I should probably have got round to this by now, shouldn’t I?

Hey there, folks. It has now been five months since Football Manager 2023 was released, and so much has happened during its life cycle. On a personal level, my dad had cancer surgery, my old computer slowly died on me, and I’ve been getting ready to move 150 miles across the country. It’s not been much fun.

And what about FM23 itself? Well… that’s not been much fun either.

During the beta, I started a short-term save with Real Betis (which I wrote about on Twitter), but playing the game was such a frustrating experience that I abandoned it a few weeks after the full release. I’ve dabbled in a few test saves since then, but I only got into playing the game ‘properly’ again after the Winter Update came out early last month.

So, at long last, here are my thoughts about the latest installment of Sports Interactive’s football management simulation. Is this a genuine upgrade on FM22, or is it a season update too far?

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NEW ‘FEATURES’

What counts as a new feature? All of us in the Football Manager community have our own opinions; something that might be mind-blowing to one user might be irrelevant to another. Even so, a lot of FMers – and even some game reviewers – agree that FM23’s new feature list is the most underwhelming yet.

One of the big ‘headline features’ is a new licensing agreement with UEFA, which allows FM to use official branding and theme music for UEFA club competitions such as the Champions League and the Europa League. Even the trophy presentations look more like the real thing.

I think this is a really cool addition to the franchise that makes European matches feel that extra bit special. Some people will shrug and say you could have just downloaded some mods and added them to FM yourself, but not everyone knows how to mod their game – and in some versions, modding is very difficult, if not impossible.

There’s a new-look live draw, which you can view during the main stages of a competition. This ‘feature’ is also more like window dressing, but it has potential… if SI can clean up the visual glitches that it is prone to having.

My biggest issue with the new draw is that it takes TWO mouse clicks to draw each team rather than one, though there is an option to skip to the moment your team comes out of the pot. Another complaint I have is more of an immersion one. Why are all the UEFA draws being hosted by washed-up managers like Steve Bruce and Frank Lampard?

The other headline features are uninspired and/or not functioning properly. Scouting has had an overhaul, with an emphasis on setting ‘recruitment focuses’ rather than assignments.

It should be easier for your scouts to find and assess players in positions that you actually need… but as far as I’m concerned, it’s now messier, more convoluted, more frustrating. SI have tried to fix something that wasn’t necessarily broken, and they’ve ruined it.

The squad planner should make it easier to build your team, and plan up to two seasons ahead… in theory. In practice, it is cumbersome to negotiate, and it’s prone to breaking whenever you change your preferred formation. I typically make my own squad depth charts in Microsoft Excel, and I doubt I’ll be retiring those any time soon.

The ‘manager timeline’ – which supposedly highlights your biggest career achievements – is a pointless addition that doesn’t work as intended either. For example, bringing a former Betis physio back to the club gets on the timeline, but reaching the Quarter Finals of the Europa League does not.

There is one notable absence from the list of new features. Once again, there have been ZERO improvements to international management, which has been routinely neglected for years. We seem to be in a never-ending cycle where SI refuse to improve that game mode because they see that very few FMers are managing national teams… but very few FMers are managing national teams because SI haven’t improved that game mode since FM17!

We literally had a World Cup just a few weeks before FM23 was released! Giving international management a long-overdue overhaul in a World Cup season was the clearest of open goals from six yards, and SI somehow blasted it over the bar, out of the stadium, and into the car park!

But hey, who cares about international football? Your managers can now wear watches and earrings! Not that you’ll ever see them in a zoomed-out graphics engine or anything…

On that note, do I really need to know that 15% of my fans are ‘fair weather’, and that only 10% are ‘hardcore’?

To be fair, it has now been 30 years since the launch of the original Championship Manager. SI have added so much depth and detail to the series since then that it’s now hard to see where the next BIG new feature is coming from. Once women’s leagues and more modern 3D graphics are introduced in the future, what else is there left to add?

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WHAT I LIKE (NOT A LOT)

Despite my initial scepticism, I do quite like that supporter culture is more prominent on FM23. Your clubs’ fans now have separate expectations from the board, and you’ll have to work to keep both groups on your side. While the fat cats who run the club may care more about the finances, your fans may become more excited if you can defeat your fiercest rivals.

The Club Vision screens now have a few extra tabs which explain any board and supporter feedback in more detail. One tab in particular shows you how your fans feel about every single player in your first-team squad. I do like how all these screens are laid out and find them to be quite useful.

