Football Manager 2017 On PC Pitches From Nov 4

Football Manager 2017 (and the kind of streamlined/quick play version called Football Manager Touch 17) [official site] will be coming to PC on 4 Nov 2016. I suppose now is as good a time as any to bring up my grievance with the FM series which is the fact that you're not actually managing a football at all; you're managing a team of players who play with the football. You don't get to have six-monthly reviews with the ball and say "people have complained that you're too spherical and that makes you hard to work with" and then check back in half a year later so see if the situation has improved.

I don't actually play Football Manager and only really pop up in football conversations to deliberately show my age and ask what people like Karel Poborsky and Ian Rush are up to nowadays so I'm not sure what else to say about the series as I'm not sure what to look forward to Sega adding in or hoping that they strip out. I will say that my favourite thing about the artwork Sega sent over is that the manager looks like he's comforting the invisible man as he leads him off the pitch.

What I do know is that if you buy the full game on Windows/Mac/Linux you get a free copy of the Touch version. You can also get Touch as a standalone thing. I wonder if the bundling is to try and make sure people don't drop off the radar with the game by making sure they always have the more dip-in-for-a-bit version available to them. Perhaps there's been a drop-off with hardcore FM fans staying the distance, or maybe it's a code you could gift to a friend and there's an element of trying to spread the game that way? WHO KNOWS? (Not Pip)

As you might expect there's some pre-order incentivising where you can start your career two weeks ahead of the release date. To that, we say, as ever, don't pre-order, wait for reviews. They also say this, which... I feel so much like these individual words make sense but...

All pre-orders from participating retailers, whether digital or boxed, will come with downloadable content for Football Manager Touch 2017 including “Board over-ride”, “No firing”, “All job applications”, “National management” and 3 brand new challenges to play in the “Challenge” game mode, as a thank you for pre-ordering.

I think it's trying to incentivise pre-ordering by making you an HR dictator?

Anyway, it's all arriving the day before fireworks night in the UK so a "No Firing" aspect sounds like it might be a Canute vs The Tide scenario. God, I wish Graham was here and not huddled in the shed. Is this news article finished yet?