It’s that time of year again. For the fourth season in a row, I’ve had a look at the latest edition of the free-to-play Soccer Manager series.
Some of you might remember my previous Soccer Manager reviews. I wasn’t too hot on either SM19 or SM20, but I gave a more positive review of SM21, saying that I felt “the developers [were] finally steering this game in the right direction”.
Soccer Manager 2022 was released last November and can be downloaded from Steam right now (for mobile gamers, it’s also on Google Play and the App Store). But does it live up to its potential, or is it facing an early bath? Let’s take a closer look…
BACKGROUND (AND A MINI-RANT)
Soccer Manager is a series that prides itself on being a fast-paced, dirt-cheap alternative to Football Manager. Since debuting with Soccer Manager 2015, the series has slowly but steadily improved year-on-year and is now on its eighth edition.
Before I write about SM22, though, I must discuss the developers. For those who aren’t aware, Soccer Manager Ltd are a small independent company from Preston who’ve been going since 2005. They are also a precautionary tale of what can happen when a video game developer decides to put all their efforts into an ambitious new project, at huge expense to their previous product.
Soccer Manager started out as a multiplayer game, attracting over a million players at its peak. I was one of them for many years… but when SM launched its single-player series in 2014, the original game went into decline. Work gradually slowed down before coming to a halt in November 2016, when the now-rebranded Soccer Manager Worlds got its last major update.
SMW is still going today, but it’s now been totally overshadowed by the single-player game – to the extent that it barely gets a mention on Soccer Manager’s website frontpage. Indeed, when I logged into my old SMW account for the first time since 2019, I was presented with a huge advert for SM22, as if the game was asking me, “Are you sure you don’t mean to play THIS instead?”
Many SMW players have given up hope that their beloved game will ever recover. They’ve been stuck in a never-ending cycle of neglect for so long – players ask for an SMW update, developers promise an update “very soon”, new update fails to materialise, players get frustrated, rinse and repeat a few months later.
To make matters worse, back in January this year, several players tweeted the developers saying they couldn’t log into SMW anymore from mobile apps. They were met with the usual radio silence from a company who mainly use their social media accounts to post about football wonderkids, rather than the video games they make and are supposed to maintain.
Despite all that negativity, I will try to review Soccer Manager 2022 on its own merits. Anyway, let’s get to it…
STARTING OUT
While there have been questions about Soccer Manager’s use of real players and photos, SM22 have answered them by announcing an official licence with world footballers’ union FIFPro. They also have licencing deals with Wolves, Bayer Leverkusen, Internazionale, the Bundesliga, and the SPFL. However, I’m sure a certain club in Manchester will have questions about why their logo is still in the game…
Setting up a new Soccer Manager save is as simple as it always been. Give your manager a name, pick a continent to manage in, select your starting club, and you’re on your way.
Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta is back for a second year as brand ambassador. He is slightly more prominent in this year’s game, appearing not just in the tutorial, but also doubling up as your ‘assistant manager’. Throughout the game, Virtual Arteta will give you invaluable feedback such as “we should play through the middle”, “our defence is struggling to cope”, and “you should get rid of Aubameyang”.
If you’ve played SM21 before, SM22 is essentially the same game, just with a slightly different paint job. The menu layouts and screens are largely unchanged, tactics are still easy to set up, and you can still breeze through one full season in a few hours.
Ah yes, and you’ll still be pestered to spend money on extra in-game credits – perhaps even more often than last year. Freemium games, innit?
WHAT I LIKED
For the first time, SM22 gives you the option to compete in a pre-season tournament against three other teams – usually of the same calibre, if not slightly higher. It’s a great chance to hone your tactics, build up team chemistry, and maybe even earn some extra cash if you win the tournament!
Player interactions, which were introduced in SM21, have been fleshed out even more. Players will now come to you more often, demanding a new contract or a bigger first-team role if they feel they deserve it. This is good, but still needs some fine-tuning – one of my players asked for a pay rise after I’d agreed to sell him to another club in January!
SM22 also comes with some extra RPG elements that you can use to improve your manager. As you play through matches, you’ll earn XP that will build towards upgrading your managerial level. With each level you reach, you’ll be able to boost some of your attributes, which will make you more productive in training, transfer negotiations, et cetera.