When it comes to matches, there have definitely been some improvements to defensive tactics. I’ve had plenty of success defending with a low block, usually to see matches out, but also as part of a general counter-attacking approach. Also, gegenpressing isn’t a surefire way route to success anymore – certainly not if you have a squad full of ageing lower-league journeymen.

AI managers react a bit better to adversity. If you’re 1-0 up in the closing stages, the AI will often look to chase the game and throw more players forward, rather than rolling over and surrendering. You can no longer afford to coast through matches on auto-pilot.

I’ll also add that animations are constantly getting smoother and more realistic, even if goalkeepers still occasionally turn into New York breakdancers. After that, though, I’m struggling to come up with anything else that is a significant or even obvious improvement on what we had in FM22.

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WHAT I DON’T LIKE (THE MATCH ENGINE)

Fuller FM regulars may know that every year, I review the new version of another management game called Soccer Manager. This is a free-to-play FM clone, and it plays like it, with a chaotic match engine that rarely resembles the beautiful game (e.g. the offside rule does not exist in SM). The 2023 edition was only released on mobile, but having played it briefly, I can say that PC gamers aren’t being deprived of anything special.

Mind you, I will also add that SM match engine is now much more similar to FM’s. Not because SM’s idea of ‘pinball meets football’ has become more akin to real-life, but because FM’s match engine is in as poor a state as it has EVER been in.

That is saying a lot. One major gripe with FM22 was that defenders often passed the ball back-and-forth between each other for ages without any pressure from the opposition. This would allow weak teams and mediocre defenders to rack up ludicrous passing statistics that made them look like Manchester City and Rúben Dias.

This doesn’t happen so much on FM23, where mistakes and imperfect passes are thankfully much more common. But once again, SI’s attempts to balance the match engine have resulted in a massive overcorrection. Instead of non-league teams playing like world-beaters, we now have the exact opposite problem!

Even top-class defenders can look utterly incompetent in possession, frequently losing the ball to high-pressing attackers in dangerous positions. They react incredibly slowly to long balls over the top, allowing even a sluggish Andy Carroll-esque target forward to race past them like Marcell Jacobs.

Ball-playing defenders tend to dribble on the ball very slowly, ‘shuffling’ more than LMFAO did a decade ago. Sweeper keepers love to charge out of their area to meet a long ball, and suddenly turn back just before they get to it, leaving the opposition a clear goal to aim at.

Players seem to have no idea of their own surroundings. A long ball might bounce off the back of their head, and even when a team-mate plays what should be a straightforward low pass to them, they sometimes stand there and watch an opponent intercept it. These issues were especially common on the beta match engine – so much so that I rage-quit my Betis save after barely a season-and-a-half.

There have been a couple of ME updates since then that have reduced most of these errors, but it’s still not great. My biggest bugbear right now is another holdover from FM22, where players often go for needless headers in unnecessary situations when a simple pass would do. Even when the ball is at chest height, few players can resist hitting it with their noggin.

This can lead to some ridiculous heading statistics for centre-backs in particular. I’m talking about players regularly completing 20 to 30 headers a game, if not more. At best, these stats are unrealistically high. At worst, FM23 looks like an early-onset dementia simulator.

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WHAT I DON’T LIKE (EVERYTHING ELSE)

There is one big change from FM22 to FM23 that SI didn’t shout about from the rooftops, so you might not have noticed it. They have overhauled much of the language used in FM – specifically when it comes to press conferences, agent interactions and player body language.

When a player responds positively to a team talk, they’re no longer just “pleased” or “extremely delighted” – they are “positively chuffed”, as if they had just stumbled out of Football Manager 1888. One less spiffing addition is when a substitute’s body language suggests they “would have preferred to stay on the bench”, even if they’re a 17-year-old making their senior debut when your team is leading 4-0.

Meanwhile, when you are speaking to an agent about a transfer target’s wage demands, the pointlessly wordy language can make it difficult for some FMers to understand what they are actually reading. The first two answers you see above can easily be reduced to “Could you reduce Devyne Rensch’s wage demands?” and “Could you lower his playing time expectations?”, and they would read just as well.

As much as FM prides itself on being a simulation, it’s also a game, and it should feel like a game. I don’t want to feel like I’m attending a business seminar every time I’m playing this game. SI, PLEASE cut out all the Don Draper nonsense – and say it again in plain and simple English!

