It’s about this time of year, during the build up to the new football season over here in England, that my love for the Championship Manager/Football Manager games takes a true grip on me.  So I was pleasantly surprised when I checked my inbox at the weekend and found an invite to the beta for the latest iteration in the series, Football Manager Live.  For those who don’t know, Football Manager is a game that casts you as the manager at your choice of quite literally thousands of clubs around the world and leaves you running the club.  Football Manager Live varies from the rest of the games in the series by joining the ever growing number of MMO games out there, but the first sports management MMO (as far as I’m aware).  Think fantasy football leagues meet the Football Manager games and you are about at Football Manager Live.

I have been playing since Monday and hope to keep you all up to date with the exploits of ‘Team Teabag’ in game world 13 and my experiences with beta in general over the coming weeks.  Follow the jump for some basic info and my initial experiences.

The differences FML and a standard football management game are quite staggering, firstly you start off with only £500,000 to create your entire team and your initial funding, and that means no superstars for anybody at the start of the season.  The games database of players is huge, drawing from all around the world, so thankfully there is an auto-create team option at the start which you can use.  This can be weighted towards any nationality and club if you’d prefer, but as there is no rules regarding foreign players it’s not really to bad. After this you get to choose your kit and stadium details and then you are away.  Player transfers and scouting are also handled very differently in FML, but those are tales for later posts.

The first major task you have is to choose which Football Association you want to join, as this will make up the main bulk of the games you play in the season.  There are plenty of different FA’s to choose from, each with a varying time schedule for the matches, I went for the All Evening Association that plays between 6pm and midnight, but there are FA’s to cover just about every time in the day.  These will work very much like standard leagues and will be the source of most of the clubs income, these leagues will not start until Monday, so no news on that just yet.

The match engine looks very similar to the rest of the Football Manager series, showing your men as coloured circles as they run about the pitch giving you an overview.  If you are familiar with those then you’ll already know what you have here, the only real difference being the inclusion of a chat window on the left so you can have some friendly banter with your opponents.

One of the new things FML brings to the series is skills, these effectively replace your backroom staff by controlling your coaching, scouting, tactical, physiotherapy and financial abilities.  You only start the game with a small amount of the player database available to you, this is improved on by learning the scouting skills, each one unlocking more players for your perusal.  Much the same is true of the available tactical options for your team (not standard formations though), as each level in the tactical skills unlocks more options and the same goes for the other skills.  The other new feature to the series is achievements, which as the name suggests are awarded for such things as one of your players getting their first hat-trick of goals or winning 3 games in a row.  The awards have no actual effect in the game, unless they somehow contribute to your clubs reputation rating, so exist purely for bragging rights.

So with the beta now having been in full swing for a week I have had plenty of time to form some thoughts on my experiences so far.  Overall the concept behind the game is great, I can’t see it appealling to every fan of the genre though as it is very difficult to get players you have ever heard of, for example I actually only have 1 player in my squad I’ve heard of, a Brazilian defender called Felipe.  I like the way that time is sort of ignored, so there is no ill effects for making your squad play 50 matches in a day compared to 5 matches a day, meaning that the people who play all day every day gain no advantage over those that only play casually.

So what about my team your asking?  Well, ‘Team Teabag’ have had a bit of a roller coaster start to their season.  After dominating their opponents for the first few days, enough to propel them to 67th in the gameworld rankings (from 1232 teams), the weekend has brought some bad luck to the team and I have struggled to win a match all weekend, dropping me down to 106th in the rankings, but this has all been freindlies so far.  The real competition kicks off tonight at 8pm when my league, and then the money should also start flowing in and I can work on strengthening my squad.

Expect more updates on the trials and tribulations of Team Teabag in the Football Manager Live Beta over the coming weeks, until the if you want more information then check out the official website here.

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