Hey everyone, Fuller FM here – the blogosphere’s most average virtual Football Manager, and it’s time for my retro review of FIFA Manager 07.
Some of you might remember my ‘EA MAY’ mini-series from last spring, when I reviewed three separate games from Electronic Arts’ now-defunct FIFA Manager series. Though we haven’t yet made it that far into 2022, I thought I’d revisit this series a month early. Call this ‘EApril’, if you… er, may.
Sadly, my quest to play FIFA Manager 14 – the final game in the franchise – goes on. After searching high and wide, I still haven’t been able to find a legal copy of the game that won’t cost me a kidney.
Instead, like that time when Lukas Graham’s black cat accidentally smashed a time-machine mirror under a ladder, I have gone back seven years. Here is my retrospective review of FIFA Manager 07.
BACKGROUND
EA’s attempt to challenge Sports Interactive’s dominance of the football management genre had undergone several changes since its debut in 1997. The series that started off as FIFA Soccer Manager later became FA Premier League Football Manager, and then Total Club Manager… but by the mid-2000s, another rebrand was on the horizon.
In October 2005, EA released the imaginatively-named FIFA Manager 06. It featured yet another UI overhaul, plus some licenced music from popular indie bands such as Hard-Fi and Stereophonics. It was also the last version of the game to be developed by EA Canada, as lead developer Gerald Köhler left Vancouver behind and returned home to Germany.
Together with programmers Petr Vlček and Thomas Schwan, Köhler founded Bright Future GmbH in Cologne, where FIFA Manager 07 was developed ahead of its full release in November 2006. It was met with the typical mixed-to-positive from reviewers and gamers alike… but development wasn’t quite finished yet.
In February 2007, Köhler took on board some player feedback and released an expansion pack called FIFA Manager 07: Extra Time. If you play another EA franchise, the term “expansion pack” will send chills down your spine – but this was the first time it had been done for an EA Sports game. New features included an option to be a player-manager, and more match analysis tools.
I did not get the Extra Time expansion – just the initial game, but with the first patch installed. I have been playing FIFAM 07 as it originally was, warts and all.
STARTING OUT
While FIFAM 07’s soundtrack isn’t as impressive as its predecessor’s (let alone the main FIFA series), there is an early musical treat. The very first song you hear after loading the game is only the frigging “Grandstand” theme tune! Ironically, the long-running BBC sports show ended in January 2007 – just a few months after this game was released.
The game also includes a huge number of instrumental tracks covering almost every genre imaginable, from electronica to Indian sitar. As I’m supposed to be reviewing a video game, I won’t write about each song in detail… but I’m feeling a Strong 5 to a Light 6 on the soundtrack.
Anyway, the game modes are all the same as they were in TCM 05. You can begin your career at a random club, or you can select your own team to manage, or you can create your own club from scratch in the regional leagues. You can also change various difficulty settings and set which jobs you want to be in charge of, from selecting the team to selling ad boards.
One feature from the very first FIFA Soccer Manager makes an unexpected return. When picking your team, you can also choose which division you play in – but you cannot move them into a higher league. So you can take Arsenal all the way down to the Conference National, but you can’t manage Grays Athletic in the Premiership straight away.
FIFAM 07 comes with a whopping 81 playable leagues from 47 nations – including Guatemala! However, I would only recommend loading 5 or 6 nations at most. From my experience, this game is poorly optimised, and processing time is significantly slower than on TCM 05, even with the same number of leagues loaded.
Matches can be viewed in four different modes. My preferred choice is ‘Text Mode’, which gives you bog-standard text commentary while still allowing you to make changes on the fly. ‘Instant Result’ allows you to whizz through games very quickly, and ‘Videotext Mode’ is much the same, with some added Ceefax nostalgia. Then there’s ‘3D Mode’, which I will touch on later. [Cue ominous music]
WHAT I LIKED
UI design has never been EA’s strong suit, but FIFA Manager looks much prettier than Total Club Manager ever did. The horrid grey/pink colour clashes and labyrinthian menus have been replaced by a cleaner interface that’s a bit easier to navigate through. There’s still a lot of info on each page, but at least they don’t look like something only an astrophysicist on ecstasy could understand.
This extends to the player profiles too. All their skills (of which there are almost as many as there are in FM) are now divided into four categories: Outfield/Goalkeeper, Set Pieces, Mental, and Physical Fitness. It would’ve been nice if these skills were listed in alphabetical order as well, but whatever.
