When developing Football Manager, and our games before that, we’ve always tried to make entertainment that provides the best value for money on the planet and also offers an escape from the real world. People have always used FM to create their own fantasy world and we reasoned that now, more than ever, they needed something to take them away from reality… not to remind them of it.
Of course, we couldn’t stop people who ‘mod’ our games from including COVID-19 in FM20, but we really dislike what their work did to our game – and from what I’ve seen on social media, so did most of the people who downloaded and used those mods. FM is meant to be an escape from reality, and having a squad ravaged with an illness has the opposite effect.
However, that was FM20. We knew that our stance would have to change for FM21 as COVID-19 and – possibly more significantly – its social and economic effects have had a serious impact on real world football. As we pride ourselves on FM’s realism, we knew that we had to reflect that, while still offering that escape.
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Let’s start with the money side of things. It’s no secret that football clubs around the world are suffering financially. The absence of supporters from the stadiums not only means a huge loss of revenue from ticket sales, but also from concessions and merchandising.
This will be reflected in FM21, as your chosen club’s finances will inevitably be in a worse state than you would normally expect when you start a new save. The most visible knock-on effect of this will be transfers; we’ve rewritten chunks of our transfer system to ensure that while superstars and wonderkids will retain their value, FM21 will see more ‘loan to buy’ offers, the value of mid-range players dropping and clubs in real financial trouble trying to move players on a more regular basis. However, as money comes back into the game over time, the transfer system will adapt and eventually return to some sense of ‘normal’.
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Something we thought long and hard about was when (and whether) we should let supporters back into FM21’s stadia. We eventually decided that crowds will attend matches from the very start. The revenue this generates will allow clubs to get back onto an even keel sooner and will help with the above-mentioned in-game financial and transfer systems.
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Finally on the subject of dates, transfer windows will start by matching their current real life counterparts, but will revert to ‘normal’ in season two.
Match wise, we’re going with substitution rules as they are in real life for season one; if a league is using five subs (rather than three) then so are we. Then, like the transfer windows mentioned above, revert to ‘the old normal’ in season two, unless the competition in question has already indicated that the plan is to adopt the new rule for the long term.
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But there’s one point where we haven’t settled on a decision, because I would like to throw it out to you, the people who will spend huge amounts of time playing FM in the coming months. The feature in question is the new ‘gesture system’ that you may have seen revealed in our new headline features video.
When this system was first devised we included a number of gestures that (at the time) were completely normal, but now aren’t part of daily life – one perfect example being ‘shake hands’ as a greeting. In game, we have changed that one to ‘elbow bump’, which seems to be the most used tactic to avoid hand shaking at the moment. However, I’m aware that that goes against our ‘trying to be Covid free, whilst not completely ripping up the real football world’ policy.