Football Manager 2022

Football Manager 2022 packs a number of new features, such as a data hub, an extended transfer deadline day, and new staff meetings that help improve the immersion of life as head coach. This new addition is still one of the best entries in the series, although FM21 owners may want to hold off until next season if you want more than just an extended upgrade.

Introduction

Soccer Manager 2022 is one of the best sports games in my game, allowing a ridiculous amount of tinkering to take your team into tip-top shape to challenge for the league title.

It may all look like a tedious spreadsheet fad from the outside, but in reality, it can create far more stories and narratives than the FIFA series – with nothing less than the joy of taking a lower-league team to the Premier League. Shoe budget, after all.

From Sunderland’s efforts to bring the AFC back into the Premier League to participate in the ্যাস 200 million transfer to the Newcastle project, there are endless opportunities, each with unique challenges. You can easily spend 100 hours in this game and just scratch the surface.

Football Manager 2022 is the latest iteration of the series, and although it has not changed its coaching staff at Old Trafford as extensively as David Moyes, it has certainly changed enough for a more enjoyable experience.

Here are my thoughts after the football manager sank more than 60 hours in 2022.

Create your own manager

• New customization options for your avatar
• There is still a huge amount of structure and strategy
• Data hub makes performance analysis easy

Each entry in the Football Manager series lets you create your own manager with unique features instead of being forced to slip on an existing coach’s boot. Soccer Manager 2022 takes things a step further with a vast wealth of customization options when creating your avatar.

There are now more presets for the choice of eyebrows, hair and glasses, so every manager you create can look totally different from the next. I appreciate the level of customization here, although the plasticine-esque figures you create usually look like obsessed dolls rather than lively humans. It’s certainly not the best character creation I’ve ever used in a game, although it’s not really a big deal because you’ll rarely see your avatar from the short cutsin before a match.

Despite the awesome incarnation, Football Manager 2022 has managed to make you feel like a suitable head coach, allowing you to choose your own players, backroom staff and strategy. In fact, you can control every single aspect of your chosen football club, as long as the board supports you.

There are plenty of formations and football styles to choose from, allowing you to replicate or originalize Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola’s favorite successful blueprints and create your own legacy. You can have more fun by telling your fullback to run overlapping or prioritizing the link-up game rather than scoring your central forward. No matter what strategy you dream of, you will probably be able to implement it.

I must admit, football manager 2022 Thomas Tuchel has not made any significant updates on the strategic front other than introducing the new ‘Wide Center-Back’ player role that made it popular. But there are already so many features here that I would really struggle to come up with a way to significantly improve Sports Interactive.

I’ve noticed some immersive-dental situations that will probably never happen in reality, such as Van Dyke out-scoring Mohamed Salah halfway through the season due to a corner exploit, but these unexpected results could arguably make a game even more exciting.

A new feature that Football Manager 2022 has launched is the Data Hub. As professional football clubs become more reliant on data, Sports Interactive has decided to make it a bigger focus for this installment.

After a football match, your analysts will be able to create numerous pie charts and graphs to display different statistics. For example, I can try and test my team’s overall performance to identify a weakness. Maybe your team isn’t shooting often enough, or maybe you’re allowing too many opposing shots outside the penalty area – somehow, Data Hub will probably start any recurring trends.

The data hub can even compare teams across all leagues based on a specific statistic, such as the amount of shots aimed at the target and the legacy rate that your team is hitting behind the net. If the former is high and the latter is low for your club, you may need to invest in a striker with a higher finishing feature. It’s always frustrating when your team performs poorly and why you can’t work, so I really appreciate Data Hub providing a better understanding of my team’s strengths and weaknesses.

Staff and transfers

• Staff meetings feel more normal than a storm of emails
• The interaction of journalists is still annoying
• Deadline Day adds more drama to the window transfer

The staff in your backroom is always important to the success of the football manager, but they can be blamed for feeling like numbers in a spreadsheet rather than a character like their life.

The football manager has tried to resolve this by launching a 2022 staff meeting. Here your assistant managers and coaches can meet with you regularly to make recommendations such as how to improve training, who should take the freak and whether the current captain still qualifies for their leadership role.

The scouts can meet with you frequently and discuss what kind of players they need to find. You can choose which positions need to be improved and what kind of player traits you want to prioritize and then the scouts will recommend who they can fit briefly. This seems far more realistic than sending hundreds of scouting reports via sporadic email.

The way you interact with staff as a whole seems much more realistic, although the same cannot be said of journalists. Meetings with the media seem very formulaic, becoming tediously repetitive even before you end a season. Your relationship with reporters will evolve over time which is a nice touch, but such interactions rarely bring any major consequences, feeling more like an annoying distraction than an important element of the game.

And now for my personal favorite aspect of the game: Transfer. Agents were given a bigger role for Football Manager 2021, but the latest entry has further expanded the options for interaction. You can try now and convince an agent that a player is suitable for your team, as well as be able to improve your relationship with them to smooth future transfers. You do not want to be frustrated if you cannot get the right pitch so invest in a good capo.

Scouting has also been reformed, with players now graded with a letter (such as B +) instead of a number in the 100s. Again, this seems a lot more realistic when it comes to preventing you from splitting hair on the difference between 82 and 84 ratings.

The football manager has also tried to recreate the excitement of the 2022 deadline, slowing down the hours just before the window slam closes so you have more time to sign at the last minute, or agents can offer you an unhappy player who is desperate. Leaving Newcastle as manager, I signed with Essencio on the last day of the summer window – in this situation it is really difficult to resist the panic shopping, giving me a little more sympathy for Solsczger’s decision to sign Ronaldo.

Sports has further improved its interactive AI to make more logical decisions about migration. For example, Newcastle will not be able to sign Mbappe even if they offer him a mouth-watering salary because he would like to compete in the Champions League. AI-controlled teams are now much more likely to pay transfer fees in installments, as clubs make sure they are not breaking any financial fair play rules.

I often want to stop my progress to see what the players of all the teams in the rival Premier League have signed. I’ve rarely seen an unrealistic event, but they still deviate from reality enough to keep things interesting – the Rangers swap for Steven Gerrard Brighton, while Manchester City were able to sign Mbappe on a free deal.

Pitch

• 3D models look decent with more realistic animations
• The player’s behavior has been improved with the new match engine

The football manager series goes far beyond the days when 2D dots would pass the ball around the pitch. Each player now has a 3D model to create a more immersive experience on the day of the match

Of course, those 3D models now have countless entries, but FM22 has introduced a new animation engine that looks much more natural when players dribble with the ball. Players are also more intelligent than before, as they are now more likely to pass the ball backwards instead of running in densely populated areas, as well as be more aware of their ‘sprint ability’ to refrain from chasing the ball when there is no opportunity. Reach it before an opposing player.

The actual graphics of the players and the stadium have not improved much since the previous entry, and it is still difficult to recognize the players by appearance alone, but I think the improved reality for the players still significantly improves the on-pitch action.

As always, you can adjust the speed of the match and the amount of highlights you want to see. This is pleasantly quick to change tactics, as you can switch to a more aggressive mindset using the bottom-left panel instead of diving into the original strategy screen.

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