The new edition of the legendary Football Manager series packs a powerful new tactical effectiveness system that will really put top players through their paces and offers big reward for taking a successful risk.
FM27 will be available to try before you buy from Thursday, including the tactical effectiveness features that will govern the complexity of tactical innovations that can be trained into squads and the individual players within.
Prior to the launch of the free preview, FourFourTwo spoke to Sports Interactive and Football Manager developer Antony Farley about the new system.
'It's a measure of how well your players understand what you're asking them to do'
"It is quite a deep system, I would say, and one that the real hardcore – the people who really engage, think about FM, and leave no stone unturned – are going to have a lot of fun with," Farley tells FourFourTwo.
"To be really simple about it, it's a measure of how well your players understand what you're asking them to do and how well they're able to execute it.
"There are a lot of gauges in the experience to measure your progress in these areas. The two really important gauges we've added to your tactic give you a sense of its intensity (how physically demanding it is) and its complexity (more how mentally demanding it is). Then, a new gauge shows how effective you are at that tactic overall.
"Training has been reworked to be a little bit more about match preparation and working towards winning football matches. You'll see that breakdown of tactical effectiveness, and you may see that our pressing intensity is something we're a bit behind on at the moment: something the players aren't necessarily clicking with.
"You can then go in and cater your training sessions to work on that specifically, hopefully building their understanding of what you're asking them to do and becoming more effective at it."
Such detail isn't going to be for every FM27 player, but those who love to get down and dirty with the details should find that the time they invest in preparing their teams tactically can be time well spent.
"This is about risk-reward and new choices," says Farley.
"You might want to go into a club and ask them to do something really simple and straightforward, and you're probably going to get those players performing that tactic quite quickly, depending on the squad available to you.
"But it may be that that tactic has a bit of a ceiling to it: it's only going to be so good. Whereas you might go in and say, 'I've got something really complicated that I'm asking my team to do here.' It's going to take a while for your players to get up to speed with that.
"That's the balance of risk-reward and those new choices."
FM27 will be available to play as a free preview from October 29 to November 3. All game modes will be available within the preview, which can be accessed without proof of purchase for PC, Mac, Steam and Xbox.
