Football Manager 2011

Football Manager 2011, like its predecessors – either in the Championship Manager form or the rebranded Football Manager series – is a fantastic backroom, strategy and management football game. In Football Manager 2011, you take the position of – you guessed it – a football manager. You start the game at the beginning of the football year, choose your player, choose your strategy and make all the decisions every budding Alex Ferguson might think of.

The Football Manager series is known to go on for weeks and even if you were rushing through a season, it’d still take quite a few hours. These are games that you invest your time in, and Football Manager 2011 – with its new features, larger database of players and clubs, and more interactive game play – is no exception. It is important to note, to those unfamiliar with the Football Manager series, that this is not your typical football sports game like the Fifa or Pro Evolution Soccer series. This is a game dedicated to the management, strategy and simulation side of football, and while there are 3D games to watch, the matches themselves are entirely lacking when lined up alongside other football game series.

Pro's: Highly configurable, huge replay-ability, the best football management game out there.

Con's: Requires a lot of time invested into it, 3D game play is lacking.

Conclusion: Football Manager 2011 offers a level of realism, professionalism and depth that many video games simply could never offer. You can spend weeks and weeks playing a single season of Football Manager and forever be learning something. Never will you feel like you’re clicking ‘Next’ just for the sake of it. Yet this expansiveness will naturally turn many away, and if long-term, large-scale, management simulation games aren’t for you, then you should avoid at all costs. As with each instalment of the game, Football Manager 2011 gets better than the last, and when you’re already the greatest football management game out, that’s a winning combination.