Football Manager 2011 Pre-Match Interview

Future Football Manager Features

bit-tech: How do you decide what goes into which year’s game?

Miles Jacobson: What we did at the start of this year is we decided to have a monster feature session – we actually had three weeks of feature meetings, and the feature meetings lasted from 11 o’clock til 7 o’clock every single day of the week for three weeks.

We went through 1,500 feature ideas, which had come from everyone. These ideas all went into the meeting, and went through and we voted on everything and decided what we wanted to see in the game over the long term and what we never wanted to see in the game. [We also voted on] what the priorities were for the ideas as well.


We know what the core things are that we want to do for FM12, FM13 - at the moment we’ve got far too much stuff – so I’ll be going through 12 and 13 again and assigning some of that stuff to 14. We’ve also got about 400 new ideas that have come up in the last year that we’ll sit down and go through as soon as FM11 is out, and then I’ll schedule those again for the different games.

bt: What things will we never see in FM?

MJ: Streakers. Won’t ever see streakers. Cheerleaders – won’t ever see them either.

Aliens too; we won’t see aliens. There was an idea – and I have to take responsibility for this, but I was drunk when I put this idea into the database – that in 2030 there would be a random, 1-in-100 chance of aliens landing on the earth whose stats could go up to 30 for pace and acceleration because they had 3 legs.

There are other thing which don’t have a place in football, such as hooliganism or bungs… we don’t want to see those things in football, so we’re not going to promote them


bt: So, players crowding around the referee would be one of those things?

MJ:We’ve very much been helping the FA with their Respect campaign, and promoting the fact that referees need respect. So, no you wouldn’t have players surrounding the referee [in FM], you would have players going and talking to the referee. I think the days of a bunch of players surrounding the ref are gone anyway – if that was to happen now in real life, multiple players are going to get sent off, clubs are going to get huge fines.

bt What about the… er, naughty activities of footballers?

MJ Not going to happen. We do have it with generated players, which is another thing that we’ve re-vamped this year, by the way – the new-gens are now more specific to player roles, which means they’ll be a lot more balanced.

New-gens can miss training because they’ve been out a nightclub the night before. But it won’t happen with real players - there are all kinds of legal issues surrounding that stuff, and I’m also of the belief that a footballer’s life is absolutely none of my business. I hate the fact that it gets reported in the way that it does, and I hope it’s something that never happens to game developers!

Football Manager 2011 is made by Sports Interactive, and published by Sega. You can pick it up from your favourite games retailer from tomorrow, Nov 5th 2010 - until then, let us know your thoughts in the forums.