An excellent football simulation that disappoints us
The Football Manager 2023 is once again an excellent football simulation, but still disappoints in the test. What’s behind it?
The year 2022 could have been so nice for football fans. The last FIFA was really convincing at the end, with Anstoss a beloved football manager series celebrates its comeback after 16 years and the Football Manager from Sega and Sports Interactive is convincing every year anyway
All is well after all
Although the introduction sounds quite dramatic, Football Manager 2023 is not a bad game. It’s not a bit worse than its grandiose predecessors, which captivated millions of players year after year.
In essence, you can expect exactly the same game as in the years before: an incredibly comprehensive management simulation that lets you fulfil all the tasks of head coach and sports director down to the smallest detail.
You take over a team of your choice, buy and sell players and meticulously plan training, tactics and moves down to the smallest detail. Of course, only if you want to, because you can also let the co-trainer and other AI assistants take over almost all tasks and download well-functioning tactics from the Steam Workshop if you feel overwhelmed by the dozens of different tasks and setting options.
This all still works brilliantly, as old tactical foxes we immediately lost ourselves in hours of statistics analysis, scouting and hair-trigger tactics options again. After all, it takes a lot of work to lead the cash-strapped Rot-Weiß Essen from the 3rd Bundesliga to the German championship. And yes, if you love Football Manager anyway, the old familiar gameplay loop is just as much fun again as it was in previous years.
New features? No way!
Of course, it’s not enough to rest on the core that has been almost perfected over the years. As an annual title, Football Manager, just like FIFA, has to be measured by the number of its innovations and improvements. And in this respect, it becomes noticeably problematic this year. With each new version, so-called headline features come into play, i.e. mechanics and improvements touted by the developers as major innovations. But these are so marginal this year that we are simply disappointed. But first things first.
The squad planner wants to be THE big innovation. A screen to help us shape our squad for the next three seasons doesn’t sound wrong at first. In practice, however, the thing turns out to be mostly a repackaged squad view in which we can now also add players from our watch list. You can use it, but you can also leave it alone. In practice, we only occasionally took a look at the experience matrix, which quickly shows us where all our players currently stand in their development. But even this info we could have gathered almost as quickly in the screens we already had.
Ultimately, all the innovations and improvements either fall into the category of quite ok or completely unnecessary, such as the new timeline in which you can look up your greatest successes. For us, after ten seasons, it consisted almost entirely of purchases of talent and we’re sure that hardly any player wants to look in here more than once.
The fact that we don’t find any of the headline features particularly worthwhile this time around, either for series veterans or newcomers, should be quite disappointing for all fans of the series.
What we would have liked to see
Of course, the developers can only put the things into the game that exist in real football. Football Manager 2023 is pretty close to reality anyway and still deserves to be called a simulation.
But there are so many obvious construction sites that have remained untouched for years. For example, the national teams, which are still only integrated into the game in an absolutely rudimentary way. People, this year is the World Cup! Although it is a very controversial one, this could have been taken as an opportunity to invest a little love here.
The sterile-looking 3D graphics also urgently need a major update, ideally a completely new engine – the annual mini-updates are no longer enough. Even if the calculation of the moves looks very realistic in most cases, their representation is simply utilitarian. FIFA and PES looked miles better 20 years ago.
For whom is Football Manager 2023 worthwhile?
Due to the lack of real innovations, the verdict is quite clear this year. Do you already own Football Manager 21 or 22? Then by all means save your money and just download a database update instead. You won’t miss anything worth mentioning!
A change for veterans is only worthwhile if you absolutely insist on owning every part of the series in your Steam library or you have subscribed to the PC Game Pass, because FM 23 will be available here in time for the release on 7 November 2023.
But if your last FM was a few years ago or you are complete series newbies, then feel free to grab it, because in that case there is no reason whatsoever to advise against buying it. Although there was a critical bug in the first week of our test phase that made it difficult for players to develop their technical skills, which ruined our score a little, it has now been fixed and the game runs as smoothly as it did in previous years. Everything just stays the same.
Editorial conclusion
As a long-time fan of the series, I am actually very tolerant of the Football Manager developers. I don’t expect groundbreaking innovations every year that you absolutely don’t want to miss in subsequent years, such as the youth centre from FM 21 or the statistics hub from FM 22.
That’s why, although I’m disappointed with FM 23, I haven’t lost hope for the series from one moment to the next – because actually everything is good and I’ve fallen for FM fever again even without exciting changes and have completed ten seasons in record time. Still, I wish Sports Interactive would at least hint that something big is going to happen. It would be enough for me if they simply announced that a new graphics engine was in development, even if it was still a few years away. But whether SI will really take action here, as long as their game sells even more with each new version than before?