You can also upgrade certain perks to improve your chances of success in certain areas. Some of these traits can give your players larger pre-match rating boosts, improve team chemistry, or increase the chances of getting a top talent from your youth academy. While I thought this was a cool new addition to the game, it unfortunately has one major drawback…
WHAT I DIDN’T
If you want to manage a big club from the start, then highly-rated players won’t have confidence in your abilities. Your biggest stars can become unsettled, their morale will drop before big matches, and their performances will likely suffer.
Sure, you can use some of your ‘boosts’ to improve those players’ dismal morale to an acceptable level – but that fix is only temporary. One defeat later, and they’re right down in the dumps again.
To counteract this, you must activate each level of the ‘Big Game Players’ and ‘Player Patience’ traits. To do that organically will take you at least a couple of seasons in-game, unless you spend real-life money to buy all the credits you need to automatically activate each managerial level.
That basically means you HAVE to start in the lower leagues – unless you’re willing to risk your players turning on their manager faster than Manchester United’s squad. While it is no doubt more realistic, it’s still very unfair on those big-club fans who ONLY want to manage their team. Having to either pay or grind their way to an enjoyable experience would probably put many of them off.
One particularly annoying bug from SM21 is still there. I took charge of Sevilla on the assumption that my target was to finish in the top half, only for the board to then tell me I had to win La Liga. Obviously, Sevilla didn’t win La Liga, and I was sacked just before the final game of the season – when we were 9th.
Transfer logic is still pretty rubbish. By February, Bruno Fernandes and Paul Pogba were playing together at Chelsea, Roberto Firmino had gone to Manchester City, and German wünderkind Florian Wirtz had taken a sideways step from Leverkusen to Dortmund. (And don’t get me started on that numpty who always buys Lee Angol on his Soccer Manager saves!)
Now, those are issues that I might be able to tolerate if the match engine was any good. You can probably see where this is going, can’t you?
WE MUST TALK ABOUT…
That bloody match engine. Nothing has ever come close to threatening Football Manager’s dominance in this respect, but Soccer Manager has always lagged SO far behind that it’s like comparing Manchester City to Elgin City.
SM20’s match engine was truly diabolical. SM21’s still wasn’t great, though I saw a few positives. But SM22 has somehow managed to take the worst bits from its predecessors, then thrown in some new bugs to create an utter monstrosity of an ME.
These are just some of the things I noticed:
- Players frequently run through on goal after heading a long ball past the last defender.
- Players often glide across the pitch during kick-offs, and sometimes run backwards towards the ball.
- Defenders rarely press opposition attackers, even when Pressing is set to the maximum. Man-marking is almost non-existent.
- When players do get pressed off the ball, they tend to fall over comically easily.
- The ball occasionally teleports forward or bends unnaturally in the air. A shot that looks certain to miss the target may suddenly zig-zag into the net.
- In one Champions League game, Wolfsburg scored a clear goal against us that wasn’t awarded. One of my defenders rushed back to clear the ball out of our goalmouth – and play just continued as normal!
- There is STILL no offside rule.
Don’t believe me? Watch this.
By the end of the season, I already had more than enough blooper-reel footage to make Denis Norden chuckle in his grave. Here’s the full playlist in case you have a spare 15 minutes.
SUMMARY
If you want a free alternative to Football Manager, then I might suggest Soccer Manager 2021, which you can still download if you’re not too fussed about the outdated squads. Unfortunately, I simply cannot recommend SM22 – a game that is chaotic, frustrating and perhaps even fundamentally broken (especially when it comes to that ridiculous match engine).
It’s free to play, sure, but the persistent badgering to spend money on microtransactions – some of which are almost necessary to make the game enjoyable – really makes me uncomfortable. It seems very exploitative, especially coming from a company who have treated their loyal multiplayer fanbase with such contempt for five years now.
FULLER FM RATING: 1.5* – National League.
Well… that was one of my most negative reviews yet. If you have any thoughts on Soccer Manager 2022, feel free to leave a comment below. You can also find me on Twitter @Fuller_FM.
Fuller FM 
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