On this episode of the Official XBOX Podcast, we’re sitting down with the team behind Football Manager 27. The long running franchise is back and better than ever with all of the info, stats, insights, and more you’ll need to live out your football manager dreams. And, we’ll hear how the franchise has made an actual impact on the world of football and how the world of football has helped guide the franchise forward over the years.TRANSCRIPTSPEAKER 1: Games in this podcast range from E to M. [ XBOX sound ]JOE SKREBELS: Hello and welcome to the official XBOX podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside XBOX. I’m Joe Skrebels and I have once again been drafted in as XBOX’s designated British correspondent because in this episode we are talking Football Manager 27 which arrives for XBOX on PC starting on October 29th with a console edition following on November 10th. And both of those editions are coming to Game Pass. But maybe you’ve never played this series before. Maybe you watched this year’s World Cup and thought I could do better than that, and did not realise that there was a game and a series to try to do exactly that. So who better to break down all of that than Sports Interactive Senior Features Manager Ant Farley. Ant, hello, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?ANT FARLEY: I am very well, thank you. Thanks very much for having me.JOE SKREBELS: No worries at all. How’s the run-up to launch going?ANT FARLEY: It’s such a buzz. I’ve been in the studio for quite a long time, 18 years but it never wears off that novelty of putting something out there in the world and seeing how it resonates with them.JOE SKREBELS: I can imagine. And as we’ve kind of set up here the World Cup probably brought a lot more new eyes to football and we will be calling it football in this episode. I apologise. You can leave your notes in the comments. Are you looking at this as like kind of a moment for Football Manager in that way? Certainly hope so, yeah. I mean the World Cup is obviously a huge, huge global event and actually we had it licensed in Football Manager 26. First time we’ve ever had that. Licensed FIFA World Cup. Football’s the global game. And one of the main, I guess, selling points or appeals of Football Manager is we simulate that huge football world to a really detailed level. Anyone that falls in love with the game of football, the more passionate you get about it the more you start thinking, oh, I could do that better. You said at the top. Football Manager gives you a chance to prove that by kind of making those decisions, making those calls that a real-life football manager would do in a real kind of simulation environment. Very detailed simulation environment. And you’ve got at it there but for someone who might not know exactly what this series is or what this genre is, how do you sum up something this wide ranging?ANT FARLEY: It’s more of a strategy simulation title than an action title. You’re not controlling the players but really it’s about the core areas of what a real-life football manager or head coach does. They’re making transfers. They’re buying new players. They’re training their team. They’re setting the tactic. They’re setting the game plan. They’re managing finances and budgets. It sounds like a job basically because what we’re trying to do is simulate the job of a real football manager. We have a lot of in-game mechanics if you like that help with that onboarding. Let’s just say you’re new to the game and you know the buying of the players is something that really excites you but maybe the training not so much might be something you want to kind of get around to a little bit later into your journey. We have the option to delegate that to your staff members. One of our big selling points if you like is our database of players and staff which is over a million human beings that we research and we get their attributes, and you know the information and how much potential they’ve got for players. So you’ve got the real world staff at these football clubs as well. So you can kind of tailor their experience that you want from it. You could play an FM save where all you’re doing is picking your tactics and playing the matches or you can really go into the big detail of taking care of everything, micromanaging every element of what goes on at your football club. We give you those options. You know, if you think you can do better than a real-life football manager we’ll give you the opportunity to prove it.JOE SKREBELS: As you mentioned, this series has been going on for a very long time at this point. How are you approaching this year? How you’re iterating on that new take on the game that you had last year?ANT FARLEY: I think, iterating is a really key word there. So the FM26 release was our first game in the Unity engine that required everything to be designed and built from the ground up again. So what that has given us