

You sign up to a forward-looking Team Vision from the board, tailored to the club. Rather than just concentrating on the season at hand, more emphasis is now placed on the next 3-5 years. The new additions focus on longer-term planning. The menus are presented in a clear, crisp, and ordered way, so navigating your way around soon becomes second nature. Thankfully the clear explanations never bamboozled me for long, and often just playing around in different sections is the best way to learn. The sheer amount to learn was overwhelming at first, thanks to twenty years of ignorance. These tutorials do a solid job of introducing the basics, leaving the nuance and extra depth for you to discover. Everything from training regimes to scouting, to reviewing your injured players is discussed in detail.

However, a robust set of tutorials for the uninitiated soon set me straight. The sheer breadth of options and considerations was staggering upon firing the game up and plumping for Career Mode. My concern about Football Manager 2020 being impenetrable wasn’t without reason. But despite a continuous passion for the beautiful game, I dropped off the bandwagon around the time of Championship Manager 3 at the turn of the century, and the rest is history, and here I am now playing Football Manager 2020 every night. Finds like Ibrahima Bakayoko would become the stuff of legend as we trawled the databases looking for rough diamonds to transform into glittering superstars. Back in the late 90s, with Championship Manager, my friends and I poured in countless hours, in the strive for managerial dominance. I haven’t touched a Football Manager game in roughly two decades, and I suspect there may be a lot of people reading this in a similar situation.