It is particularly annoying that SI are making all these unnecessary changes when significant bugs in other areas of the game have remained untouched for years. I cannot remember the last version of FM where my custom views didn’t break at random, or where the set-piece editor wasn’t an utter mess.

Oh, but to be fair, SI did make ONE change to the set-piece editor. They made the shirts bigger… which makes dragging them into the right positions even more fiddly than before!

Press conferences remain a huge immersion-breaker. When you’re getting ready to play Real Madrid at the Bernabéu, you still get asked repetitive questions about youngsters on loan at third-division clubs, or what other teams in your league are doing. Like, I really don’t care that Elche have put their backup goalkeeper on the transfer list!

Even when the questions ARE about your team, they don’t always make sense. One journalist asked us about our “slow start to the season”… except that it was March, and that even though we were now in poor form, we had actually started the season with six straight victories!

Talking to the media is an important part of professional football, so I don’t think press conferences should be removed from FM entirely. My idea for improving pressers would be to have fewer questions – questions that are less repetitive, but more relevant to what’s happening.

Almost a year ago, I explained FM22’s age-old problems when it came to youth development and player reputation growth, which led to AI teams assembling very old squads. This issue isn’t quite as horrific on FM23, but it is still serious enough to put me off starting a long-term career.

Even a decade into an FM23 save, it’s very hard for young players to break through into a top club team. Because of how much FM relies on reputation in terms of team selection, most up-and-coming talents rot on the bench (or worse, in the reserves) until they’re about 23 or 24, when the game suddenly decides that they’re now ready to start.

It’s a problem at international level too, where far fewer starlets emerge at a young age compared to real-life. On one of my holiday saves, Jude Bellingham was still the youngest player in the England squad until 2029, by which point he was nearly 26! It’s also quite common for players who have consistently been in great form for several years to be ignored by their national teams, purely because their reputations are too low.

The one big positive now is that older players seem to decline at a steadier, more realistic rate. It’s not quite hit the Goldilocks zone just yet, but at least veterans don’t all suddenly lose their physical powers after their 32nd birthday (FM21) or stay in peak condition into their late-30s like Zlatan Ibrahimovic (FM22).

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SUMMARY

This is perhaps the longest post I’ve written on Fuller FM in years. I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to FM23.

Look… there’s no doubt that, after three decades at the top, Sports Interactive are still the undisputed champions of developing football management games. All their serious competitors were defeated long ago, yet SI are still looking for ways to push Football Manager to the next level.

But I’m afraid I cannot whole-heartedly recommend FM23. To me, this game isn’t only a major letdown; it feels like a potential tipping point for the entire franchise.

In some areas, it feels like FM hasn’t evolved enough. As someone who has been playing video games since the late 1990s, I won’t make any ridiculous comparisons like saying, “This looks like it was made for the Game Boy Color.” Yet the graphics DO look quite outdated, especially when compared to FIFA or… whatever Konami are doing now.

But in other areas, the game has arguably become too bloated. The user interface is less user-friendly and more cumbersome, while player and media interactions are messy and easily broken. To be brutally honest, I am not surprised that the backlash from the FM community has been especially strong this season.

As I am writing this post, I am in the process of moving house. Part of this involves taking stock of everything that I own, packing up and securing everything that I need, and throwing out anything that I don’t. I feel like Miles Jacobson and the good folks at SI should be taking a similar approach with FM.

Instead of adding more unnecessary features like wristwatches and manager timelines, SI need to cut down on the bloat, and focus on improving the core game. Many people in the community want a cleaner UI, a more stable ME, and better AI logic when it comes to transfers and interactions. If all that means we have to wait another year for women’s leagues and/or a modern graphics engine, so be it.

At this point, I should probably disclose that I did not buy my copy of FM23 – I won it in a competition run by my good friend in the community, FMBurt. If I hadn’t been so lucky, I could’ve maybe justified paying £45 for potentially hundreds of hours worth of entertainment… but in hindsight, I might as well have taken a year off.

If you played and enjoyed FM22, I’d suggest you stick with that for now. If your last game was FM21, you’re probably not missing out on too much. It might be worth buying FM23 if you haven’t played since FM20 or earlier, or if you’re brand new to the series, though I’d always advise playing the six-month demo to get a feel of the game first.

So, yeah… Football Manager 2023…