Scout Genie already coming to Football Manager 2018

While Football Manager 2018 doesn't launch until next week, ballheads can rest assured that the popular fan-made tool Genie Scout is already coming over.

For non-ballheads, lets sidebar for an analogy. Football Manager is a crafting game about preparing and tweaking a wildly complex stew. The stew is a football team. Thousands of ingredients (players) are available, each with oodles of flavours (attributes) affecting what they contribute to the stew. Football Manager's crafting recipe grimoire is cumbersome, though, and even hides some ingredient attributes. Enter Genie Scout, a fan-made ingredient guide (tool) which is friendlier and more detailed - invaluable when creating a truly great football stew.

Scout Genie's makers say they expect to release it publicly "towards the end of November". If you've alraedy flashed the cash to start playing Football Manager 2018 in its pre-order beta, you can get to play with a beta version of Genie right now by donating a couple of quid to support its development.

The Scout Editor is also out for FM18. Like the Genie, it improves on the game's own editor.

Football Manager 2018 is due to officially launch next Friday, November 10th. Resident ballhead Adam offers these initial thoughts:

"I'm playing the beta and it's the first year for a while where I've just felt weary of the supposed upgrades. Being a manager feels like more work than ever, though perhaps I just need to bite the bullet and hand over some jobs to my staff. It's the first time I've considered switching to Touch, the stripped-down version of the game. On the positive side, there have been updates already and I'm enjoying the match engine a lot, a few oddities aside."

He'll be hoofing a full review our way when the whistle blows.