Football Manager 2022 – -apkrig

Instead, for the last few days, I’ve been bumping into things and mumbling, “Mbappé or Haaland? Mbappé or Haaland? ”I pour boiling water on my hand instead of a cup, watching the bouncing bulletlessly and wondering if Mason Greenwood would be retrained as a wingman.

Work first, then fun

A new part of a long-standing management series, so famous and acclaimed that professional coaches spend hundreds of hours in it and a lot of articles about it are published, for example, on the prominent football server The Athletic, as usual it offers nothing so revolutionary. When one day Football Manager manages to display matches in a beautiful, realistic engine that you would confuse with a scanned product from EA Sports, I will light a regular Hooligan pyro in the room at the computer, but I’m guessing that our house won’t be reduced to ashes yet about ten years.

So this year, Football Manager really leaves a lot to your imagination, despite the creators’ promises that they implemented a lot of breathtaking news into the match engine. Yes, when I put on my contact lenses under my glasses, I see some new animation or a surprisingly clever solution to the situation here and there on the field, but even the 22nd year is simply nothing for football voyeurs.

This is not about beauty, about treadmills, zidanovky and gallows scissors. These include ball possession statistics, friend and holiday planning, communication with physiotherapists and scouts, careful training and, unfortunately, lots and lots of press conferences, where journalists ask you questions like: “Do you think that when you play with the last team on the table , do you automatically win? ”And if you say no, that you take the match seriously like everyone else, the scribe screams dramatically,“ SO YOU ARE AFRAID THAT EVERYTHING IS LOST?! ??!? ”

Journalists are idiots.

The job of a football coach is simply hard work – you have to earn matches. For every single triumphant shot from the chair, when you equal the corner at the last minute to 1: 1, there are tens of minutes in which you stare at the detailed tables, rummage through the percentages and wonder if it is better to tell your right wing to hold on next time at the line, or rather he attacks the opponent’s middle defender.

Or, of course, you don’t have to. You can assign all possible responsibilities to subordinates, tell the director of sports operations to bring you the player he wants, order an assistant to train (and if you especially hate him and persevere to watch the silent horror in his eyes, even send him to the press) and focus on the matches, where you name the players according to the number of stars.

Football Manager is quite liberal in this regard and will let you play as you like. But if you approach him as such a slightly more handsome Czech Soccer Manager, you will be deprived of a decent line of the best news that this year’s episode offers.

Master puppeteer

The most fundamental novelty is more efficient and a little more believable hopscotch. Take, for example, regular meetings with employees who, like some overpayment, cultists, dressed in perfectly suited suits, raise their hands and try to attract the attention of their master. “I have an idea, me!” We have to hire a new physiotherapist! ”“ Desecrate my only daughter, please, great Ole Gunnar! ”“ Pogba should dig straight! ”And so on.

Last time it was more of a yawn that a person suffered by constantly clicking on “accept” or “reject”. This year, however, their presentation is much better and the information value much higher. All those trainers, assistants, scouting bosses and other hardy ants explain why they want what they want, and they also provide a small SWOT analysis – you can really learn from them not only that they suggest increasing the training intensity of your stellar midfielder. and what they intend to achieve, but also the rather significant fact that such an increase carries with it the risk of fatigue and injury.

Most of all, this applies to data analysts, who have finally risen from the half-forgotten appendix that they were a few years ago to the position of absolutely key employees. Definitely don’t fool a good analytics team – it would be the same mistake as going to war in a giant deadly crowd, but without scouts who could warn you against an ambush attack.

Every day, all possible graphs fall into your inbox, highlighting everything. In the last match, Stancia and Ševčík played the most, while Kuchta did not give Masopust a single passport. The players of Teplice basically start the presink on their own half of the field. Beware, in Mladá Boleslav they have the best headers from the whole competition!

However, over time, the flood of information is getting a little overwhelming, and as I initially liked to click through the new Data Center and thought about specific visualizations (“Show me which of my attackers ends best!”), This pastime only shortened a moment. .

I would also like analysts to analyze more often. At the moment, they are able to effectively draw attention to statistical anomalies, write: “Look, Coach, Newcastle is trying to get the fewest centers of all teams in the Premier League, but the percentage is centered quite accurately!” That’s because they don’t get in half as often, but when they do, Matt Ritchie and Allan Saint-Maximin can twist dangerous balloons into the lime. ” he had a special patrol on the left wing.

Patched illusion

If analysts gave me similar additional information or presented my suggestions, if I could ask them something organically, it would be terribly helpful to the illusion that Football Manager has been working hard to create over the last few years – the illusion that you are not actually clicking through a complex Excel spreadsheet and You do not follow the work of the algorithm live, but that you are surrounded by real people.

“The less abstraction, the better,” they say at Sports Interactive, letting the players in the booth sit in a semicircle around you, pretty much everyone at their locker. They will send a spokesperson to the press, who will call the individual journalists. You communicate with agents through WhatsApp and text messages, not instant remote telepathy as before.

But it’s not done yet, not at all. In addition to the half-analysis, there are other pins that ruthlessly burst the soap bubble of a realistic experience – for example, machine, beating, still the same advice of the assistant during the match. Match after match, it’s buzzing in my ear: “Coach, replace McTominay, one more yellow card and he’ll be suspended!” to the face of the pertinent question of who I should replace McTominay for when he’s my only defensive midfielder.

We are moving forward – but slower

Gaps. Gaps where one looks. In interactions, in the “improved” match engine, which is almost invisible, for example in the fact that top teams from the Czech league still prefer the transfer policy of the so-called “Rotana” and bring outdated, overpriced former stars from abroad, instead to buy the best of the rest of the competition and add one, two Scandinavian or African talents.

And yet there is enough progress to make this year’s fans worthwhile. I have already talked about data analytics and meetings with employees, but I have not mentioned enough significantly improved experience from the last day of the transfer period or – and this is extremely important for a Czech fan – a change in generating new talents who should now roughly match the reputation of the given of the nation. Therefore, as in previous years, it should not happen that after all possible Vyškov, České Lípy and Sokolov, generations of non-Swedish super-talents are born, who push all existing Czech league players to the bench within five seasons or move to Barcelona.

In addition, the game is clearly paving the way for the advent of women’s football, which has been talked about for some time – it adjusts the terminology of some positions so that the classic Target Man becomes Target Forward (and Ironman no longer rules you, but Chairperson, shared with women’s football as more in recognition of the fact that there are women in the world like Debbie Hewitt).

Of course, there is another important factor why all the shortcomings are quite easy to overlook: As I confided at the beginning of the article, I still enjoy it very much and I bet the rest of the gaming community will be just like me. I’m experiencing exactly the old familiar insatiable rush that makes me think: “Keep playing! Keep playing! PLAY ON !!! ”Football Manager 2022 is again an unprecedentedly stunning simulation of the best sport in the world, and I can’t get enough of not only famous victories, but also losses, in which I then dig for tens of minutes to find out what I did wrong.

Game after week passes, real hour after real hour, and I don’t want to do anything but plan transfers and think of ways to finally mature the Germanic fox Jürgen Klopp. Sometimes I would rather train virtually than watch real football or go out to bury. And for that, the new year deserves the same dose of admiration as its predecessors.

But it cannot be disputed that he took smaller steps forward than they did. Usually, after the release of the new Football Manager, I would never return to the old one. This time, if, in return, someone offered me a private jet with a season ticket to Old Trafford and the addition that I could eat sushi from Christian Ronald’s naked chest in a private lodge, I would slip back into 2021 without tears and lamentation.