Football Manager 2022 review – the obsession made real
Let’s get the shameful business out of the way first. Every year on Football Manager, I choose to manage Manchester United. United – or, ahem, – are the team I support here in the real world, and that’s about as far as my thought process goes when starting up a new FM save. There are two philosophies, basically: the fashionable, hipster choice of managing somewhere a little trendy, a little half-step out of the limelight, an AS Saint-Étienne, maybe, or for a greater challenge someone like AFC Wimbledon or your local ultra-underdogs of choice; or, you manage the team you support. There is technically a third way which we don’t speak about (PSG), but broadly speaking, those are your options.
Football Manager 2022 reviewDeveloper: Sports InteractivePublisher: SegaPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Released 9th November on PC, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One. Available on Game Pass. Other versions on mobile and Switch.
The reason I like Manchester United is because they straddle a bit of both. I know the club inside out, I’m desperate for us to win and loathe to see City win the race for another five attacking midfielders ahead of us, and frankly I just like having all my dreams fulfilled. At the same time Manchester United is a god awful mess of a club, and it brings me immeasurable joy to step into the breach every year and be the hero who comes and fixes it. So, like I said, best of both: favourite-team fantasy plus the pleasure of mending that which is fundamentally broken.
Where does Football Manager 2022 come in? Well, this year more than any other year before it has truly captured the experience of modern football management at the very top of the game. To both my immense joy and my not-insignificant anguish, playing FM22 makes me feel exactly like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
I’ll come back to that, but first let’s backpedal a bit. FM22 has changed more than you might expect at first glance, through a series of subtle but highly impactful tweaks to how things work under the hood. The biggest of those is a somewhat revolutionary change in the match engine. Animations, in those many hundreds and thousands of 3D matches you played through in previous years, were actually tied to the classic 2D discs – as in the ones from the classic view that your mate who still calls it “Championship Manager” insists on using. Now, according to developer Sports Interactive, players can move off of those discs in their animations. Most of the time this just results in a very pleasing curved run here or there, but it also enables things like Cruyff turns and more agile pivots for the players themselves – the type of thing you always thought was there but, if you went back to FM21, would suddenly notice as missing.
It also has knock-on effects to how other things work in-game, and the knock-on effects are amazing. This is one of the huge successes of Football Manager’s years-long attempts at capturing the spirit of the real thing, because as some guy called Jose Mourinho once said, a given tactic is a lot like a blanket that’s a little too short. You can pull it up over your shoulders, or down over your toes, but you can never both, and so every strategy, and every specific decision that goes into it, is about sacrificing one consequence for another, one benefit for one cost. In FM22 those consequences are harsher, more noticeable, more pointed, your toes colder than ever.
