Du Malone writes: Online I’ve been reading several save reveals for FM20. And I’ve enjoyed several of them. In particular, I liked:
- @thewideplaymaker’s ‘Mist Rolling in from the Trent‘
- @DirigoFM’s tale from the other side of the river
- @Armchair_Gaffer’s news from Pro Vercelli
And I look forward to reading how @TheFFM_ fares at CSKA Sofia.
And yet all this bothers me.
Why I feel uneasy
Three things bother me.
- Until FM20 actually arrives, nobody can know the precise characteristics of a club. What will be the general expectation? And the board’s? What precisely will each player’s attributes be? What will the staffing allocation be? On top of which, with FM20, we evidently have the board’s vision to consider. All of which makes me wonder, Don’t you want to know exactly what you’re taking on before you commit? I mean, don’t you get a survey done before you buy a property? Emptor caveat, surely.
- All this becomes more of a worry when the prospective manager announces in advance the tactics. Don’t tactics depend, even more, on the precise characteristics?
Plato and Aristotle, on the way to their technical areas. Photo by Brian Jackson, generously made available under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence There is, of course, a quasi-philosophical debate here: on the one hand come the Platonists, who form a vision of the tactics and get the players to conform, and, on the other, come the Aristotelians, who like to look at what they’ve got an decide how to get the best out of them. It’s the extreme Platonists who unnerve me.
- Why restrict yourself to one save? I don’t for one minute deny the attraction of a long-run save. I still relish my decades-long venture with Plymouth Argyle. But to the exclusion of all others? For my money, Football Manager is a wonderfully rich resource, affording an opportunity to experiment in an array of contexts. And that, surely, is how one learns most.
But if you want to do these things — select the club, determine the tactics, and remain forever loyal — then, of course, I’m not seriously suggesting it would be wrong to do so. We each pay our (not so very much) money and invest our (considerable amount of) time, for sure.
I’m just saying: it unnerves me.
