Miscellaneous instances of Managing the Foot to Ball

[Norgy]

[Syt]

Champions League League

(I don't like this new mode btw)

[Norgy]

We are so going to be smacked by Liverpool. But the win against Slavia was pretty convincing. Aga even missed a penalty.

Now half of Europe wants my players. 

[Norgy]

Would you believe it, just 0-3 at Anfield Road. Against FK Lyn, that is. Outplayed and out-classed in every department.
It looked promising when we got the first goal after 2 minutes, but of course, VAR decided it was an offside.

Half the team is leaving, as they are looking for greener pastures than the Norwegian first tier.

The problem with playing in Europe for Norwegian teams isn't the match fatigue, rather that the Norwegian season is spring to late autumn. So the board decided to send the team to a training camp in Turkey. Sorry, Erdogan, I am not going to use that new name you came up with. No habla Turkish.

We smashed one team, but all players need some minutes, so in the next game we go down 3-4 with a last minute winner.

Some journalists are now questioning my tactical inflexibility. Unfortunately, there is no option to answer "Have YOU won the double two seasons in a row? No?"

[Syt]

Haven't really picked up my Cordoba save since switching PCs yet.

Preview of the changes to tactics in FM26:

Major change: different formations when in possession and out of possession.



Player roles/abilities also split between the two.

A good change, IMO, but I expect a lot of jank and gamebreaking combos.

[Syt]

Early Access "beta" unlocks on Thursday. On various videos Miles Jacobson warns that the new UI will require a lot of muscle memory rewiring and is easier on people new to the series than "people who spend 1000+ hours per title".

Fully licensed FIFA World Cup update comes next year, including managing international sides.

FM did (finally) a first look at the gameplay (with Miles Jacobson and Jarrod Bowen from West Ham Utd):

EDIT: Apparently there will be an "instant result" button included by default. This should speed up long term careers, but I kinda prefer managing the match myself.

[Syt]

I've been looking at the beta for a bit now, and for the most part it feels incredibly disorienting. To say the UI compared to the previous 10+ years feels different would be a vast understatement.

I'm not as doom & gloom as some vocal folks out there, but there's definitely light & shadow here (and, as expected, some bugs).

All screenshots below are done on 4K screen with 2160 resolution. Images are on imgur - sorry, Brits. If you know an equally easy to use free image host that hasn't been blocked in the UK, I'm all ears.

Overall, I think there's a good general thought behind it.

FM24 and earlier had its pages (accessible from the main menu), and the pages had tabs and you'd navigate through those. However, I often found it a bit inconvenient when you look e.g. at some specific info for a sec and had to switch between tabs in a pages, sometimes only looking at the other tab for moment before switching back.

The new UI seems to be built around the idea that there's a number of "landing pages" that give you key high level info in tiles, and when you want more you click on a tile which opens a pop up modal with the details (which in turn can lead to more tiles). While I guess this might increase the number of clicks, potentially, it can also feel more fluid/intuitive, if done right.

E.g. on a club landing page, it will have an "About Club" tile that shows their jersey, when they're founded, their stadium, when they were founded and their nickname.



*If you click the tile, a pop up opens, with several tiles - Club Profile (similar to before), Facts, Stats, Club Info, Affiliates. There's top level info again, but a bit more detailed (though Facts & Stats tile info seem a bit borked at the moment.



And each of the tiles gives you more info. Stuff like this is, IMO fine, and I'll get used to it.



Often you will be able to access certain modals or screens from different areas where previously you had to click through menus because they can re-use certain tiles where it makes sense. Stuff like that is great.

However, I think there's still work needed. Generally they seem to try to keep the interface clean from clutter. But I think they're also wasting space, or want to be slick and end up being a bit confusing.

E.g. if you look at the Managerial Vacancies, this gives you this screen:



And my first impression is "what's with the wasted space?" See, the idea is that you select a club and then it shows you some key figures below:



Personally, I think this is not ideal - I think it would have been better to have an info pop up here when you click on a club and make the scroll list larger. (You can click on a team name, but it then takes you to the team landing page ... which is probably what I would want, anyways, to examine their squad, etc. Never mind that while you can sort the columns, there are no filters here.

And these kinds of things are found throughout. E.g. the Team Hierarchy which was visible on one screen is now scrollable.



(And it looks barren without at least their photos there )

This screen is also an example that while they still have the little thingy where you can open a pop up with a player's key data, it's not present on all screens.

Where it becomes baffling is the Staff Screen which is unnecessarily finicky.



You will notice that on the Overview page you will not see the names of any of your Staff. For that you have to navigate to the corresponding Tab (which I feel they generally want to use less, so not sure why it's here?).



Notice how on the previous screen the list of coaching staff had a lot of empty space underneath? Well, here it's squiched ansd crollable.

You may also notice that you can't see your staff's attributes. For that you have to go to their profile again.



(The back button takes you again to your staff overview, not to the Coaching Staff list.)

The All Staff list is just a sortable list of all Staff folks. Want to see their attributes (I don't mind that they're masking it more now instead of showing numbers)? Prepare to click through their profiles (and staff recruitment does the same).

There's many such quality of life issues at the moment. Like not being able to right-click on a training session to change it. I like to leave training to my assistant, but like to add match reviews and community outreach (for team cooperation) each week. In '24 this was a right click on the upcoming training schedule. Now I have to click the unit, navigate through the corresponding drop down, then confirm.

Though the game does know differences between left and right click. E.g. on the pitch you can click on a player role and get this with left-click:



While right-click is more concise:



Or in the Medical report, where - instead of showing all players in one list - they have one tab per injury risk level even though IMHO a scrollable list would make more sense.



Now, I'm sure those are all just teething issues and Sports Interactive is currently getting inundated with feedback (though much of it is not very constructive to say the least ), so here's hoping things will improve. But I admit every time I start trying to play my brain gets annoyed with having to learn something new.

I guess I would like more options for customization (like it used to be in some screens in older versions), where you can decide which tiles to show where, ore maybe resize them/edit what information goes into them. In 4k I feel I have both wasted space but also keep running into text overflows/being cut off (on lowest text size).

I do like the new search function. In the previous games you could only search for entities (players, clubs, etc.), now it searches also messages, UI (to some extent) and the "FMPedia" (an in game wiki, essentially):



But there's still limits. If you search e.g. "Gegenpress" or "Formation" it will not have relevant results. You can create bookmarks, but not sure why it was arbitrarily limited to six. (Though they said they'll look into offering 12 or 18 for higher resolutions.)

I guess the main impression is of a weird bizarro-world. The pieces are all familiar, but when you start using them it feels like a dreamscape where everything familiar has been rearranged into an uncanny valley.

There's people shouting loud into the void at the moment that this is the end of Football Manager, and that this looks like a mobile game and that nobody tried to play the game before releasing the beta, but I think that's exaggerated. I think this can become pretty good with more customization and better Quality of Life. Though I think I will wait a bit more before really digging in and the dust settles a bit.

I'm sure once modders figure this out this can be really amazing.

[Syt]

But e.g. a screen like this - great! Key info about your squad (you can switch the view for the roster with the three buttons to U21 and U18, each tule takes you to the relevant bit (Team Roster, Tactics, Youth Development, Training etc.).



Or the Match Day screen:



Stuff like this is good. More of this, please

[Syt]

P.S.: A lot of people complain about performance of the UI ... can't confirm that on my side, tbh.