Football Manager 2017

Football Manager 2017 is a deep-end football management simulation developed by Sports Interactive and published by SEGA, released in November 2016. You take control of a professional, semi-professional, or amateur club and handle everything: squad building, contract negotiations, tactical setup, press conferences, training routines, and transfer dealings across a database covering over 50 leagues and more than 2,500 clubs worldwide. There is no ball at your feet here. You are the person in the technical area with a clipboard, not the one curling one into the top corner. The headline improvement this year is the match engine, and it is a genuine one. In previous entries, wingers reaching the byline would fire hopelessly from impossible angles, crosses were overpowered, and right backs were almost comically dominant. FM2017 cleans most of that up. Player movement is noticeably smarter, and you will see fuller variety in how goals are constructed - cutbacks, through-balls, speculative deflections. The engine also responds more honestly to your tactical instructions, which matters a lot when you are trying to build a counter-pressing system over multiple seasons. Pair that with new post-match heat maps, upgraded scouting reports showing opponent tendencies, and staff reports that now surface actionable advice in one or two clicks instead of burying it in menus, and the day-to-day workflow is meaningfully faster. Pre-match opponent analysis now includes heat maps and formation breakdowns, so preparation actually pays off on the pitch in a way it did not always in FM2016. The new features outside the engine are more uneven. The social media feed - a Twitter-like tab showing fan and media reactions to your decisions - sounds useful in concept. In practice, the content pool is shallow and the same responses start recycling before your first season is even done. The face-scanning tool that maps your real photo onto a manager avatar is cosmetically fine and basically irrelevant. The genuinely interesting addition is the Brexit simulation: between two and ten seasons into your save, a scenario triggers that can range from soft (no change to player movement) to hard (EU players needing work permits for English clubs, and Scotland voting to stay in the EU independently). For anyone managing a Premier League or lower-league English club, this can completely reshape your recruitment strategy in the late game, and it is the kind of macro-level event FM rarely does. Online multiplayer is also here, and the Draft mode - where managers build squads by picking real players in turn order within a budget - remains a fun way to play with friends over a long afternoon. For newcomers, FM2017 is genuinely more accessible than earlier entries in the series. The quick-start option gets you into a save fast, and the assistant manager handles enough of the workload that the initial information overload is manageable. Tooltips and staff advisories do most of the tutorial work. That said, this is still a game that rewards obsessive preparation, and it is one of the harder entries in the series when it comes to punishing tactical mistakes across a full season. If you already own FM2016 and were happy with it, the incremental nature of the improvements means the upgrade question is genuinely debatable. If you skipped FM2016 or are new to the series, FM2017 is a very solid place to start - the match engine and UI streamlining make it the most playable version up to that point. Just be honest with yourself about whether you have 200 hours to give it, because the game will absolutely ask for them.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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