now in FM27 is a foundation that we can then get back into that rhythm of iterating on. The changes we’ve made for 27 are a lot about reacting to feedback, both internal and external. We’ve tried to make the game easiest to navigate. Some of our consumers felt the 26 felt a bit narrowed in on your own club, what’s happening at your own club. And I think we realized that was a lot about the navigation of the title. It wasn’t necessarily as easy to get down those rabbit holes that FM fans fall in love with. People can kind of sort of click around FM and end up all of a sudden, I’m looking at a player in the Bulgarian second tier and you go, well, hang on, how did I end up here. (Laughter.) The magic of FM in a lot of ways. So a lot of the changes for 27 are about reducing the amount of clicks to take on that exploration through the navigation of the title. And we also wanted to bring a few more new choices to the experience. Everything is gearing towards match day as a football manager. Ultimately, you’re going to be judged on winning football matches, fulfilling the criteria of your team. And we’ve introduced a new cool feature called Tactical Tweaks this year, which I think will be really helpful for people that don’t know football that well or don’t know FM that well, actually. The tactics side of the match simulation can be a bit intimidating, I think, as the real world of football tactics can get quite complicated. So what we’ve done with Tactical Tweaks, if we’ve effectively given you a single button to press that will make multiple changes and it kind of summarizes it a little bit. If I want my team to play with more urgency, I can press a button that says, play with more urgency. And what that’s doing is it’s making a bunch of different tactical changes in the system, but you’re not having to navigate those menus. And crucially, you’re doing that from the touchline as well as a manager. So you feel a lot more of an active participant in those matches by, you know, really feeling like you’re shouting from the touchline and instructing, you know, you get forward, you come back a little bit. We’re very, very fortunate that we benefit from what we call foot talks in the studio, which is where we get real world professionals from football that come in and kind of talk to us in a nice safe environment. And that can range from, you know, people that work in the recruitment side, technical directors, but right down to those real world football managers as well. And we use the insights we can get from those discussions to help inform our features year on year. That Tactical Tweaks is one that we’ve really heard a lot from insiders on. How do you deliver instructions to your team from the touchline? And if you’re in a big loud stadium, right, you can’t be getting into the real detail of what you want them to be doing, but you can give a simplified instruction that the players then understand and can kind of enact. So this is a cool version of that for 27.JOE SKREBELS: We’ve heard about clubs using your database for real life player scouting. There are top flight managers, Will Still, recently, who have credited the game to them starting their careers. There was at one point and a whole online theory that Jose Mourinho played the game because someone spotted the icon on his laptop in a documentary. I mean, do you think about it as you’re now beyond simulating football and into almost actually affecting football in that way?ANT FARLEY: Yeah, I think so to an extent. I mean, the real trends in football over the last sort of 10 years or so has been towards data. And you see some really successful teams in the UK, you know, Brentford and Brighton that are doing fantastically well. They’ve really started from kind of a data first perspective, you know. And I think that that is something that, you know, Football Manager has really been an influence on because that’s really what you’ve been doing while you’ve been playing our game. You’re looking at attributes and form ratings and stats and, you know, trying to use those to inform your decisions of what you want to do on the pitch. And I do think that that is a huge part of football these days that we’ve had a big influence on.JOE SKREBELS: I literally support Real Betis, a Spanish club, because of a Football Manager save in 2005. You hear this kind of story a lot. I’d love to know if the studio has favourite stories about how people have sort of taken Football Manager beyond the game. >> My absolute hero growing up was Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and learning that he played the game that I then went on to work on. And then he ended up managing the team that I love. You know, I was there seeing him on the touchline and I’m like, oh yes, he’s one of us. [ Laughter ] So there’s so many things like that. Players as well, Anton Griezmann, Dembele. They’re very vocal FM fans. So yeah, we’ve got a lot of