Conveniently just before the new Premier League season starts Sports Interactive give us something new to be excited about, the first details of the new Football Manager 2010. There was never any doubt that a follow up to the hugely successful yet slightly flawed Football Manager 2009 would be released and Sports Interactive have confirmed it will be released on October 30th for both PC, Mac and PSP handheld. You can read the full article here complete with pretty pictures but I'll give a basic run down of the news.

SI start by tooting there own horn a little, talking up how great FM 09 was selling over a million copies worldwide before mentioning that the average player has clocked up around 240 hours on the game, now that's rather impressive. Really though that's not the important stuff, the important stuff are the new features and improvements and as always there are a whole bunch of em. Things like interface, AI and animations have been improved again like you would expect and the 3D match engine has undergone a large overhaul to make it appear more realistic. It seems every year SI redo the interface for FM but they promise it will be easier to use and navigate and I have to admit it does look quite nice. Probably the biggest announcements in the article concerned a Tactics Creator and a new Data Editor. The Tactics Creator features a whole series of drop down menus with pre-selected player roles like deep lying midfield so it's easier to set up a player the way you want. Players can still use the old slider and like in FIFA Manager you can now shout out things from the touchline to your players. How much effect this will actually have I'm not sure but it's a nice realistic touch whilst the tactics creator should allow more people to create their own killer tactics. What I'm most looking forward to are the improvements made to the Data Editor. It now allows you to create entire new leagues and add divisions to existing leagues. Up until now leagues had been hardcoded and impossible to edit to allow more teams in or whatever and this is definetley SI working on fan feedback which is great. I can now add more leagues to Australia just because I can.


The manager is also given a few nice new tools to play with which are the News Centre and the Match Analyser. The News Centre obviously gives you news but when you sign up to it you can filter out the news you don't want to receive so you are only reading what concerns you, not a revolutionary update but nice nontheless. The Match Analyser appears more useful, especially for hardcore managers. It lets you see, in real time or post game, where all the headers, passes, shots, tackles, crossess literally everything your and the oppositions players do on the field happen. The idea is if you can see you are being more successful from the right hand side you can adjust your tactics to play from the right hand side more often or if an opposition player keeps getting too much time and space to shoot you can switch to closing him down and man marking. This is also added by better feedback from your assistant which at times was non existant even though you were losing or not comprehensive enough to tell you how you succeeded or failed in that last game.

A host of other features are promised and I imagine a demo will be released soon. With Eurogamer releasing a positive preview of Championship Manager 10 and claiming it may bridge the gap between them and Football Manager these and other features better come together nicely.