➤ A foregone victory 🎮

Insigne takes the ball in midfield, dribbles two men and throws it at the edge of the area to Higuain, who performs a perfect control before handing it to Gabbiadini, who in turn fires a shot at seven and gets in the running. It is the 27th minute of the Football Manager 2016 championship premiere, and the roar of the exultation of those in front of the monitor can be heard throughout the neighborhood. What better way to start talking about Football Manager 2016, if not by telling just one of the many emotions that this series has been transmitting for over twenty years now to all football sufferers? It is no coincidence that those wizards of Sports Interactive have launched the We Are The Managers campaign in recent weeks, in which more and less famous characters have told their experience with the game. But we have exceeded in sentimentality and it is better to move on, because as always there are many things to say.

Football Manager 2016 is a threat to the productivity of all football fans!

Bugs for everyone

Before proceeding further, a service communication: keeping the tradition of the last few years, the Football Manager 2016 code provided for the review is the same as the Beta downloaded by all the players who have booked the full version. On the evening of November 10, the Release Candidate version was put online, tested for a few hours before starting the final draft of the review. All this to tell you that the final edition available from 13th November could still be different in some detail than the description of Football Manager 2016 that we do in this article, especially in terms of bugfixes.

Fantasy football 2.0

So by heart, we are told that for the first time since the Football Manager series has existed, among the most anticipated game modes by fans there is one not linked to the classic managerial one. We are talking about the Draft introduced this year by Miles Jacobson and his friends, thanks to which players can create a tournament completely separate from the simulation of real football.

A sort of fantasy football without geopolitical limits, in which you can rely on the huge database of Football Manager 2016 to create your own team. After providing the name and other details about your invented club, the actual draft phase begins, proceeding in a snake among the introduced teams to allow each of the participants to choose a player, up to make up the whole squad. At this point the chosen competition begins, facing the friends participating in the match within it: This opens up a more than tempting opportunity for those who for years have played Football Manager in multiplayer in the only way possible. In terms of the actual game, the Draft mode has more or less the same components as the main one, allowing for example to manage the training but eliminating the component dedicated to the market. Although we have devoted most of the time spent on the review to the classic mode, curiosity has led us to take a test drive in Draft: the overall adaptation looks quite good, even if it is to be refined both in the management of the initial phase , a bit too cumbersome overall, both in its optimization. Clicking around the menus, it even happened that the game returned to the desktop after a disastrous crash. We remain now on the subject of modes, to remember that even in Football Manager 2016 the "reduced" one seen in the last chapters is back, renamed for the occasion Football Manager Touch: the most attractive feature, in this case, is the ability to share saves with the Android and iOS tablet version of Touch, keeping the game going even on the go. PC side, in addition to being incorporated into the full game, Football Manager Touch will arrive later also in a separate version, with a price that should be around 20 euros. For this reason we do not dwell any further, perhaps taking advantage of the exit for a more in-depth analysis. For the moment, just know that Sports Interactive has integrated some of the novelties of the main mode, such as data processing with Prozone, in addition to the inevitable series of improvements in the interface designed to be immediate to use even on mobile, embracing the simplification philosophy behind Football Manager Touch. Before moving on, scrolling through the list of game opportunities we find the new Create a Club, thanks to which to insert a team created from scratch in a real competition, composing the squad with players from all over the place and others created from nothing: a pity that the editor is only half so, since the club "inherits" some characteristics (such as the staff) from the one chosen for the replacement. Finally, there is no lack of the usual Challenges.

Career coaches

Beyond the rich outline included in Football Manager 2016, the main dish continues to be the classic Career mode. Among the first novelties, this year we find a further step to define the identity of the player-manager within the game:

it is the character editor, with which you can give your virtual alter ego a face and a body. The tool is similar to what we would expect to see in an RPG, but limited to a small number of features that allow you to change its look; even if this is the first experiment in this sense, perhaps a little more could have been done. The other available parameters allow you to specify some preferences from a tactical point of view in general, and then move on to the screen where you can assign the points between the two branches "Coach in suit" and "Coach in jacket", already seen last year. After the restyling made in Football Manager 2015, the new chapter looks quite familiar in the interface, which again this year relies on the vertical menu on the left as the main hub. Browsing through the various sections, you gradually notice the other additions made by Sports Interactive: in particular, the screen dedicated to the overview of the staff is useful, from which to obtain an overall assessment of the management staff of your company, together to a comparison with that of the other teams. Relevant news also in the tactics editor, where the disposition of the players on the field is no longer represented by their shirts, but by a square in which various information is summarized, including the type of role played and the ability to satisfy requests of the coach in that position. The team instructions now enjoy a large window, designed by the developers to be more intuitive also thanks to some graphic elements that represent the different suggestions to give to the team when it takes the field: to do this, we find at our disposal a whole package of data on the latest matches to be combed, thanks to the aforementioned collaboration with Prozone. We complete the view on tactics with the set piece editor, where you can indulge yourself in the creation of schemes on corner kicks and free kicks, taking care of the defensive phase if you want it: it is evident the intention of Sports Interactive to give to players a dimension in which to get lost while playing Football Manager 2016, also exploring the less "playful" components of the coaching job.

