What with the advent of the transfer window, loans within divisions and huge squad sizes at the sport’s leading lights, it seems the powers that be within the beautiful game like nothing more than to twist the knife into each aspiring manager. So it follows that a game charged with replicating life within the dugout should become harder than the impossible lovechild of Julian Dicks and Vinnie Jones. Sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened, but not always in the correct way.

The most prominent and pointless failure featured is the ability to run only ten leagues from a selection of well over a hundred. To clarify, that’s divisions, not countries. Although some may baulk at the inevitable lengthened processing time, it’d be the easiest thing in the world to forewarn players of the wait and include more as an option. This issue is important for two main reasons. Firstly, such a low number restricts your ability to take whatever local team you wish into battle against European sides that don’t effectively have their arms tied behind their backs. Also, you’re damned either way in terms of finding new stars – if you forego activating Europe’s top divisions at the outset, players will be hard to come by once you’re successful, but if you do without the leagues below your team, there’s nowhere for new talent to develop from the word go. It’s not even like you’re able to cherry-pick a few shining lights from deselected leagues, as teams within them will only have three or four real-life starters amongst a sea of greyed-out nobodies.

A slightly more reasonable toughening method seems to have been in progress for some time now, and that’s a noticeable stretching-out of player stats. Quite often, you’ll come across players with literally worldbeating stats in technical areas but a horrendous three or similar for some crucial physical attribute. Not only does this give players a greater, more realistic degree of individuality, but also provides a fun opportunity to play the virtual Sam Allardyce to a succession of fading stars and underdogs. In fact, it’s arguable that the wheeling-and-dealing aspect of the game is made stronger by the fact that there’s more risk involved with each bargain basement transfer. There is a tempering negative, though – with ten leagues activated we found a market populated with only 93 players available on a free transfer in effectively the entire world, the majority of which stuck in that awkward wasteland of too poor for a top division club to be interested, too financially demanding for anyone else’s budget to stretch.

After the relative success of translating the mouse-and-pointer interface to a console screen last time around, it seems strange that SI has chosen to alter the formula this time. Sadly, a number of seemingly insignificant irritations soon add up, including the much-trumpeted ‘breadcrumbs’ menu, which allows users to choose pretty much any ingame screen using the shoulder buttons before selecting to view it with a face button. Essentially, it’s both too much of a hassle and a lot slower than the set of shortcut buttons it replaced, whose only real downside was an hour or so’s concentration. As with the leagues issue, providing a cursor mapped to the analogue stick as a matter of choice would again be ten seconds’ work and far better than a misdirected redesign based upon the system being the problem when everyone knows it’s the pad. There are a few grating miscellaneous issues relating to control too, such as suspension information being placed in an out-of-the-way submenu, player pages defaulting to the polygonal Teletubbies interface and item selection being assigned to the slightly unwieldy analogue stick that further muddy the waters.

On a slightly more positive note, the much-maligned scouting system has been given a thorough makeover with those sweetest of numbers: statistics. For players willing to put in the time, the level of expertise each scout is assigned can provide some incredibly focused results instead of the usual ‘Thierry Henry’s quite good, sign him’ nonsense you used to get when manager of Luton Town. Media and player interaction have seen great improvement, too. Although asking players to recommend signings often results in them naming mates who are short of a few quid, having key figures at the club comment on everything you do builds atmosphere. Of course, that was never the problem – regardless of the baffling technical issues, Football Manager’s the same celebration of kleptomania and heartpounding action it’s always been. With a fair crack of the whip it’s guaranteed to captivate footy fans, but another version would be preferable.

Dave Shaw