Football Manager 2019

Your team can be entirely fictional, or you can choose any of a wide number of real players who have been digitised and uploaded into the game, with their talent markers, stamina, and fitness levels and so on all ready and waiting for you.

This means that you could play the game in a very realistic way, like fantasy football – choosing your ideal team, setting targets for them that might be achievable in real life, and earning a big pay day should all your plans and training come to fruition.

You can also play fast and loose with the rules of football and football management – but the chairman and the board will be watching your every move, so to speak. Any failure results in you being summoned to explain why the team lost their game, and you might have a tricky time of it unless you can explain your case convincingly!

The chairman and the board are essentially the computer: AI manifestations that analyse every move you make: and hold you responsible should your plans not work out properly! But management grumbles aside, training your team and coming up with tactics for them to try out is exciting and very fulfilling when it comes off.

New Details

For the first time, this incarnation of the game features a woman manager, with the addition of Emma Hayes as a character. Hayes is the real-life manager of Chelsea F. C. Women’s team.

VAR. The Video Assistant Referee has relatively recently been introduced into championship games and this version of the game has embraced it. It can be frustrating as goal declared by the ref can be overruled by VAR – but it does go both ways and you can sometimes benefit from the feature.

There is an autofill feature that completes your best-suited team once you have painstakingly worked out your strategy. This is a very useful feature that prevents any silly mistakes from costing you the chance of the championship, and perhaps even your job!

You can micromanage players at every stage during the game, whether they are in possession, passing or intercepting, or waiting for the ball to come their way.

This gives you much tighter control over what happens during the game, and ramps up the excitement as you have to keep a cool head and monitor what all the players – and the ball, come to that! – are doing.

Ways to Play

Tactics

Work out how best to deploy which players, based on their opposite numbers and using the many useful reports and analyses made available by the AI.

Sometimes playing younger, hungrier but untested players can benefit you more than clinging to your aging squad for sentimental reasons, for example.

Training

Keep your players’ fitness levels at optimum by arranging and enforcing training sessions. However, do be careful about over training the team – while levels of fitness, stamina and strength might go up, so too will injury and exhaustion!

Play Games

Take your team through the rankings, playing in real championships and tournaments – that is to say, games based on real competitions, played in stadiums and on fields based on the real-life venues for those tournaments.

Endgame