As the final whistle blows on Football Manager 2022, it’s time for another blog update right here on Fuller FM.
It’s become an autumn tradition for me to finish each game cycle by updating you on everything I’ve written on the blog this season. I’ll also deliver my final thoughts on FM22 – and I have a lot of them – before looking forward to the release of FM23.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON FM22
Since Football Manager 2017, I have noticed a pattern – the FM series takes two steps forward with each odd-numbered release, and then one step back with each even-numbered title. In my opiion, FM18 was a disappointment compared to FM17, FM20 wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as FM19… and FM22 was an underwhelming follow-up to FM21.
I’ll start with the positives. When I first reviewed FM22 back in November, I was impressed with the new animation engine. Dribbling is more fluid, and players look like they’re actually running on the turf rather than sliding on an ice rink. Unfortunately, goalkeepers still have a habit of breakdancing after some saves, and certain fouls in-game (especially penalties) look completely innocuous going by the 3D animations.
Okay… I’m already getting negative, so let’s bring it back a bit. The match engine itself has improved compared to FM21, especially with wide play becoming more viable and ‘gegenpressing’ not being quite as overpowered. The new Data Hub is probably my favourite addition, providing plenty of statistical charts and graphs to help you figure out where your strengths and weaknesses lie.
Unfortunately, I now have to scrape the barrel to find any other positives. From hereon in, I have A LOT to criticise.
You probably know how much I hate it when AI defenders frequently pass the ball back and forth between each other, while coming under little pressure from their opposition. This leads to them completing an unrealistically huge percentage of their passes. Even Rubén Dias cannot reach 95% pass completion in a season, but in the FM22 universe, you frequently see lower-league defenders with passing stats that make them look elite.
This becomes especially ridiculous when there’s a big gulf in class between the two teams. When I was playing the demo in November, I ran a test by managing England in a World Cup qualifier against San Marino. We won with ease (duh), but San Marino still had 49% possession and completed nearly 90% of their passes. Even Gareth Southgate’s England at their most negative would not let that happen.
There are a couple more realism breakers when you get deep into a long-term save. Firstly, AI clubs neglect their young prospects and focus too much on experience, which eventually leads to their starting line-ups being full of old men. Also, newgen player reputations don’t rise quickly enough, which means they may get passed up by their national teams – even generational talents from major nations may not be called up until they hit their mid-20s.
This double-whammy shows the knock-on effects of the realistic/slower changes to player development and regression on FM22. We all know that youngsters could become superstars far too quickly on FM21, and that older players could collapse just as suddenly. It appears that SI have overcorrected with their changes, thus making AI teams too old rather than too young.
Press conferences have become more tedious too – not because the questions are repetitive, but because they’re largely irrelevant. 15 minutes before the Champions League Final, I don’t want to be asked about Luton’s manager putting a backup midfielder up for sale! Nor do I want to listen to any questions about my youth player’s loan spell at Reading before every single league match!
And though I didn’t experience this issue too often in my Arsenal save, I have heard a lot of complaints that players have unrealistic playing time demands. ‘Star Players’ seem particularly hard to please; you probably shouldn’t give a player that status unless you can guarantee them 97 minutes per match.
The newgen faces are always bad, but especially so this year. I got far too irrationally angry at seeing 15-year-old schoolboys who look like 90s Britpop singers, and resorted to using Zealand’s NewGAN facepack again. Sadly, this facegen farce doesn’t seem to have improved on FM23.
But that wasn’t even my biggest graphical gripe with FM22. The user interface leaves plenty to be desired, particularly when you see buttons and icons that overlap each other. When the base skin has such a fundamental flaw as that, I’m not surprised that many FMers prefer to use a custom skin – and I may well go down that road on FM23.
Hey, you can’t have too many mods, can you? At this rate, my game’s gonna feel like that Futurama episode where Hermes upgrades almost every part of his body until he becomes almost unrecognisable!
But no, seriously, I’m quite concerned about where the FM franchise is heading. As the game gets bigger and bigger, more features are getting broken every year, with many of these bugs crossing over into the next game. Anyone who’s messed around with custom views – or played ‘Whac-A-Mole’ when giving out multiple individual shouts – will know where I’m coming from.
Sometimes I do wonder how Sports Interactive’s testing team allows certain bugs to stick around for so long. Then again, I also believe the FM community could do better at reporting these issues to SI, especially during the beta. Too many FMers start kicking and screaming whenever they see a bug instead of alerting the developers to it, and I think that attitude contributes to so many of them slipping through.
Anyway, enough with the moaning. Let’s talk about what I’ve been up to on Fuller FM this season…
WHAT I WROTE THIS SEASON
I was quite late to the FM22 party and didn’t play the full game until April, during its free weekend on Steam. I started off with a short-term save, trying to save a Crystal Palace team who were in the relegation zone in Christmas. It… didn’t go well.
Despite my catastrophic failures at Selhurst Park, I was finally convinced to buy the full game. After mulling over which club I should manage in a longer-term save, it was this tweet from Iain Macintosh that convinced me to take on a challenge much closer to home.
And so the “Hale End Heroes” challenge was born. In this save, I would take charge of my beloved Arsenal, with the aim of winning a Premier League or Champions League trophy with a minimum of SIX academy graduates in the starting XI.
I also imposed some restrictions to make this save even more challenge. For starters, I had to name a certain number of academy graduates in the starting line-up in each match, with the minimum number increasing with each season. I could also only sign players who had British/Irish nationality, were aged 18 or under, or were previously developed at Arsenal.
Things didn’t get off a great start, as we lost our very first friendly match to New York City. The result was so humiliating that I nearly gave up on the save – and on FM22 altogether! Thankfully, I had a change of heart, and the result was one of my most rewarding series to date.
