Football Manager 2021

Football Manager 2021 may not revolutionise the series, but instead it adds countless quality-of-life improvements – including ones to the match engine – that make it the best Football Manager game to date.

Football Manager 2021 is finally here. This is always something I look forward to. I've spent close to half-a-year of my life playing Football and Championship Manager titles and, like billions of others, the loss of football thanks to COVID was felt. With matches having returned, albeit behind closed doors and unable to watch them at a pub with friends, we're still not at that moment where I can say, with a song in my heart, that football's coming home.

With Football Manager 2021, Sports Interactive have once again delivered a game that countless fans will happily be pouring hundreds of hours of their lives into.

As I prepare for the 2021 season, I find myself surprisingly preoccupied with an Argentine’s right leg. Maxi Moralez isn’t present for training during the pre-season, thanks to an MCL injury and a sprain suffered in the final quarter of last year, and I’m missing his influence both on the pitch and in the dressing room. As the new, utterly clueless manager of NYCFC, I’d been counting on frasquito to help paper over the mistakes I was inevitably going to make in my first season of Football Manager 2021.

Sports Interactive has learned a few new moves.

Football Manager 2021 has done something that great managers do: it has acknowledged its weaknesses and improved upon them without completely rocking the boat. It still feels truly familiar as a Football Manager game, but the overhaul to expectations and communication makes for a more coherent and impactful experience. There’s more of a focus on what you say and do in your role as a manager and, over seasons, your performance is better judged. It makes a real difference to how the game can play out. The matchday experience may not be massively improved, but the improved focus elsewhere makes a...

A noticeable improvement over last year's installment. Football Manager 2021 addresses many of my personal peeves with the series whilst keeping the core design philosophy of the franchise intact. However, it is lacking a little in the way of new game-changing features and the few added haven't been implemented too well.