Football Manager 2023 Review (PC)

Liverpool’s real-world season is mildly disappointing, with inexplicable losses to relegation candidates and an inability to deliver the spectacle of last year. My virtual campaign with the same team also started rough, with a 5-0 loss at Manchester United. I then had three consecutive games at Anfield and won them all, using a more conservative approach while giving more freedom to Salah and Firmino. I am now in third place before the World Cup, thinking about potential transfer targets for the January window.

Meanwhile, Thiago is injured for 2 months, Gomez and Matip are underperforming, the fans are only slowly warming up to me as a manager, and Alexander-Arnold shows signs that he might want to leave for PSG. New signing Darwin Nunez is very unhappy with his limited playing time and my attempts at mollifying him have only made things worse.

Football Manager 2023 is developed by Sports Interactive and published by SEGA. I played the PC version using Steam. A version of the game is also offered on the Xbox Series X and S, the PlayStation 5, and the Xbox One. A Touch version of the game is set to arrive on the Nintendo Switch. The title is part of a long-running series that delivers a deep simulation of the sport of football.

The setup is simple yet compelling: choose any football team in the many simulated nations and then guide its fortunes. You can manage your childhood club or choose one of the biggest on the planet, the ones that sign superstars and constantly battle for trophies.

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Players are real and, for the first time this year, there’s a full license for the UEFA competitions, including the Champions League, the Europa League, and the Conference League. The game features a lot of writing, most of it functional. It’s a particular disappointment that they have not tweaked the press conference system in any way.

Football Manager 2023 gives players almost full control over a club, should they want it. Want to scrap the entire training program and create a special new one? You can (I tend to delegate this part to the assistant). Gamers can handle scouting and transfers, engage with the youth system, interact with the board, and choose their staff.

The most important task is to choose eleven players and then design the best tactical system for them. There are plenty of choices both for how the team acts on the pitch and how individual players react to situations. During matches, a little fine-tuning is possible via substitutions, shouts, and tactical tweaks.

The biggest gameplay tweak will make long-term planning easier. Players can quickly see which players are at their peak and which still developing. It eases the job of planning transfers and scouting work. It’s less impressive for big teams but will make a difference for a smaller club looking to move up.

Computer-controlled clubs also seem better able to adapt their tactics over the course of a season. Gegenpress remains a little too effective as a tactic and I set myself the challenge of avoiding it. But I like that smaller teams can pose problems, especially in the 2022-23 season, with its weird World Cup placement. Still, clubs with plenty of money to buy great players dominate the scene, as they do in real life.

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I understand why people dismiss Football Manager as a collection of spreadsheets with a decent presentation. The game does deliver a lot of information for the players who want it and it takes some time to get all the systems if playing for the first time. Success requires analysis, planning, and careful decisions.

But I treat the series as more of a role-playing experience centered on statistics. A team filled with superstars that don’t like the manager and want to move cannot perform on the pitch. Interactions with the board and fans are crucial. It’s fundamental to get tactics right but it is as important to get the relationships right.

And all the complexity, info, and interactions create a lot of emerging stories. This is a narrative generator, although it takes time and energy for the best ones to develop. I won the domestic league with Rapid in Romania (one of the teams I supported when I was a child) and picked up the European League trophy, retiring when most of the first-team players I know from the real world hung up their boots.

I took Fulham to seventh in the Premier League, despite a weird relationship with the fans and a transfer market in which all my good players left for bigger teams. And I will continue to play my Liverpool save until I get sacked or Trent Alexander-Arnold retires from football. The new Dynamic Manager Timeline is a good way to relieve all these stories

Football Manager 2023 has managed to marginally improve data presentation. It is also enhancing detail in the actual matches. The first one is important because the game throws a lot of information and choices at players. The interface presents data well but newcomers will need some time to learn all the intricacies. Matchday presentation is full of all the pomp associated with the biggest leagues in the world. The full UEFA license really helps in making big European nights feel important, especially when taking a smaller team to the top. The sound design continues to be a weak point for the presentation, but there are plenty of good football podcasts to listen to while playing.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion