Football Manager 14 Wishlist

Its not long now until Football Manager 14 will be on our doorstep, on our computers and being the reason behind many relationship breakdowns.

We wanted to explore what could potentially be included on the game, put it one place and hopefully point one of the boys over at SI in this direction, you never know!

No doubt the guys at SI will be doing all kinds of research to see what the loyal gamer like you and me is wanting to see on their beloved games, but I don’t know about you, I have been slightly disappointed by the 2013 and 12 releases, I feel there are a few features that have been ‘overworked’ and some that are completely non-existent.

Anyway, lets be constructive about the forthcoming release (November-ish) of the 2014 version of Football Manager.

My FM 2014 feature wish list

There is soo much that is missing from Football Manager, it could be much more friendly to customisation and I wonder why SI have not made that step yet. For example:

Customisable formations are a must.

Of course you can customise your formations on most if not all previous versions of FM but I mean totally ‘drag and drop’ player formations, where you can create and tweak a players position to match their abilities. For example, we all know Eden Hazard is a great AMC but because his default (bright green) position is AML the only option you really have is to stick him out there on a AP or IF tactic to try and encourage him to come infield and influence the play more. But for me, for my confidence I want to play him slightly narrower than AML, but more wide than left AMC and I think I should be able to do this.

If i remember correctly, one football management game allowed you to do this, can’t remember which, might night even have been FM.

The problems this small adaption would solve for me is endless, 99% of the careers that I start and don’t follow up on is because I don’t have the team to match the formation I want/need to play or vice versa. Sort it out SI.

Re-invest in the game.

Owning and managing a club must be the want of all managers out there and I think enabling this would be an awesome feature for Football Manager 14, let me tell you why and how it could work.

Throughout the game you build up money, no doubt ask for higher and higher salaries from your club for no other reason than personal achievement, why not give us a way to spend this money, invest it, earn dividends from the club we manage etc.

Or even better, after I have taken Arsenal to 10 seasons of unrivalled success, let me resign as boss and use my millions to buy hard-up Northampton Town FC, improve their stadium, inject money in to transfer funds and manage the team myself. Maybe you could just own the other club but keep your Arsenal job until your own team get promotion to a league you want to play in.

Improve the pre-match and half time team talks.

It is soo annoying only being able to use a couple of the ‘multiple options’ to inspire your team, what is even more frustrating is the fact that 9 times out of 10 you are using exactly the same team talk, it just becomes a case of another annoying couple of clicks before you get in to your game.

This is far too one dimensional, even though there are quite a few options most are never used.

For me there is an easy fix, bring across the ‘team meeting’ type arrangement, where you can have a full blown convo with your team about the match ahead, give yourself the chance to correct or try something different if your first approach does not work.

But, also on that note, the team meeting engine is the worst part of Football Manager 13, it never works the way it should, you are nearly always 50/50 with the obvious choice of words working and for some comments, the outcomes make no sense whatsoever.

Decimal places on stats.

Though this, for me anyway, should be a feature that you have to dig for or turn off and on I think it would make great sense to have 1 decimal place on each stat, so you can more accurately gauge the growth of the player. For example finishing doesn’t go from 19-20, it goes to 19.1, 19.2 etc. Of course this would happen at the same/similar speed to the current format but give the manager a far more accurate idea of training success/failings.

Give us a metric to tutor/train harder/more efficiently.

There isn’t many months that go by without getting several million messages from your back room staff that you should be training blah blah to be doing this or putting some regen under the wing of some old player to help his growth. Do we ever really know the success of this?

I can’t imagine it being too difficult for the training report/staff member reasoning to include something like:

Mr Trainer thinks that WIll Hughes will benefit from learning from Frank Lampard, he estimates that this will improve his training success by 6%.

Or

Mr Trainer thinks that Sumyoung Striker will improve his finishing by 10% if he is put on a personal training schedule.

Revive Manager Contract negotiations

This one isn’t my own idea but I loved it so much that I just had to include it on this post, thanks to MyPassion4Footballmanager.com for letting me use it, you can find his post about his ideal Football Manager 14 wish list here. 

Manager contracts are very basic in Football Manager 2013. Apart from being able to request your own footballing philosophy, I would love if you could set some minimum requests or demands for accepting a new contract, just like in real life with reference to the Jose Mourinho saga, which is going on these days, for instance:

• Be able to setup a shopping list of possible transfer targets which you demands that the club approaches to sign before agreeing to a new contract or signing for a new club.
• Request that the board upgrades youth facilities or other important assets to the facilities for agreeing to a new contract
• Request that the board makes room for a specific favorite backroom staff of yours. This backroom staff member could exceed the limit set by the board.

What would you like to see in Football Manager 14?

Send us you ideas using the contact form below and we will add them to this list, lets hope SI spot us!