Sports Interactive's "Football Manager" series (formerly "Championship Manager") has walked a fine line between showing what's happening and filling in the blanks since its launch in the 1990s. It's easy for those who stray from that gravitational pull to poke fun at the match engine, which has yet to match the spreadsheets and PS2-era "FIFA," but they miss the point: the great trick of FM is to make you believe so deeply in its world that you let your imagination fill in all the gaps.

That's great. But with the arrival of Football Manager 2021, bringing a new detail-rich match engine and sports data analysis numbers that erase any ambiguity about tactics, veteran managers are in for a bit of a culture shock. You will no longer envision the precise shimmy in which Jayden Sancho found space to put in the cross that would score the Champions League final goal. It's not quite Dylan Goes Electric, but it's still a landmark moment in this series.

And while there may be ambiguity, it is a positive one. Because which tactics worked, which tactics lost badly and left them furious, reloaded, added a new manager who said "Revenge, you tw*ts," gave them jobs at opposing clubs, sold all their best players and put youth team strikers in goal, the FM There was much charm in the etherealness of the I'm sorry, but I was trapped there. There was mysterious fascination, but also a lot of frustration.

Now there is no place for inefficient and pointless tactical systems to hide. While it may be confusing at first to see where they are failing, with a plethora of heat maps and graphs showing the areas the players are covering, where the passing is disorganized, why they can't get crosses into the box, and why, in rare moments, they are cheered on by all who visit their home turf, it is you can see it with your own eyes.

Given the newfound power to discover the inner workings of formations and tactics, it is no longer enough to just sign awesome players, send them out on the pitch, and expect them to return to the dressing room with three points. Honestly, you can have Ronaldo, Messi, and Neymar in your starting eleven, but if they can't get the ball to them, even a mid-tier team like Arsenal can contain them.

FM21 makes this path to tactical enlightenment a little easier by making the UI adjustments and tutorial stages deeper. When you take over a new club, you are building your tactical approach from scratch. This begins not with formations, but with philosophy. Klopp's Gegenpress. Or the pure Route One of Ligue 2. If your fullbacks are the type to stay at home, it is unwise to build tactics based on them sprinting up and down the pitch, overlapping with the wingers and joining the attack.

Your backroom staff will have some suggestions as to what approach or formation would best suit your current team, but as ever, you are free (and often wise) to disagree with them completely. There may be plans to invite fresh talent to help implement the new system.

And then another major change in FM21 rears its head. Agents can now be approached directly to negotiate transfers, and while many editions have had individual personalities and opinions about you, this year those statistics and values take on new weight. This is because if you can establish a good relationship with even one of these dreaded blood-sucking parasites, the entire portfolio of players will be easier to sign. Agents can quickly take the temperature of a potential transfer and tell you if the player is interested and what his annual salary demands are. After all, if the target is not willing to move, then there is no point in micromanaging the director and the transfer fee.

Of course, it's not just the relationship with the agent that matters. Strange as it may sound, this year's update allows for the addition of gestures in addition to the classic tone-of-voice option (I don't think I've ever uttered a word that wasn't "assertive" in my seven years as Fulham's director in FM13). If you are truly angry with the cavemen in the dressing room, you can literally kick the water bottle to get your point across.

These are all welcome features and contribute to a deeper level of the series that only James Cameron and his mini-subs could have portrayed in depth. But it is also the downside of the FM career: it is the "Wading Through Treacle Syndrome": what was just four clicks a week in the days of CM is now experiencing a national blockade. There is so much information out there that FM21 can't tell which information is really pertinent. Dealing with dressing room mutinies and post-match interviews becomes tedious enough after a few months; it's possible to unsubscribe from much of the FM spam, but that in itself is a chore; Sports Interactive has been shrewd in adding valuable features in recent years. Perhaps now is the time to grease the wheels of the giant machine and facilitate the passage of time between matches.

Still, the urge for the next match is as strong as ever. Maybe more than ever, in fact, thanks to an improved match engine. Never before have we been able to see the difference in quality between Ligue 2 soccer and top-flight matches, and between weaker and stronger players on the pitch.

Once again this year, Sports Interactive has managed to make a compelling case for returning to this franchise that probably spent 500 hours last year. The difference may seem subtle to an outsider, but it changes your decision-making on a profound level. Sorting through your inbox each week is harder than ever, but FM21 continues its winning streak.