Football Manager 2014

Football Manager 2014 is the next edition of one of the most popular and longest football manager series, which started back in 1992 under the name of Championship Manager. Sports Interactive studio, responsible for the title, has introduced more than 1,000 changes and improvements as compared to the last year's edition, thus making the game the most expansive and realistic installment of the entire series.

The basic rules of the game have not changed. The game simulates the work of a manager of a football team, putting the full weight of the club on the shoulders of the player, which includes everything from administrative issues through the wide range of sport aspects. During the subsequent seasons a skilled manager needs to take care of organizing, training, and motivating players, making transfers and searching for promising sportsmen, as well as keeping good communication with fans and the press. The key element is setting lineups for individual matches and choosing advanced tactics that would help achieve victory.

Traditionally, the most visible changes are upgrades to the graphics engine that generates individual games. The 2014 edition has got improved artificial intelligence as well as lighting and players animations whose reactions to the events on the pitch are now more realistic. The user interface has undergone a major renovation in order to modernize its key elements, such as training window or transfer center. Also, the language of the game was slightly modified, in order to more closely resemble football jargon. A significant change was also made to news system that now allows you to deal with many aspects of the club directly from your inbox.

Football Manager 2014 has much more realistic systems of transfers and contracts. New transfer clauses were added, and negotiations may be now conducted either traditionally or live. In this new installment of the series even more emphasis was put on interaction between manager and the managing board, players, staff and the media. The board may make demands and push through their plans for the club, while the manager can renegotiate the budget, depending on the current situation of the club. Coaching staff shares their opinions on individual players from the entire squad – also from the reserves and juniors. If necessary, you can ask the key players for mediations, or to motivate the rest of the team.

The last worth mentioning novelty are improvements to Football Manager Classic mode, which was introduced in last year's edition. It has been prepared mainly for the less experienced players who do not want to spend time on all the meticulous club management aspects. In this mode, a large portion of the responsibilities is transferred to assistants, while players take care of a much simplified management that focuses purely on sport aspects. The new edition of the game offers more than three playable countries and enables to take advantage of a number of editors and new unlockable materials.

It is worth noting that for the first time in the history of the series Football Manager 2014 can play be played on Linux. The developers have also tried to integrate the game with Steam service even better. This resulted in, among others, possibility to keep game saves in the cloud and resume the game on any device without having to manually move the needed files. Moreover, Steam Workshop support was added, which greatly expands possibilities to share fan-made modifications with the rest of the community.

Last updated on August 14, 2015