Over the course of five seasons, I rebuilt an underachieving Arsenal team into a competitive outfit with a strong homegrown core – complementing established first-teamers such as Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe with younger graduates like Charlie Patino and the returning Yunus Musah.
I don’t want to spoil too much here, but this was a story that had pretty much everything. Heroes were born, enemies were made, hearts were broken, wonderkids were discovered… and the finale made all those desk thumps and battered tissue boxes worthwhile!
Meanwhile, I started a new occasional mini-series, unofficially titled “Let’s Talk About… Football Manager”. In this, I discussed a number of issues around FM, whether it was a significant bug, a potential new feature for the game, or how an existing feature could be improved.
Firstly, I looked at how FM’s newgen faces have ‘progressed’ over the years, from the cherubic babyfaces that were on FM15, to the Ian Brown lookalikes you see on FM22. That was followed by the series’ most popular post to date, where I discussed why official retro databases on FM were an awesome but impractical idea.
I put forward some ideas for improving international management, which has long been neglected on FM. I also ran some experiments that explained FM22’s “Age Old Problem” with ageing squads and slow reputation growth in more detail.
Meanwhile, I wrote a couple of guides on how to develop your coaches, and how to properly assess and train your youth intake players. The “FM Mythbusting” series also returned, with some thoughts on why English teams and players may not be as ‘overrated’ in Football Manager as some people might suspect.
All in all, I’ve written 44 articles since the most recent blog update this time last year. In that sense, it’s been the quietest season ever for Fuller FM – partly because I didn’t properly get into FM22 until midway through its life cycle, but also because I’ve focussed more on quality than quantity. The days of me churning out 4 or 5 posts a week during FM19 are well and truly gone.
FM23 & THE FUTURE
The Football Manager 2023 beta is expected to go live later this month, and as soon as it does, I’ll be embarking on my first career in the new game. This season, I will become ‘The Fuller of Seville’, as I take charge of La Liga side Real Betis.
Though often overshadowed by their city rivals, Betis are a club with plenty of history, having spent over 50 seasons in Spain’s top division. They were crowned champions for the first and so far only time in 1934/1935, but they have also won the Copa del Rey three times, including defeating Valencia in last season’s Final.
Los Béticos’ squad includes several big names, such as William Carvalho, Nabil Fekir, and Germán Pezzella, who was my captain on my very first blog save with Fiorentina on FM19. They also have a couple of golden oldies in former Barcelona and Manchester City goalkeeper Claudio Bravo (aged 39) – and legendary captain Joaquín, who played for Spain at the 2002 World Cup and is still going strong aged 41!
Upon taking over the reins from Manuel Pellegrini, my aim will be to gradually rebuild an ageing Betis team around the club’s younger talents. Left-back Juan Miranda, forward Luiz Henrique, and the mercurial Mexican winger Diego Lainez can all expect to play prominent roles.
This save will like run for about two or three seasons, maybe even four. While it might be a tough ask to overhaul the ‘big three’ of Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid and Barcelona, I’m hoping to at least give it a good shot.
I will post regular Betis save updates on my Twitter handle @Fuller_FM, using the hashtag #LosBeticos. As things stand, I will probably not write a full blog series about it here on Fuller FM, mainly because of a number of personal reasons.
Some of you may be aware that my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer earlier this year and is currently receiving treatment. Unfortunately, my mum has not been in great health recently either. I am also planning to move house early next year, so my FM time will likely be heavily disrupted as the big day approaches.
In the meantime, I’ll be looking to write some more guides to help you get a little more out of your FM experience. The “FM Mythbusting” and “Let’s Talk About…” series may also return in the future.
Outside of Football Manager, I’ll continue to review other football management games – both retro and more recent (in fact, I’ll be posting a new Retro Review next week!). And to mark the 20th anniversary of Championship Manager 4, I will be writing plenty of content about one of the most important but divisive games in the Sports Interactive franchise.
Once I have finished my Betis beta save, and real-life things have settled down, I’ll hopefully be ready to kick off my long-term FM23 career. After a Premier League save on FM22 and a journeyman series on FM21, I’ll be going back to my favourite kind of FM career – one where I build up a lower-league club and lead it to bigger things.
I’m considering managing my hometown club Romford, who were recently relegated to the Essex Senior League (at the 9th tier of the English pyramid). I had a long-term save with the Boro on FM13, where I took them up to the Conference South before achieving greater success elsewhere. However, any potential return to Romford depends on me finding a good and stable English non-league database.
If I cannot find one, I could take over another local team – Hornchurch FC. They currently play in the 7th-tier Isthmian League, which means they can be promoted to the playable leagues without needing any custom mods.
Alternatively, with Scottish football back on the up, it seems like a good time to manage an SPFL team and try to topple the Old Firm. The Republic of Ireland also interests me, but I want to find a custom database that expands the Irish league pyramid, because trying to ‘build a nation’ when there are only 19 league clubs would bore me pretty quickly.
I also have a few options outside of the British Isles. I once had a brief but enjoyable FM15 save in Sweden’s lower leagues, so I would like to give that a proper go. Also, there are a couple of potential rebuilds in Slovakia’s second division with either FC Petržalka or FC Košice – two clubs whose precursors played in the Champions League group stages before falling on hard times.
So as you can gather, I’m not short of ideas! But if you have any other interesting challenges you’d like so share, I’d be more than happy to hear them!
Whether you’re a long-time reader or have only discovered this blog recently, thank you for tolerating me over the last year. I will be back very soon for another season of Football Manager blogging. Don’t have nightmares.
Fuller FM 
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