The Development Centre doesn’t ensure those promising kids all become world-beaters, but at a glance it’s at least apparent why they’re not flourishing.
Football manager full#
Traditionally, keeping tabs on your potential wonderkids has been one of the fiddlier and less enjoyable aspects of the job, too often leaving you stumped as to why the 16 year-old you'd pegged as the Bolivian Messi has a stats screen full of downward arrows.
![football manager football manager](https://static3.gamerantimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/football-manager-2021-cover-art.jpg)
Top of the pile is the Development Centre, essentially a new menu which aggregates all the useful info you’d want to know about your young players in your organisation’s youth squads. That’s not to cast its new additions to the side altogether, though. Like a great impressionist painter, Football Manager 2020 captures the whole ecosystem of the sport using an email inbox, some menus, and a match engine that, yes, still looks more like Virtua Striker than FIFA. Instead, players are drawn into its intoxicating spreadsheets and carefully simulated calf strains by the things that don’t change: the astounding depth of its player database, the attention to detail in every aspect of its dutiful recreation of the football world.
![football manager football manager](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/bltcc7a7ffd2fbf71f5/blt9af5d7a1453f5a76/6168184d4b93a211320a8acd/2cc2d463c8710b808df5c708df81336627cd1a05.jpg)
Nobody’s enticed into a new Football Manager game by its new features, however useful or profound they might be. The easiest explanation for its form would be the new features it includes, but that isn’t quite right. And yet Football Manager 2020 emerges from the undergrowth like a latter-day Jamie Vardy: not much to look at, but metronomically consistent, and good for another season of entertainment despite its advancing years. Amid all that noise, following up a widely celebrated iteration of Football Manager must feel like navigating a jungle without a map. Broadly similar to being an actual football manager, in that regard.
![football manager football manager](https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/844960/capsule_616x353.jpg)
Every day of the year your social media feed is inundated with feedback from fans whose suggestions range from genuinely useful insights to grounds for police action. Picture what it must be like to be Sports Interactive studio director Miles Jacobson and his team.