Football Manager 2014

If you like what lies beyond every match, Football Manager 2014 is the only option you should consider.

Whether you are looking for a coaching career or a simply deep experience as a manager with no frills, the latest incarnation of the series created by Sports Interactive will meet once again to your need.

Sports Interactive made the hardest job in football better than ever. [Issue#142, p.120]

Football Manager 2014 finds improvements in its details. That makes it the best, most expansive and mostly most accessible football management simulation ever, without sacrificing its depth.

Sports Interactive continues to push the boundaries. On the surface this is just a collection of visually enhanced excel sheets, but under the numbers and tables you find a lot of personality. This is a gem from soccer crazies for soccer crazies.

With every new addition to the franchise Sports Interactive achieves new heights of realism and addiction. This is the definitive Football Manager.

That FM continues to build an enormous, cogent world out of a crazy, crazy sport continues to be a marvel. The romanticism of being able to mould a club to your own desires is the fuel of its appeal. And now, with its focus on the people that fill these clubs, this year it is its heart that impresses most.

Football Manager 2014 might not seem to do anything new at a glance, but nothing could be farther from the truth. It has many big and small improvements, that make the manager-experience better and more interesting than in previous installments. This will keep you busy for tens of hours, guaranteed.

The new Football Manager 2014 has been renewed, thanks to a more immediate design, the inclusion of new options, management tactics and game dynamics. The significantly improved graphics engine completes this year's package.

Football Manager 2014 comes with hundreds of new features, related to all the aspects of a game that each year makes its players feel more and more like a Special One.

I am immensely happy that I can take everything I have learnt and plug it into a simulator over the summer whilst I’m travelling around Brazil watching the World Cup. It’s simple and strips out a lot of what I’ve done and utilised this year but the raw challenge is there - to win something and develop the team.

A top game and the best of its kind. It suits all comers, and is the most complete management sim yet.

The full game is for those with actual dreams (faded or otherwise) of being a football manager, while Classic mode is aimed at those with a more active social life and a desire for instant gratification. Whereas last year's game was the beginning of this dual-focus outlook, this season it feels fully realised thanks to the further depth and complexity added to the core experience.

FM 2014 allows you to do more in less time, but it doesn't mean you won't spend as many hours as you do every year playing the game. Whether you're desperately trying to avoid relegation or win that all-important cup final, this year's entry will once again keep you invested for a long time.

Football Manager is growing every year, and this edition won't be an exception. The game focuses on finding an interaction increasingly realistic and it extends that to our dealings with the club Directive... although the match engine is still not at the level of the rest of the game and interaction with the players on the field is very far from the interaction outside it. A game mandatory for all football lovers who really want to test their knowledge of the sport. Seems very simple when discussing at the pub.

It's a deep game focused on keeping kickball obsessives happy - and succeeds at doing just that. [Jan 2014, p.82]

Deep, exciting and, for the first time, as human as real football, Football Manager 2014 has hit the back of the net.

FM 2014 unnecessarily tries to be two games in one. Instead of investing in the intentionally limited Classic mode, the developer should work on increasing the role of the assistants in the primary mode. Changes in the tactics system are sensible, but would be more valuable if the game did a better job at explaining what all the options mean and what the consequences of using them are. [13/2013, p.50]

An excellent management simulator - and not much else.

Football Manager 2014 says goodbye to the slide bars and toggles for the tactics, and says hello to a more streamlined experience. Is it worse? It depends on the player.

Football Manager 2014 - for fans of the series and lovers of a more strategic version of football - is a truly great and unparalleled game. Attention to detail, representation of various mechanics and a very high satisfaction rate deserve the highest praise. On the other hand, this year's edition brings surprisingly little novelties and innovations. Still - FM enthusiasts will definitely love this game.

Really, it's amazing again. Football Manager 2013 was already nearly perfect, but this one seems to be perfect and more realistic. Although there's the fear of getting too realistic; making the game less fun. That's a warming for next year, because this year it's luckily still alright.

Sports Interactive has taken a long look at their primary tactical setup and made changes to make it more relatable to their audience and also more analogous to the influence that real-life managers are able to exert. As long as they keep pulling tricks like this, Football Manager is a series that will remain evergreen.

Football Manager 2014 feels more like a lifestyle than a game. I just doubt thee need of yearly iterations in the era of DLCs. [Feb 2014]

FM2014 is a refined, tactically-rich game which gives you countless tools to play with in an infinite sporting sandbox.

Very little of what Football Manager 2014 adds to the series is radically new. Aside from the simplified tactics system, most changes are small, refining the user experience rather than dramatically changing the way you play. That said, these minor changes are impressively numerous and universally welcome, and they come together to make this the best, most addictive (only) management simulation available.

What Football Manager needs to do as a franchise is make it much more approachable to new players.

Overall, then, FM2014 is a quality product; an enjoyable entry point into the series for new players and customisable enough for series veterans to add or remove the features they want to make the best experience for them.

The franchise continues with its yearly release and though the innovations are few and far between Football Manager 2014 is still as enjoyable as it has ever been. The undisputed king of manager games sits comfortably on its throne.

On face value there are fewer drastic improvements, but many gentle refinements to the UI and subtle additions to its newer formulas mean that Football Manager 2014 improves solidly where it counts.

The changes to the tactics system are likely to prove controversial but this is undeniably the most accessible and realistic Football Manager ever made.

Another year's volume, another Football Manager, another hundreds of hours of the virtual football game throughout the mouse-clicking. There are no strong novelties this year. It's more about cosmetic changes and debugging the two main game modes. For fans of the series this is a traditional must. For the others this is a chance to hop into the long-established series of intoxicating football madness with improved Classic mode.

Football Manager 2014 will not bring any great addition as was the mode Classics last year, but a refining to the way we interact with various elements of the game, with special emphasis on tactics and interface. It continues as the deepest, more complex and detailed football coach simulator around, and a “guaranteed addiction” for the entire year.

As usual with the Football Manager series, we know where we put our money in. Partly to reward the tremendous work of a team that knows and loves football, who seek the opinions of experts to recreate the best of everything that makes the salt of football/soccer.

Sports Interactive tried to change the philosophy beneath Football Manager, but it doesn't work as we expected. The new tactics editor simplifies the game in many ways, and we are not sure it is the feature hardcore gamers were waiting for, considering that Classic Mode already exists.

A fun and life-absorbing game, yes, but a fickle one. In so many ways, it's like the real thing.

Football Manager 2014 is as much about removing the restrictions of past installments as it is about introducing new content.

While FM14 feels in many ways like a standard release, the subtle changes to philosophy beneath the hood feel like a corner being turned - an acceptance, perhaps, that sometimes for a complex simulation to remain captivating, parts of it must be made simpler.

Much like inspecting the evolution of Rooney’s fascinating mop, you’ll need a magnifying glass to identify the follicles of change that make a real difference to the Football Manager experience.