Players get tired more quickly if you constantly play at a breakneck tempo and the effect on their performance is palpable. The knock-on effect is considerable, with you now needing to pay more attention to opposition stars and in-form players as they are likely to turn your defenders inside out if not marshalled correctly. Seeing your high-press easily circumvented, players simply not being up to speed to execute your orders or overlapping full-backs failing to find space beyond the wingers gives you much to ponder. It is incrementally improved every year, of course, but this is a major reworking that vastly reduces, if not eradicates, much of the unusual ‘skating’ or odd backwards diagonal passes in previous games that were attached to the game’s ingrained logic.Įven if it doesn’t look vastly different on the surface, the detail is hugely important as it gives more personality to skilled players and allows you to see your game plan unfolding more clearly on the pitch - for better or worse. And much of the reason for this increased consequence is the result of the revamped match engine. In general terms this makes for an objectively better game. But it does place more value on the decisions you make. And should rest assured that FM22 doesn’t force anything upon you delegation remains a plausible option in most areas of the game. I imagine a swathe of you may be put off by this idea. The Pep Guardiola school of minutiae and detail. Juggling those trade-offs is increasingly important, mirroring the real world’s growing fascination with marginal gains.
Every small strategic shift -on the pitch, on the training ground, or even in the makeup of your backroom staff- can have a noticeable consequence. But once you start playing matches it becomes obvious that more weight is given to your choices and tactics. There are few sweeping, back-of-the-box changes that appear obvious when you first embark on your career, with players of previous iterations slipping comfortably back into the dugout (a little *too* comfortably in my case, apparently). To say that Football Manager 2022 is harder is true in a broad sense, but is also an oversimplification. Not even Everton had the good grace to collapse at Joshua King’s feet in the digital world, former Golden Boy Richarlison bundling home a late winner against my flagging men to secure a fifth defeat on the bounce. My team run ragged tired out by my high tempo demands, my stock with the infamously trigger-happy Watford board falling as the weeks progress. Safe to say I can now empathise with Claudio’s plight a wretched run of fixtures against the big boys leaving me pointless after five games.
Reviving my high-pressing 4-3-3 counter-attack that had served me so well, wondering just why Xisco Munoz and Claudio Ranieri, latest rider on the Hornets’ managerial merry-go-round, were making such hard work of the Premier League back in the real world. In FM21, I swept the Championship without losing a game before pushing on for Europe in the Premier League. In FM20, instead of the relegation that befell them in real life, I steered my beloved Watford to a respectable mid-table finish before building towards back-to-back domestic doubles with Norwegian wunderkind Erling Haaland at the spear of my attack. After all, I am a stalwart of Sports Interactive’s famously detailed and all-consuming simulation. Like many ingenues of football before me, it was the hubris that did for me early on in Football Manager 2022.
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