cool stories. What would you suggest to someone who’s never played before? How could they start a game of FM and learn the ropes most easily?ANT FARLEY: It’s something we talk about an awful lot. We’ve got this big, complicated beast, but we want to make sure that it’s not unfriendly. I think that was a lot of the redesigns that we took in place when we moved to Unity Engine. We’re about trying to kind of make it a little bit friendly as an experience, you know, a little bit more affordance, a little bit more predictability mechanically, which can be handled relatively well with in-game tutorialization. I think there’s a lot of great content creators out there that put videos together that explain kind of how to do what you’re looking to do in the game. Football is a game of marginal gains. We’re in a maybe unique position as a game where you can kind of make all of the right choices and all the right decisions and still lose the game. [ Laughter ] That’s how football is. So when that penny drops and you start getting to that, like that reward of doing well, when, you know, seeing the team you support grow and run up the leagues, or you may be taking a plucky underdog and, you know, killing a giant in a cup game or something like that, that’s where you really start to learn the appeal of the game at that point. So if you’ve not got a pre-existing relationship with football, I think that that, you know, requires a level of patience a little bit further. If you’re a football fan, you’re going to kind of be halfway there already.JOE SKREBELS: I saw that you brought back watching cup draws like team by team coming out of the hat. And this idea that there’s something to be anticipated — is narrativization almost part of the watchword this year for you?ANT FARLEY: Yeah, very much so. Immersion was a real key word for us this year. I’ve touched on that with the navigation, that kind of organic immersion that you can feel through gameplay and just through kind of like browsing that football world that’s going on around you. But we also put a lot of thought into the actual composition of the screens this year as well. Those as immersive as possible. What that means in reality is if you go and look at a club that you’re not managing, right, let’s just say you’re managing Arsenal and you go and have a look at Bournemouth, you should get a sense of the past, present and future of Bournemouth in that moment. Who are Bournemouth? You’ve seen their rise up the leagues over the last few seasons and you get that sense of their history. What’s the present of Bournemouth? Will you now see who’s playing best for them this season? Who’s their top scorer? Who’s their manager? What transfers have they made? And then what’s the future for Bournemouth? Who’s the next match against? What’s the news that’s going on with Bournemouth at the moment? Are they in transfer negotiations for a player that might be coming in? And we try to apply that thinking to kind of everything — competitions, players, clubs, as I mentioned, to kind of bring that sense of emerging and that sense of kind of narrative to the forefront. Because what that does is it allows for the theatre of the mind that’s so important and those emergent narratives that are such a big part of a Football Manager. We’ve also tried to reinforce that with a little bit more direct, straight to source with news stories and news content this year. We were thinking about the phases of the football season quite a lot this year and how, you know, the first eight weeks of the season, you’ll see very different news stories to the middle of the season and the last, you know, eight weeks of the season. So you’ll see really in-depth club season previews now that give you that picture of, you know, this team’s got a new manager and then they’re in Europe for the first time. What’s going on over there? And then as you move through the season, you might go, oh, that manager’s under pressure and I wasn’t anticipating that. You know, are they going to get sacked? Aren’t they going to get sacked right to the end of the season? Who’s going to win the league? Who’s getting relegated? Who’s overperforming? Who’s underperforming? We’re trying to get that front and center as well. So you’ve got the emergent narrative and then you’ve got the narratives that we can actually tell in game too.JOE SKREBELS: Nice. And we mentioned that the PC version of the game is coming on October 29th and that the console version is coming on November 10th, both to Game Pass. So you have plenty of choice depending on what platform you own. But if you had both, can you sort of break down the differences between those two versions for us?ANT FARLEY: Sure. I mean, ultimately, they both offer the same core experience. Which is, if you think you know better than a real football manager, you can go and prove it in either game. But the console version, we would say, is a little bit