Football Manager 2018 isn’t just about playing for a season, giving up, then starting over – it’s about building a legacy, relationships and a squad to be proud of. With that comes the need to sign people who are still legally children for more money than most of us will ever see in our lives. Wonderkids, then.

With that in mind, I’ve trawled through the game to find 36 of the best young players in the game, across all positions, and for a selection of budgets. The days of genuine bargains have faded into near obscurity, but you’ll still be able to put together a winning squad for a reasonable amount. Just remember they probably won’t be winning anything until 2023 at the earliest.

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This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Football Manager [official site].

Do want to play a cavernously deep simulation of a world of viciously competing factions? Do you dream of leading your people to glory and dominating all comers? Do you relish bending complex systems of law to your advantage? Do you savour the idea of surveying the world for the sharpest operators and spying on your rivals’ smallest decisions?

Forget Crusader Kings 2. Its network of aristocratic machinations is a kid’s toy next to Football Manager. And nothing in Football Manager is quite as vast and encompassing as the transfer market, in which hundreds of thousands of players, scouts, agents, and managers live out digital careers in an international scene of countries and leagues. 25 years in the making, Football Manager’s transfer system is a blend of artificial intelligence, maths and hard data, and it’s designed to simulate the real business of football, behaving credibly into an infinite future of football. “We haven’t perfected it,” director Miles Jacobson tells me. “But we’re pretty close.”

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We’re poised in the drop zone, hanging on by a thread, and nobody seems to care if we cling on by the skin of our teeth or tumble into oblivion.

I am the manager of Bury FC and the terrible results aren’t the worst thing about this season. The truly heartbreaking thing is the apparent demise of a small club and its generations-old local support base. If a last minute goal condemns a team to relegation and nobody is around to see the ball hit the net, does it even matter? In Football Manager [official site], they only sing when you’re winning.

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Adam hands me the pass-and-save Football Manager Touch 2017 file with the following pep talk:

“I got us to the semi-final of the FA Cup, and the draw for that is coming up shortly, and we’re through to the 2nd Knockout Leg of the European Champions League,which is a big deal. We might end up playing Barcelona or Bayern Munich in which case we’re probably doomed, but HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL. The League is dead though. Nothing good can happen there.”

Good pep talk, Adam. Top management. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always said a manager should be judged on the trophies in the cabinet rather than their position in the league table. Give me the choice between finishing 17th in the Premier League but winning the League Cup and finishing 2nd but having no trophies to show for it, and I’ll go for the cup every time.

When I say I’ve always said that, I mean I’ve been saying it to the Leicester board repeatedly for the last couple of weeks. Our Football Manager 2017 League campaign is a dud; not a disaster but a damp squib. But we’re still in the Champions League and I calmly guided us to the semi-final of the FA Cup. Now it’s all on Pip. We’re going to do the double (and finish 15th in the League).

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Ian Football’s long brown raincoat hides four people inside: Pip, Adam, Alec (who already took his turn) and me, Graham. It’s now my turn in our pass-the-save (or pass-and-save, geddit) playthrough. Our mission: take control of Premier League champions Leicester City in Football Manager Touch 2017 and perform better than they are in real life.

Where Alec has limited experience with football, I watch half a dozen matches every weekend. I haven’t spent much time with FM16 or 17, but I spent many thousands of hours playing previous iterations so that shouldn’t matter. I also read a lot of Football Manager fan fiction as a teenager, in which people would embellish after action reports with imagined details of their manager’s personal lives.

I thought about this as I kissed Mrs. Football goodbye on Wednesday morning, before climbing in my Renault Clio (the car of Footballs) and beginning the drive to work. I burped, detecting the taste of the Venky’s chicken (the meal of Footballs) I’d eaten the night before. Read the rest of this entry »

Two of us know far too much about football. Two of us know far too little. Together, we will create chaos for once-proud Premiership club Leicester City.

Here’s the deal. In Football Manager Touch 2017 (chosen over the full-fat version as it’ll move quicker), we take control of Leicester for the 2016-2017 season, which is effectively working just a few months behind what’s actually happening now. That being that Leicester won the title last year, but are having a hard time this year. You ain’t seen nothing yet, lads. Every quarter of a season, whoever’s in charge passes their savegame onto the next player. As we’re alternating between people who know what they’re doing and people who don’t, this is going to involve quite some degree of calamity and, hopefully, salvation.

It starts with me. Graham, Pip and Adam will follow. Adam has observed that if the club is not in the relegation zone when the save reaches him, he will consider it a great victory. Oh dear. Read the rest of this entry »

Sports Interactive’s Football Manager series (once known as Championship Manager) is the Chosen One of sports management games. Rarely does its year-on-year instalment fall from Steam’s top ten most played games list and while the latest edition, Football Manager 2017 [official site], isn’t exactly brimming with new features, it has finely tuned almost all of its existing ones – to the point where this season’s outing is one of the best in the series’ illustrious 14-year career. “I have been impressed; greatly impressed at times,” says Adam in his review.

Similar to the waves of players and personnel who switch employers each year, mods come and go with each passing iteration of FM. The following list gathers the best that are available so far for 2016/17’s incarnation – but we’ll be adding to this list as the season unfolds.

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Just before the launch of Football Manager 2017 [official site], with the beta already released to the many people who preordered the game, I spoke to Sports Interactive director Miles Jacobson about the changes his team have made in this latest game in the series. We talked about AI improvements, Brexit, and whether Leicester winning the Premier League was a happy day or a sad day at Sports Interactive.

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Even though Sega have been publishing PC strategy and simulation games for years now, I still can’t see the company logo or hear the word without thinking back to hours spent at schoolfriends’ houses, trying to work out if Sonic was too fast or I was too slow. The acquisition of Amplitude was the point that I decided that I needed to ask Sega a very simple question: “Do you want to marry PC strategy games?”

At Gamescom, I sat down with Jurgen Post, COO of Sega of Europe.

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