Playing "Football Manager" makes you more knowledgeable as a soccer fan. You sound educated when you talk to your peers about promising new players in the Austrian League. The wide world outside the Premier League is full of talent whose time is ripe. [In Football Manager 2023, that has never been more true. If you like playing with virtual spreadsheets and trying to take your small local soccer club to the Champions League, look no further.

I've been trying to do just that for 18 years, and thanks to the ultra-realism of Football Manager 2023, I can sign off from my work email at 5 p.m. and get into my fantasy email at 6 p.m. In a way that no other sports simulator has, learning the game translates directly into real-life soccer knowledge. And like every other iteration that has appeared so far, I am completely hooked.

In Football Manager 2023, I am a manager, but I am also much more than that. I am the head coach, the chief financial officer, the director of football, the entire personnel department, and the media relations. I think Jose Mourinho's workload is less than mine as football manager. He can spend 25 hours recruiting, scouting, setting tactics, optimizing training schedules, etc., or he can leave most of it to his backroom staff and just deal with recruiting for the first preseason.

The trouble is.

It's really overwhelming and feels almost like the same experience as "Football Manager 2022."

Similar to FM22. I started with FM05's 2D, but the 3D engine has been bumping along like an iPhone game since its introduction; FM fans don't play FM for the graphics, but FIFA23 does. Sound also has not moved forward in my opinion. It's a far cry from match day sound, and the crowd is so inaccurate it's unbearable; the new UEFA-licensed Champions League anthems provide a taste of the audio excitement. Mute until qualifying, unmute for one match, then back to mute again.

The community has a saying: "FM've been FM'd." No matter what you do, the RNG will give you better stats, but that you will lose the game. But this happens a lot in real soccer, for example, Leicester winning the Premier League. The anger caused by this will never go away. The biggest improvement in this year's match engine is that the AI managers have become smarter and change tactics during the game. This makes the game more difficult and sometimes triggers even more anger.

While the match engine is a mature beast and changes are made every year, the limited amount of animation in the 3D engine means that there is little change from match to match. Your own midfielder gets a red card once or twice a season for hacking an attacker in the back with two feet. But it still feels like football, and the players react to every change you make from the sideline, for better or worse.

Tactically, the new defensive system has made blocks and shapes smarter. New options are now available, such as offside traps, aggressive transition play, and defensive width against crosses. This is great for players like me, who sign five great attackers every season and have no defensive strings attached.

However, set plays are still like a lottery, and tweaking things like corner routines usually results in more misses than goals, so I'm leaving them as defaults to save me the trouble of downloading broken corner routines from the Steam workshop, I would like to hire a set-piece expert to create one that works best for my team.

I have signed with my club, Coventry City, and am desperately trying to put together a core of young talent. I am basically trying to hinder their career progression and selfishly push the club to the top. It takes a couple of hours before we actually play a game, i.e., a test of marriage, and we have several new players to parade in front of the media. Let's be honest, the 24-hour news culture surrounding world soccer revolves around transfers.

First, we have to look at new player planners, but even that has its problems. I love free transfers and the triallist is missing from the latest player layer analysis. I have done so myself, but it is frustrating to put in 4 extra clicks for what used to be one view. What the scad planner has helped with recruiting is the experience matrix. It is useful to see the gap after a few seasons when experienced players leave and developmental and young players stop coming in. Certainly, it eliminates the need to rush out and buy expensive players at peak times.

Then, every transfer market, I get called into a recruiting meeting by the chief scout to tell me if I am headed in the right or wrong direction. Sports Interactive has changed this meeting to be more reflective of what is happening in the soccer world, but I feel the extra "conversations" and changes that come with the recruiting focus have made this an even longer process.

FM22's meeting was now a "Alex, look at all the great players we have at positions we are short on. I hope you will consider buying some of them."

The new dynamic timeline is a seemingly small integration, but when you've been making long-term saves for years, it jolts the memory; the fun and addictiveness of Football Manager is in the stories you can tell in your head about winning cups, discovering star players, writing legends, etc. winning cups, discovering stars, and writing legends in your head. I still remember the joy of developing an up-and-coming Dutch central midfielder in the academy and turning him into a triple crown-winning international (Neek Smith, I miss you).

While it is reasonably easy to get involved by choosing a club you know, exotic football managers dive into the unknown with an extensive database. The size of the database determines the depth of the game and how far you can go. Choose a size from Small, Medium, or Large, or select more leagues and players to import into the Advanced Database Setup. More players and a larger database equals more bargains to discover - don't forget to load South America. Technically, the game is lightweight, so most PCs can easily run such a huge advanced database. I also play it on my Macbook, because the January transfer market is the best accompaniment on trains and planes.

Eventually, there will be mods that introduce more playable leagues into the deeper parts of the soccer pyramid system, and the Football Manager modding community will usually have a fix for things like real names, along with missing badges, kits, and player faces on day one Have. These add a bit of immersion that is lost with blank faces and generic badges, and are especially helpful if you don't know who the team you are running is.Some FM players randomly support the foreign club they run in the game, buying shirts and watching "their team" Some even fly abroad to see "their team.

No other sports game allows you to play in your own way, using only your imagination, and offers such a wide range of challenges that you can set for yourself. Whether you want to get rich, beat the best, or win the league with your favorite team, there's something for everyone.

If you need to save scraps and achieve a 100-game winning streak to finalize the outcome, you can do it. We need to sell a 36 year old non-league striker with no knees to Real Madrid for £100 million" Indeed we do. I used to do that when I was younger, but I don't get the same satisfaction anymore.

New fans get the ultimate football management/strategy/sim, but may find all the bells and whistles quite intimidating. Veteran Football Manager managers will not feel the revolution of the game they played last year, but will play it anyway. See also: all the sports games released each year.

Every save begins with an introduction that makes FM more user-friendly for beginners, but if you want to get the hang of the game, try the Xbox version that comes back to PC through Game Pass. Think of it as a Touch version of the game, which is currently available exclusively on Apple Arcade and Nintendo Switch. It's like the original Championship Manager 01/02, with tactics, transfers, and games at your fingertips. This game is a great introduction to FM and is perfect before playing the "full fat" version.

Still, despite the fact that the latest version of Football Manager ignited my management addiction, I can't help but feel that something more drastic needs to be added if Football Manager 24 is to remain relevant. Years of technical debt and the annual release crunch are preventing the Sports Interactive team from delivering a new era of bestsellers, which may threaten the game in the long run.

Who knows what form this revolution will take, but given that they are working on women's soccer under the radar, they may have the ace in the hole to ensure that future new releases start with a bang.