Football Manager is a game about planning and careful management.
Get two players for every position, three Goalkeepers to be safe and a couple of players with enough potential to break through during the season, create a tactic that plays to their strengths and disguises their weaknesses (Personally, I’m a man of the 4-2-3-1), and you’re set for a solid campaign. Deal with the personal dramas and transfer rumours, hit the bargains, balance wages, struggle with the needs of the board and slowly climb your way through the footballing world, while keeping your club’s best interests at heart.
That constant mental cynicism leaves, of course, space for the emotional, unpredictable magic of football. No matter how well you prepare, you cannot win every game, you will not win every title and won’t develop every promising player. There will always be a lonely early goal, a defense you can’t breach, an injury streak or a penalty to the woodwork (Yes, I’m still salty about that Ronaldo miss).
But for all of the inherent randomness, there is always a possible response. You are able to change your tactics at any time, substitute players, lie to the media, end contracts or simply win through consistency and repetition, over the occasional bad luck.
You get to do all of that because you are the sole, all powerful head manager of Carlisle United, and you and only you rule the faiths of your club, 100 pound budget permits. Power is the essence of Football Manager, the ability to completely restructure a club, to ruthlessly drag it, kicking and screaming towards success, save your results are awfully below par. That unrealistic power trip is what truly allows for the FM experience
That is, until you take on a B team.
As strange as it may seem, until last week, I had never done so. Therefore, as I prepared the coming season with FCP B, it came to me as a surprise how terribly designed the management system was. It is, for one thing, consistent. In the many times I have managed A teams, I used and abused my B team as I pleased, they played my unfit players, I took their star players, sold their backups and bought only cheap prospects. Through all of that, the manager of my B team gave me nothing in the way of a complaint, which I was forced into once we switched roles.
While I generally appreciate depth and realism, this particular piece of it makes for awful game design, because it destroys the essence of Football Manager, interaction and power. The design of the B teams lacks not only depth, but consistency and goals.
Firstly, because you are so artificially separated from your parent club. You are able to discuss the usage of your loaned players with other coaches, but at no point do you debate on your shared players with the A team coach. In reality, B teams, the youth system and the main squad’s coach work together to figure out how to better serve the club both at the moment and in the future; in FM, the A team manager abuses all the other squads to improve his immediate odds of success, while sacrificing everyone else’s work.
Secondly, because managing a B team feels like a dead end job, where careers go to die. Don’t take me wrong, managing Porto B is quite the step up from the eternal underdog that was my Casa Pia side, but halfway through my first season on the job, enjoying an 18 point lead on SLB B, I realized I was doomed to be a massive fish in a very small pond. I could not be promoted, I could not qualify for European competitions, I couldn’t even take my team to cup glory. For every season of my 3 year contract I was doomed to fight the same League, as other teams rose and fell around me. There is no new step on a B team’s competitive ladder, at most they can be relegated, but their success is eternally capped.
Amazingly enough, that is not the worst part of the B team design in Football Manager. The greatest failure of this particular piece of gameplay is the lack of foresight and consistency, which allies itself to the AI’s terrible decision making to create the absolute antithesis of classical Football Manager.
At no point are you able to predict which of your players will be sold, promoted to the A squad or loaned out. These decisions appear to be nearly random at times, or merely reliant on which players are at top form, without regards to how they would fit into the main squad’s needs, or how they will risk the quality of the B team. In the most extreme cases, the AI somehow seems to believe it is reasonable to, within the space of one week, loan the B team’s key centre back to be a backup to Panetolikos, sell the key left winger and promote both right defenders and the team’s goalkeeper to the main squad (only to give them back three months later without a single minute for the A team).
It is truly baffling to me, how, in a game that asks for such a tactical mentality, it is possible to be left in a situation where you are at once unable to renew a player’s contract, keep your key squad member or maintain any kind of squad harmony. And it is a true shame how terribly the design of the B team system stains the wonderful experience that is Football Manager to fans of the king sport.
One can only hope it will soon be corrected, because it is as close as a simulator may come to thematic inconsistency.
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