Football Manager 2023 Beta issues
I’ve spent around 90 hours playing football manager 23 since its release in beta, I decided to take the helm at Afan Lido, nestling near the bottom of the Welsh second division I figured it would be a good starting place for a road to glory save. I’m a fairly experienced football manager player; each year I’ll log around 700+ hours into the game, but this year I’ve really started to notice the flaws whilst managing in a smaller reputation league.
Managing in a lower reputation country, like Wales, poses some challenges that the game’s developers have clearly overlooked, namely the way team comparison, the data hub and staff recruitment work.
After 4 seasons at the helm, I’ve taken Afan Lido from an amateur side to the Champions League final, and that immediately flags my fist issue with the game. It’s too easy. After settling on a tactic, I was able to take my squad through the Champions League with relative ease, despite the quality of players being roughly equivalent to a lower Premier League or high Championship side. Brushing past Real Madrid and Inter Milan in the group stages, ultimately saw me qualify as the 7th seed in the newly styled Swiss format group stages.
After the group stages came ties against RB Leipzig, Manchester United and Liverpool, all of whom were beaten. Into the final against Real Madrid, despite beating them in the group stages we were defeated at the final hurdle, 3–1.
Perhaps you would expect a massive boost in reputation for a team that was ranked at just one star at the start of the tournament, well, at the start of the next season Afan Lido now have a two-star reputation, half a star less than League One side Wycombe Wanderers.
That miniscule boost in reputation has meant that despite having £70 million in the bank and a weekly wage budget that eclipses the yearly budget of any other team in the league combined, I struggle to attract ready made players. Moreover, and perhaps the most annoying part are the transfer offers I’m receiving. For my star striker, 19-year-old Welsh wonderkid Adam Andrew, Brentford offered just £40.5k. Of course, the players immediately revolt when I don’t accept these poultry offers and team morale plummets. I eventually accepted Brentford’s offer after attaching a 50% sell on clause, and after completing the transfer, Andrew was immediately worth £14–16.5 million at Brentford.
Now even with the excessive money in the bank, board requests to improve the youth facilities continue to fall on deaf ears as they prefer me to find players in the transfer market, which means it’s rather difficult for me to fulfil home grown quotas for European matches without some squad filler type players who are nowhere near good enough.
Perhaps one of the most annoying oversights is the inability to compare your club to teams outside of your own division. Whilst I’m sure the majority of players manage bigger teams, in more competitive leagues as Sports Interactive cited for a reason for not focusing more time into International Management this has led to significant oversights in how game systems operate outside of the “normal” play-through.
The Welsh Premier League is primarily made up of semi-professional teams with only Afan Lido and The New Saints fully professional clubs in my save. As such the coaching, recruitment and medical staff comparison screen are made completely redundant. I have by far the best staff in the league but that doesn’t quite help me understand where I need to improve my staff in comparison to clubs in the Champions League, which is the next logical step for improving the club. In an ideal world there would be a drop-down menu in which you could compare your staff averages against other leagues or competitions, which would offer a greater insight into precisely where you need to focus recruitment.
The data hub is another victim of this short-sighted approach. As you are only able to compare how your players stack up against the league average this data become distorted extremely quickly in less competitive leagues. In my case, you’re essentially comparing how Premier League quality players stack up against non-league semi-professionals, and there’s no way to compare against other more reputable leagues. Every player in the league is below average because my own players are such outliers, they drag the “average” way out of whack. In stark contrast, data from sites like FBref, allows you to easily compare how players stack up across the top 5 European leagues, and any scatter gram drawn from this data is far more useful than anything offered by football manager.
The only way to recruit when you manage in a less reputable league is from abroad, in my case it’s primarily from the English league system due to difficulties gaining work permits for foreign nationals. In theory, these scatter grams could prove immensely useful in finding the next high scoring attacker or replacing my aging goalkeeper. There may well be technical limitations stopping the game from collecting this level of data for every active league in a player’s save game, however the reality is, the data hub is rather useless for recruitment and entirely redundant in my save.
My time with the FM23 beta has been largely unrewarding, the ease at which my average squad blitzes through continental competitions and the subsequent lack of recognition in the form of a reputation boost feels very unrealistic. When I attempt to improve my club by recruiting new staff or players I’m left to do everything myself because the systems the game provides are entirely redundant so long as they are only focussed on league based comparisons and don’t take into context the other active leagues and competitions in a save game.
