These summers without football are awful, aren’t they? Where is a World Cup or European Championship when you need one?
Football Manager is now in its 12th year, meaning that you could now make a full football team with the boxes of every copy from 2005 to last year’s outing. Of course, the series has a history longer than that, emerging from the ashes of Championship Manager after Sports Interactive lost the naming rights to its original publisher Eidos. Including those titles, the franchise dates all the way back to 1992.
We’ve seen a lot of changes along the way, and last year’s outing introduced a customisable manager avatar to appear on the touchline, Prozone statistics and Fantasy Draft, which allowed players to compete in multiplayer mini-leagues based on a pool of players and equal budgets. What does Football Manager 2018 hold for us?
Football Manager 2018: Features
For the moment, officially confirmed features are not just thin on the ground – they’re non-existent. That’s not unusual. This time last year, all we had was The Mirror’s cruel April Fool’s Day prank suggesting that mascots could be customised to dance on the touchline. Suffice it to say, it didn’t happen.
In the past, Football Manager games have been announced around August or September, and the headline features announced along with the release date. We’ll be updating this as soon as we hear anything concrete, but it seems likely the game will continue its model of having a “full fat” management version for PC and Mac and a streamlined “touch” version for tablets and mobile (with a desktop version also available for cloud based careers).
Football Manager 2018: Release date
One thing we can be reasonably certain about is the release date, because the football season follows a set calendar, and video games emulating the beautiful game pretty much have to fall in line behind it.
You can see that trend pretty clearly when you look at the release date of past Football Manager games:
Football Manager 2010 – October 30
Football Manager 2011 – November 5
Football Manager 2012 – October 21
Football Manager 2013 – November 2
Football Manager 2014 – October 31
Football Manager 2015 – November 7
Football Manager 2016 – November 13
Football Manager 2017 – November 4
Last year, the game came out on the first Friday in November – this year, that day falls on the 3rd, so let’s say that for now. But we’ll update this page when the official release date is revealed.
Football Manger 2018: Our wish-list
To be entirely fair to Football Manager, keeping up a wishlist for the series is hard work, because there’s so little left to finetune without making it totally overly complex mess. In fact, it’s one of life’s little ironies, that a streamlined simple mode was added recently for players who just didn’t have the time to micromanage every single whinging player.
That said, there are a number of improvements it would be nice to see to mirror the strange world of football, and an increasingly apparent trend is chairmen who are ultra-demanding, or like to interfere with the team on the pitch. This could have an interesting risk/reward element to it – you know that taking a specific job could be a poisoned chalice, but other clubs will see anyone who can succeed there as a high-calibre candidate. Not naming any real-world clubs that this applies to, of course. Ahem.
Temporary jobs are also increasingly common. Think when Alan Shearer got appointed manager of Newcastle until the end of the season. These short-term roles would offer an interesting new challenge, and the potential to be offered a full-time role if you do well enough would lead to some interesting in-game drama.
One addition that would be really simple to implement would be to take a leaf out of FIFA’s book, and let you play a one-off match in line with the real season. So if Manchester United were playing Chelsea in a title show-down, the game would let you play a single match as manager of either side – with the current injuries and suspensions each team is running with. It would be a small thing, but you can imagine players enjoying it as part of the pre-match ritual.
Finally, although the player manager role isn’t as fashionable as once it was, it would be a pretty nice addition to be able to start off as a player at the end of your career, giving any team you join an extra player, even if that player is an ageing has-been. I’m not suggesting Football Manager 2018 should become FIFA or anything, but it would offer you a nice bit of extra backstory which as any Football Manager player knows is all part of the fun.
piraticy 
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