Football Manager 2020

I put many hours into FM 2016 over a few years, managing the majority of the teams in the Premier League. After a long break from the series, I return with Football Manager 2020 courtesy of the Epic Game Store.

Since it's a game of football, it's not got a great scope for major changes, other than an updated roster, new aesthetic, and tweaks to the match engine. So once you get used to the new layout for menus, it's really business as usual. There are some cool features though, it’s just that it doesn’t have a dramatic effect on the gameplay loop.

The default colour scheme is a nice purple colour, or use the black theme, but you can download your own skins to dramatically change the look.

Fundamentally, the tactics are still having you clicking buttons to make minor tweaks, but the process of creating them is different. You can choose an overall style such as “Vertical Tiki Taka” which gives you a better description of what you are trying to achieve. There’s three sections: “In Possession”, “In Transition” and “Out Of Possession”, and you can make tweaks within these areas, as well as player individual instructions.

You can choose whatever tactic you like, but the formation and style is recommended to you based on the type of players in your squad. There’s a lot of these Quality Of Life changes throughout the game.

There’s a few new player roles, or at least they have been renamed, such as the Mezzala and Inverted Winger. The tactic screen shows chemistry between players in the form of a solid line. It shows background colours from red to green to show coverage of that position - ie if you have a player that is Attacking role, and the player behind him is on Defense; and then the space between them might show as red, because no one will occupy that area. It also is affected by the player’s suitability for that role, so playing players out of position won’t give you good influence in that area of the pitch. The tactics screen also has some bullet-point “pros and cons” of your tactic.

I think chemistry has always been important, but there’s a greater focus on it in this iteration and it even has its own page; Dynamics. This can show you which squad members have formed friendship groups and who has influence. If you sell an influential player, then you are likely to cause disruption within the squad, and also annoy the fans.

The scouting is more detailed and there’s even a separate job role for Data analysts. Data analysts can recommend you players based on stats “this player completed 90% of his key passes, I think you should look at him”, then you have to send your scouts in to uncover his attributes and gain further judgement. Not only do you get a star rating for ability and potential, but you also get a numerical value (out of 100) for their recommendation.

In real life, over the last few years, transfer fees have skyrocketed, and so player values have increased within the game. I feel like the values are way too pricey though. Is a 33 year old Luis Suarez really worth £40m? I guess it is subjective; if you get 2 good years out of him before he sharply declines then retires - then maybe he is.

When you sign players, instead of giving them one role like “key player”, “rotation” etc, you now give them a role for each year of their contract; so it’s a progression plan. There’s also an option to promise to send them out on loan to guarantee them some first team football somewhere, to strengthen certain areas of your team, promise them captaincy, and more.

This is similar to when you sign contracts as a manager. You will agree with a 5 year plan with the board to show the ambition of the club. Maybe you are expecting to survive relegation this year, but want to progress to a Mid Table team in the coming years? They also may have a philosophy like they want you to adopt attacking football, or sign youth players to develop into first team regulars. I think it’s a good feature and realistically captures the culture of certain clubs, yet it makes it restrictive if you want to play the game your way.

You can define a Code of Conduct which auto-fines players that meet that criteria, rather than manually deciding as these events happen. So accumulating yellow cards, red cards, missing training etc can result in consistent, and automatic fines.

When you subscribe to teams/players/competitions, not only can you receive mail in your inbox about them, but there is a social media, Twitter-style feed. It’s actually a decent implementation and not too cringey, and I liked that when they were talking about a goal, there was sometimes a link to see a replay of the goal. You see a lot of transfer speculation on this page which can give you hints of realistic transfers to go for, or to prompt you to make your move to make a signing before he moves elsewhere.

When the game is loading, you are shown your calendar to easily see upcoming games for all squads (1st team, Reserve, Under 19’s), but can also see your training schedules. I really liked this idea as it gives you good visibility on how to manage your squad’s fitness.

Physios now give you “Potential injury risks” based on player conditioning and inform you about players returning from injury and how much you should play them. They will also tell you about potential permanent attribute decreases.

Instead of assigning one person as a mentor to a specific player, you now have Mentoring Groups. You need to group 3 or more players and they can all learn from each other, depending on their Influence, and presumably personality type (this seemed a major influence in previous games). This can help improve attributes but also transfer “Player Traits”. Players must exist in the same squad to be in the mentoring group. I guess this didn’t make sense in previous games because the First Team should train separately to the under 19’s, so how did they mentor them? As a workaround, you can just promote your Youngster but then make them available for the other squads.

In the match engine, players look way more agile. I saw some interesting goals where players would quickly pounce on rebounds. I also liked how they would stop the ball going out of play, but their momentum causes them to run off the pitch, then they have to quickly race back to get the ball. Players seem to put a lot more noticeable spin on the ball at times, which leads to some fantastic crossing, and amazing long range shots.

VAR has been implemented which is the video review system to spot offsides, handballs, and referee mistakes. It is quite rare to see it in action, but you mainly see it for confirming penalties rather than disallowed goals - unlike real life.

I liked how a Review Screen pops up at half time, prompting you to look at the statistics before you go in for the half-time team talk.

I seemed to encounter loads of niggly injuries, just 1-3 days, whereas major injuries seemed more of a rarity compared to previous iterations.

Players seem to whine a lot about their contracts. It’s infuriating how money-grabbing there are. You have someone on £100k per week on a 3 or 4 year contract and they moan that they are underpaid. I was constantly telling them they “had plenty of time remaining on their current one”, although mostly that caused them to go ranting to their team-mates. I found telling them you “didn’t want to disrupt the dressing room atmosphere” seemed to appease them, but only for a month before they came back to moan again. When I did cave in and reluctantly triple their wages, I liked that there was an option to start the contract at the end of the year. Agents seemed willing to accept that as a compromise.
The interaction with the media doesn’t seem to have changed, so it’s basically the same stock responses which don’t seem to matter (well, as long as you don’t publicly criticise someone), and so you will blindly click or just delegate to your assistant manager.

There’s a lot of analysis, but some of the information seems to be buried in sub-menus, or you have to go a different view. It can be quite clicky to get the information you want.

I think most people will already know if they want an iteration of the FM series or not. I’ll need to invest hundreds of hours to experiment with the tactics to really understand the match engine tweaks, but from what I have seen over 4 seasons, it’s a definite improvement.