more streamlined and it’s a little bit faster pace. The PC version is one where we’ve introduced some new options, in fact, for trying to articulate the pace of your gameplay, what happens when you press continue. You might want to fly through matches very quickly or we’ve got a more comprehensive mode, which will take you to different sort of game areas to kind of allow for those emergent narratives that we just spoke about. But yeah, the console version has some unique features as well that aren’t on the PC version and vice versa. Console has a notion of pivotal moments, which is kind of putting some of these sort of more drastic player choices front and center, which is a nice cool bit of gameplay. They also operate under a more visual version pillar, which means that maybe there’s some analysis or some statistics in the PC version that are kind of a little bit more numerical. The console version might find a more visual way of communicating that information. Regardless of which choice you make, you should still get that same core offering, but just slightly different flavors.JOE SKREBELS: Nice. And I’d love to finish up with just a few classic quickfire Football Manager questions. To start with, do you have a go-to club you always start a save with? Is it Man United or do you have a smaller club that you tend to pick?ANT FARLEY: I typically will manage as Manchester United during the development cycle.JOE SKREBELS: Okay.ANT FARLEY: When we’ve locked for release, I’ll then start my proper save. I’m thinking maybe Middlesbrough this year might be my save. That would be a good option. But the allure of Coventry in the Premier League is quite big for me this year as well. That challenge of staying in the Premier League is really quite appealing to me, I think.JOE SKREBELS: That’s great. Is there a player that sticks out as someone that you would always sign?ANT FARLEY: There’s so many. I’ve got a very self-imposed rule that I will not buy a player that has less than 15 for work rate. [ Laughter ]JOE SKREBELS: That’s a good rule, yeah. Okay.ANT FARLEY: So high work rate players are always particularly appealing. Patrick Berg at Bodo/Glimt. The one that’s got all of the mental attributes that I’m looking for, for leadership, and for work rate and for being that character in the dressing room that I want everyone to look up to. Keane Lewis-Potter at Brentford.JOE SKREBELS: Oh, yeah.ANT FARLEY: He’s done excellent for me on a few saves, but he’s now a little bit less attainable now that he’s playing in the Premier League. But high work rate, that’s what I’m looking for.JOE SKREBELS: That’s good. We talked about Newgens and how you create footballing communities as the game goes on. Some of those names are incredible. I’d love to know if you have any favourite Newgen names.ANT FARLEY: I had love at first sight, I’m going to describe it actually, with a Newgen that I had in a Crystal Palace save a few seasons ago. I’ll reveal the name at the end.JOE SKREBELS: (Laughter) Okay.ANT FARLEY: Came through, he was what you’d describe as a diminutive winger. I think he was five foot five, so short of stature, very low strength, but had that work rate that I look for. Had determination, 20 determination, and his crosses were absolutely unbelievable. Fantastic crosser, so he had everything that I was looking for as well. Cherry on the cake was his name was Billy Whips. [ Laughter ] That is good. So Billy Whips, I think very fondly of.JOE SKREBELS: I love that. I’d love to know what you consider to be your greatest Football Manager achievement in-game, as opposed to creating Football Managers.ANT FARLEY: I also had a very good save in FM26. I had an Aberdeen save that I broke the old firm dominance. I won the title in Scotland.JOE SKREBELS: You did what Hearts couldn’t do. And got to the knockouts in the Champions League as well. So that was a real big achievement. That is pretty good.ANT FARLEY: Way, way, way, way back in the day, again, before I was working here, and again, I guess a testament to our database. But when Cesc Fabregas and Andres Iniesta were kind of just youngsters at Barcelona and hadn’t gone on to have the careers they were having, I took them both to Charlton, and they became the best midfield in world football.JOE SKREBELS: (Laughter). Incredible.ANT FARLEY: World domination with Charlton was pretty good going.JOE SKREBELS: Well, can you, listener/viewer, beat world domination with Charlton? You can find out in Football Manager 27, coming out on October 29th on XBOX on PC and XBOX consoles on November 10th, both with Game Pass. All that remains to say is thank you for joining us, Ant.ANT FARLEY: Thank you for having me.JOE SKREBELS: We’ll see you next time on the official XBOX podcast. Thank you very much. [ XBOX sound ]The post Football Manager 27: The Real World of Football Meets Your Digital Decisions | Official XBOX Podcast appeared first on XBOX Wire.