Football Manager Survey – The Results: What The Real Experts Think

by Chappers  8/08/2013 | 1:52 4 Posted in Best Stuff, FM 2014, Football Manager 13, Opinion 

Around a month ago we launched a Football Manager survey to find out exactly what you, the real FM experts, really think about the game we all love and the responses have been phenomenal.

In little over 4 weeks we have had an astonishing 5,620 responses and if you took part, thanks a bunch!

We thought it would be selfish of us to keep the results to ourselves so here we go, lets see what you lot had to say.

The first question in the survey was “What is your overall opinion of Football Manager 2013?”

The responses matched our opinion of the game really, 43% said the game was “pretty good” and 39% answered that the game was “awesome”.

Importantly for SI, only 6% believed the game was the “best one ever”, which when you consider the game was the best-selling version of the game ever, isn’t the best feedback.

Interestingly though, not one single respondent said the game was “very poor”.

What does this tell us?: FM 2013 was by far the biggest selling version of the game in its existence, more people are buying it that ever so surely each one should be better than the last? Guess not, in my opinion 2012 is the best version in a long time and it seems everyone else isn’t too far behind those thoughts.

The second question in the survey was designed to understand the age range of the respondents.

The largest proportion of which were 22-29 years old which was more than double of that in any other age range.

What does this tell us?: Some people and some FM bloggers around at the moment believe FM is only a game for younger-heads, kids who need their parents to buy the game for them, it certainly is not. The majority (large) of our 5,620 respondents were between the ages of 22 and 29, couple that with the fact most people are playing the game ‘most days’ it seems the average FM player is a working man. That’s certainly the case in my experience.

Thirdly we asked “What ‘stature’ of team do you usually manage in your first season?”

We felt this was an important question to ask, though not relevant to much other than ‘how people play the game’ we thought it important.

The results of this question was fairly unexpected by us, we assumed that most people would be taking over at ‘top 6′ teams but the majority (28%) of our visitors were taking over mid-table teams in their first game on Football Manager 2013.

Only 8% of people take over the ‘best teams in the league’, with 7% taking over at the helm of ‘relegation battlers’.

What does this tell us?: You could be forgiven for thinking that people would follow their off-game support of football teams with their first club in-game but this doesn’t seem to be ringing true.  With only 8% of people taking over one of the best teams in the league, it seems we FM prefer a challenge over our loyal support.

The fourth question in our survey was designed to understand the credentials of our respondents.

“How long have you been playing the Football Manager series?”

By far the biggest response, over 54% was from people who had been playing FM ‘since Champ-man days’ which really added some authority to the answers we were getting.

What does this tell us?: This is a crucial question for the credibility of our answers, more than 54% of the people who got involved in our survey have been playing the game since Championship Manager days. In combination with some other answers you can start to see a loyal fan-base maybe turning slightly sour with the way the game is progressing.

Fifth in the survey was “How often do you play Football Manager?”

Only 3 answers were really used with this question, 94% of the respondents either played FM every day (27%), most days (41%) or a few times a week (26%).

The 6th question was by far the most important for our survey, it signifies what the real experts of the game think could change, the question was:

“What changes would most improve Football Manager 2014?”

Lots of the answers on the list were popular, with “Improve youth training – give ability to ‘mould’ young players” being the most popular, 69% of respondents wanted to see changes in this area of the game.

The second most popular answer was ”Improve youth training – give ability to ‘mould’ young players” with 67% of respondents thinking it would be a worthy addition.

Other notable answers included improving scout accuracy, giving the manager more control over sponsorship deals and to give the manager the ability to spend his/her personal earnings in-game. All of which were wanted by between 50-55% of the respondents.

Question 7 was designed to understand the buyer behaviours and the anticipation of Football Manager 2014, this, along with the first question gives us a realistic barring on the real-success of the game.

We asked “When will you buy Football Manager 2014?”

The answers were split across a few results but the bulk of people were either going to buy the game “as soon as it is available for pre-order” or on “the day it is released”. These made up 56% of the answers.

Question 8 was “Not including in-game issues, what is your biggest frustration with the FM series? “

A lot of the answers to this question were popular but the biggest concern was users getting bored and needing to start multiple games, 22% of respondents had the same issue.

This has to be a big concern for the game makers and I can say that I agree, I find myself getting bored after a few seasons because the game becomes ruled by regens. I know they are a necessity in the games longevity but there is ways and means of extending the life-span of any given game. For me the best way to do this would be to build a proper Youth Development structure, where you could recruit kids as young as 10, because these regens would have been developed by you, they wouldn’t be as detrimental to the future annoyance of them taking over.

For question 9 we wanted to understand what information people look for online, this was mainly so we could make sure we had that information on the site for you, the question was:

“What information do you look/search for online about Football Manager?”

Turns out you all want to see information on the best players and downloads, go figure!

The final question was ”How many of your friends play FM?”

This was a bit of a wildcard really, I have several friends that play FM but its a fairly ‘solo’ game so we wanted to know if it was the same for everyone else.

Over 28% of you have ’2 or 3′ friends that play FM, snap! Seems we are more alike than you might think.

I’m sure you are drawing your own conclusions about what this information means for the game, for SI and for the forthcoming 2014 release but what other things can we learn about FM based on these results?

For example, when you combine the age groups and the fact people play ‘most days’ more than any other result, you can safely say that most FM players work full-time.

You can also assume that because the majority prefer a challenge over team-loyalty they, in most cases, will need to find online help and guidance to find the players that suit the team they have chosen rather than knowing that already.

Do you have any conclusions? Let’s talk below.