When setting up tactics, you can place your players anywhere on the pitch, and use sliders to set your own playing style. It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on training and set up sessions to make the most of your team’s strengths. If you put in a few long passing sessions each week, for example, your players will be able to play direct balls more effectively.
My favourite part about this series has always been youth development, and FIFAM 07 expands on that further. You now have FOUR different youth squads, from the Under-19s all the way down to the Under-13s. If you’re determined enough to put in a long career, you could sign a 10-year-old prospect, develop him through the age groups, and then give him a pro contract when he turns 16.
Lastly, the half-time team talks often brought a smile to my face. You can choose to criticise, praise or motivate your team, and there are specific team talks for each situation. For example, if you’re 3-0 down at half-time, you could angrily threaten the entire team with the sack, or you could tell them something like, “Well… it could be worse.”
WHAT I DIDN’T
Unfortunately, things do get worse if you’re watching matches on 3D mode. The 3D engine is not based on the main FIFA series, but rather from its short-lived UEFA Champions League spin-off. While the graphics still look as respectable as you’d expect from EA, player movements and decision-making still leaves a lot to be desired.
The 3D mode also comes with an optional ‘Career Mode’, which allows you to control one of your players on the pitch. The very idea that you can be both José Mourinho AND Shaun Wright-Phillips at the same time is baffling enough. Sadly, the controls are so clumsy and unresponsive that it can make even Cristiano Ronaldo look like Douglas Rinaldi, rendering the whole feature pointless.
Even sticking to text commentary, I get the sense that whoever coded the match engine got all their football expertise only from watching “Premier League Years” repeats. Expect to see a lot of high-scoring matches, penalties and red cards – and a bunch of controversial incidents.
Results can be quite odd too. Managing Millwall in League One, we often struggled against lower-ranked teams with much less talent and fitness, and even got spanked 5-1 by rock-bottom Rotherham. Meanwhile, Charlton finished 2nd in the Premiership behind Chelsea, despite their real-life 2006/2007 season ending in relegation!
Millwall also finished the season well, to the point where I was asked at a press conference, “You must be happy you’re at the top and cruising.” One of my potential answers was, “We have an excellent chance of becoming champions right now.” Just one issue with this – it was after the final match of the season, and we had already WON the league title a fortnight earlier!
The most annoying bug I noticed was with the scheduling of cup matches. On TWO occasions, we had to play an FA Cup game the night after playing a league match! As you might expect, playing back-to-back matches on other sides of the country within 24 hours isn’t great for your team’s fitness levels!
WE MUST TALK ABOUT…
The ‘personal life’ stuff. This is EA’s attempt to combine Football Manager with The Sims. For some people, all this off-the-field stuff sets FIFA Manager apart from its serious football-focused rival; for others, it’s utter fluff and a waste of time.
In this game, your manager can find a partner, get married and have kids (who may go on to have football careers of their own). This was also the first edition of EA’s series where your gaffer could enter a same-sex marriage and adopt children, which is actually quite progressive for a video game from 2006.
Like real life, your partners and children will expect you to give them gifts on their birthdays, otherwise they can get very upset. Apart from presents, you can also spend your hard-earned wages on cars, properties and luxury items – and even ‘play’ golf.
The impact all this has on your management career is negligible. Indeed, it can be quite easy to forget you have an in-game private life. I didn’t even notice that my manager had found a girlfriend until I saw a random blonde woman called Catherine suddenly pop up on his profile. (That lax attitude to relationships might explain why I’ve been hopelessly single since I was 14.)
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m firmly in the “utter fluff” camp on this one.
SUMMARY
FIFA Manager 07 is a solid entry in EA’s back catalogue, and it was a decent competitor to Football Manager at a time when SI seemed to have lost their way (take it from me; FM07 was not good). Unfortunately, its poor optimisation and the addition of some pointless features meant I didn’t enjoy this game as much as Total Club Manager 2005.
If you do want to revisit this game, I’d recommend running it on any version of Windows from XP up to 8.1. I’ve read that it is possible to run it on Windows 10, which usually has major issues running certain games from this era, but it takes a bit of tinkering – and there are still no guarantees it’ll work.
FULLER FM RATING: 2.5* – Football League
Thanks for reading my latest retro review. If you’ve played this game before, what did you think of it? Did you like it, did you dislike it, did you have no strong feelings one way or the other? Let me know by leaving a comment below, or tweet me @Fuller_FM.
Fuller FM 
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