If necessary, a kind of tutorial with the first steps for your tactics can help you. You can choose from several ready-made styles, from Tiki-Taka to wing play to “parking the bus”, every absurdity of modern tactics is fundamentally depicted.
If that is too much help for you, you can issue it and try yourself from front to back. But be careful, you can actually do a lot wrong here. A tactic is made up of various individual concepts. On the one hand, of course, the basic formation is important, in addition, the game offers several “mentalities” that represent a basic orientation of the team. You can actually get good results with this, but those who are particularly ambitious can create different player roles. Each individual position can be interpreted differently by a player. Between these player roles there is often the choice between the player mentalities attack and defense as well as automatic, which is an alignment with the team mentality.
All in all, an incredibly addicting part of this game, if not THE addicting part. Getting to grips with all facets of creating tactics was a lot of fun, at least for me personally, and you haven't seen a single football game from his team. There is even more, you can use team instructions to set how high and intensively the team presses, on which side you want to play and much, much more. Overall, I was on the tactics for a good 3 hours (including the right choice of player) until I thought that it could work.
The best thing about this story, however, is that the game rewards it. Compared to my first attempt, the team has improved significantly. Goals have been scored and games have been won, but you always have to stay tuned because there is no such thing as the perfect tactic, the AI also learns to read you. The very extensive analyst tool for the individual games helps here. There you can see, among other things, what kind of passes were played, whether they arrived, which player made which mistakes where on the field and how the basic formations looked compared. If you read this information correctly, you can adapt your tactics even better to your team and / or the next opponent.
The important thing is on the pitch
This complex approach runs through the entire game. The employees are also an important anchor point - the scouts are particularly important here. Their job is, among other things, to observe new players - but she gives the job of where on the planet they are to discover the next Lionel Messi. The scout reports are rated on a scale from 2019 to 0 in Football Manager 100. However, this should be treated with caution, as the better scouts you get better and more detailed results.
If all of this is already too much for you, let me tell you that there are many more options. This is how the youth team, the second team and of course finances and transfers want to be managed. The last point is certainly one of the most fun, these transfers and the opportunity to spend money are a bit of the icing on the cake. You always want to improve your team, but the scouting department is of course closely linked to this. The following comparison shows what intensive, but definitely satisfying work it can be when your 17-year-old nobody becomes a permanent part of the first team within two years. In the case of the "old" EA manager mentioned at the beginning, the individual skills of the players were added up and mixed together with a few hidden attributes to form an overall strength. The simple equation was: the higher the overall strength, the better the player. SI waives this total number of points in its Football Manager. The players have different abilities, which are distributed over completion, technique and passing over mental and also physical attributes. All skills are given a value from 1-20. So you have to deal intensively with any transfer. With our center-back talent, can we do without the fact that he has a good start if his positional play is all the better? You have to integrate every obligation into the overall context, if you have a team that is favored in the league and accordingly want to work a lot with your own possession game, you also need players in central defense who can handle the ball appropriately, for example.
With SI, too, the players have hidden attributes that cannot be seen even with the best scouting. In a certain way, these determine the mentality of the individual players. This in turn creates a team hierarchy that could be friendly to the coach or that simply plays against him. Of course there is a corresponding screen here. The team hierarchy is structured like a pyramid with the coach at the top, followed closely by the team captain. This is followed by “very influential” players, “important” players and “other” players. If you alienate one of your very influential players, it may well be that you will quickly have the entire team against you. The services on the pitch look accordingly.
Image gallery for Football Manager 2019
Infobox
Number of players: 1 players
Age: 16 +
Duration: 1 hour
Difficulty: medium
Long-term motivation: low
Publisher: Feardemic
Developer: Feardemic
Year of publication: 2018
Platforms: PC
Language: English
Cost: € 8,19
Conclusion
If you start with the obvious, the first thing to do is to evaluate the graphic framework. Here, of course, the following applies: what matters is on the pitch. But what does the place actually look like? A clear answer, because the Football Manager is clearly losing out here: 2005 might have been great, nowadays people raise their eyebrows with skepticism. The players and animations in the 3D game look wooden, clumsy and simply out of date. In addition, I get the, admittedly subjective, feeling that the game is flickering across the screen in slow motion. If you increase the speed, everything goes too fast again, for me there is no balance. The 2D mode provides a remedy here, a bird's view of the playing field, circles represent the players. Sounds boring when you first hear it, but is completely sufficient to convey the feeling of seeing everything and still being in the middle of it.
At this point it should be noted that there are no different variants when it comes to game calculation. We still know the 3D game, the text mode, and even virtual teletext was used back then EA installed. Sports Interactive comes up with a gallant solution here; Each game is calculated by the “match engine”, the player decides in front of the PC how many highlights he wants to see, the rest is simulated between the highlights. This match engine also gets the rating “comprehensive”. Every change in the tactics screen results in a rat tail of up to 90 minutes on the weekend.
If all of this is not enough for you, a look at www.meistertrainerforum.de is recommended. Because, as already mentioned, the game, which was not officially available in Germany before, has a very large community. In the past, one of the things they took care of was that the English game could also be played in German. But you can't break this forum down to that either. The users put a lot of effort into designing this game with even more depth, be it through leagues expansion (up to the regional league!) Or more player pictures and club logos. You can also read stories in which other managers describe their experiences and can show you a completely different approach or make your gaming experience even more difficult with given “challenges”.
Where we are at an extremely important point; is Football Manager 2019 difficult?
After all, I am now talking about an unbelievable depth in this entire article. The answer is a very “clear” yes and no. If you get involved and concentrate on every single aspect of the game, the FM will reward you noticeably. It feels like a new branch is hidden behind every word that could change the team or the club. If you deal extensively with all of these variations, you get a clear advantage over AI. But if you don't deal with it, you won't get a centimeter ahead.
The Football Manager is very entertaining, time flies by, but it is nothing for in between. Even after several hours, he kept pulling me under his spell. It went so far that I even thought about the game while not playing it. Anyone who loves micromanagement and can "bite into a game" like an opponent's dare, is hereby given a very clear purchase recommendation. But if you are looking for a game for in between, you should keep your hands off the detailed Football Manager 2019.