I have nothing to say

José Mourinho hasn't been doing so well lately, but listening to his words during an interview earlier this month, it seems as if the Chelsea manager played Football Manager 2016.

You may have understood that we are alluding to the interaction with the media, for which the developers had promised greater dynamism and variety in exchanges. Undoubtedly the proposed situations are now a little more varied, but the novelty effect lasts very little: the need for the entire section to be redesigned appears increasingly urgent, if necessary even starting everything from scratch. At present, it is only a matter of time before the player gets to press the fateful "Send the deputy" button, after being harassed to boredom by the usual row of questions to be answered by choosing the tone between the usual "calm", "assertive", and so on: a real cross. A more or less similar speech is applicable to the interaction with the team, a clear sign of the way in which this question-and-answer mode has aged rather badly and has never been able to convince. But let's take a step back, to go back to the beginning of the game (by the way, now you can choose to start the season from a certain time between July and August) which allows us to immediately test the market phase, historically among the most discussed on online forums: in this case, there are lights and shadows. From the point of view of dynamism, in Football Manager 2016 things seem to have changed, allowing the player to give life to a live market both in entry and in exit, as long as he remains grounded in his goals. The real problem, at present, concerns the over inflated ratings of the players: at the helm of Napoli, by selling Zuniga and David Lopez we have raised almost 30 million. However, it must be said that the meter of abundance followed by the quotations is quite uniform, but for the preservation of realism we very much hope that Sports Interactive will remedy it in the final version of the game.

Another flaw connected to the market is represented by the fickleness of the members of our squad, too often eager to leave as soon as an offer arrives from another club, not necessarily among the largest in Europe: we know that in modern football there is no they are more flags, but seeing Higuain, David Lopez and Jorginho complaining at the start of the game about a refused offer is not the best of life, especially if you do not want to make revolutions on the list of players that make up the team. The complaints of the players then go on also during the season, with the excluded from the turnover almost constantly committed to communicating all their unhappiness for the benches (or stands) of the last few days. In the list of hot potatoes for every Football Manager who arrives on the transfer market, injuries cannot be missing: for the occasion, Miles Jacobson and his team introduced a new method of management, more similar to what happens in the treatment of ailments in the real world. The players are now examined several times during the recovery process, until the fateful final visit in which the team doctor offers his opinion on the return to the field. At that point it is up to the coach to decide whether or not to risk the player, relying on the state of form and perhaps even the determination of the individual. This of course does not mean that there are no injuries, so if you believe that there are too many of them in Football Manager this will not be the occasion to change your mind.

Kick-off whistle

The interventions of Sports Interactive did not ignore the 3D engine of Football Manager 2016, the subject of some criticism a year ago due to an artificial intelligence not exactly at the top. The matches we have played over an entire season have left us with the feeling of an overall improvement in the behavior of the players on the pitch., also thanks to a series of new animations that help make them look less clumsy: we are still far from a complete fluidity, but the jump is appreciable.

In graphic terms, the addition of a bar on the players' heads is more than welcome, to indicate the level of fatigue matured during the game, thus allowing constant monitoring in view of a replacement. Speaking of graphic trappings, the 3D model of the coach created at the beginning of his career with the editor appears in the external technical area of the field, ready to wave his arms to give indications to his team: it is obviously a pure aesthetic addition, given that the "screams from the sidelines" had already been present for some time. Some doubts continue to concern the latter, especially in terms of effectiveness to see the eleven in the green rectangle interpret our words properly. Results, posts and cards seemed pretty normal to us, even if after buying Fernando from Manchester City we had to see him being sent off for three games in a row: luckily it was an isolated case, but it still needs to be reported. For the rest, there is a good variety in the actions and in the development of the game, where more realistic situations now appear: if you want, you can also appreciate it through the summary tool introduced by Football Manager 2016, thanks to which you can access the highlights of the game. sunday in 90th minute style.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

CPU: Intel i7 920 2.66 @ 4.20 GHz
RAM: 16 GB
Video card: GeForce GTX 970

Minimum requirements

Operating System: Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 Intel Core AMD Athlon 2.2GHz+
RAM: 2 GB
Scheda Video: NVidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Intel GMA X3100 256MB VRAM
Hard disk: 3 GB of space

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Judging Football Manager 2016 was a difficult task. In addition to proving to be the usual great product to get lost in for hours and hours, the Sports Interactive manager offers some interesting news, accompanied by the solution of some problems reported by users a year ago. Despite the efforts of the developers, it must be said that the press conferences are in the long run a deadly bore, while the inflated evaluations undermine the realism that we would expect from the simulation in such a delicate point. The exaggerated complaints of the players, really hateful in their insistence and frequency, also need to be fixed. Mind you: it is not anything that "breaks" the game, and in the end everything can be remedied by learning the right tricks, but in the general vision the defects end up scratching an opinion that would otherwise be excellent. We hope for this reason that the team will intervene as soon as possible.