Football Manager 2014

Football Manager 2014 lets you live out your dream of managing your own Football club. Whether you're heading up tactics your local lower league squad or wrangling the superstars at Manchester United, the job is yours.

The Football Manager games are released by the same development team that basically invented the genre back in 1992 with publishers Eidos. Since then there have been yearly iterations with improvements to the interface and match generation technology. In 2004 the developers Sports Interactive split with Eidos and signed a deal with Sega to continue developing the series under the name Football Manager. The reasons for the split have never been revealed but Eidos kept the name Championship Manager along with the games interface.

Fans of the series were split over which franchise to go with but with the new release of Football Manager it seemed clear where the talent lay. Despite a change in name and a new interface the series continued to grow and achieve greater support and a larger player base whilst the Championship Manager series has struggled to garner any real following.

Football Manager 2014 introduces new mechanics and a new match generation system. As with all titles in the series the game features an exhaustive database of players with real world statistics and attitudes. It's your job to hunt out the best talent and train them to be part of a winning squad, all whilst managing wage expectations and goals set for you by the owners of your club.

It's a game and a series as a whole that rewards a real fanatical appreciation for the sport and if you're a big football fan to begin with then you certainly have a leg up. There's a lot of text to read and the majority of the action takes place in what's essentially a spreadsheet simulator although this iteration, as with a lot of recent iterations, goes a long way to make the UI a more appealing and inviting element to the game.

Even if you're not a big footie fan you can have a lot of fun here. If you're just a fan of statistics and in depth management challenges then we certainly suggest giving it a go.

Pros

• Exhaustively Researched
• Infinite Replayability

Cons

• Fiddly UI
• Daunting to Newcomers