Football Manager Live dated

By Oli Welsh Published 19 December, 2008

Out in January with 4 months' sub.

MCV reports that Sega will release Football Manager Live for PC on January 23rd.

The massively multiplayer online version of the Sports Interactive management series was originally supposed to be soft-launched this year, but now Sega is going straight to the shops with a retail version in January.

The game will sell for GBP 29.99 and come with a generous four months' subscription. The cost of a subscription hasn't been announced yet.

"Football Manager Live is a very different game to Football Manager - imagine a cross between Football Manager, fantasy league, eBay and social networking and you’ll be just about there," Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson said. Or you could call it the only MMO that Blizzard is scared of.

Apparently the game's going to have a broader approach than the series has done to date. "We're targeting a slightly more mass market audience than with the Football Manager series. If FM is The Times’ sports section, then FM Live is the Daily Mirror’s sports section," said Jacobson.

He described it as "the perfect game for the lapsed FM gamer who doesn’t have the time to put into FM Live’s older brother any more".

A massively-multiplayer game that's less time-consuming than its offline counterpart? That's a novel idea. We'll have more on Football Manager Live early in the new year.

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (15) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Tomo #1 3 years ago

    I could possibly... maybe... be tempted with this if it really is less time consuming.

    MMO and less time consuming in the same sentence has to be an oxymoron tho surely?

  • levitate #2 3 years ago

    Sounds fantastic. Can't wait!

  • X201 #3 3 years ago

    Er.. what have I been playing for the last month?

  • Buenos_Estente #4 3 years ago

    It was soft launched last month as have been playing it for the last 5 weeks

    It is quite enjoyable, although it is a completely different experience to FM generally. It can get a bit time consuming although they do claim you can put in as little time as you feel you can. Overall I have enjoyed it and am looking forward to some of the changes set for the January 'Full' launch which should improve the game in several key areas which otherwise may have put me off it long term, whether it continues to hold my interest I will have to wait and see!

  • hiddenranbir #5 3 years ago

    As a FM nut I'm defo staying away from this. I know I'd pour in a lot of time and money in this, which is something I don't want. Even cancelled my pre-order. I've managed to avoid FM2009 this season so my rehab is good!

    Edited by 1 at 19/12/08 @ 12:10

  • Gaol #6 3 years ago

    I think this game will be a big hit if they get it right. The target audience is huge.

  • Talk_Show_Host #7 3 years ago

    They can't even release the single player game without being broken. Imagine in what mess this will be.

    I am not going close to it for at least a year.

  • TheMoonRat #8 3 years ago

    Having been part of the beta for over 6 months, i 100% disagree about it being less time consuming. Regular Football Manager you can play when you want, how you want, at the pace you want. Football Manager Live however, requires you, to be successful, to login pretty much daily to play occasional games if nothing else but to keep up player fitness. Add to that the mass crunch that is the off season; a week long "grind" (for me) in finding good players on "frees" in wage auctions; it ended up being the only game I really had time to play. Nothing casual about that. And no, you don't have to be part of that, but if you don't, your team will very quickly fall down the pecking order, and lose more and more games. And people who lose all the time because they don't have the time to dedicate to the game aren't going to want to stick around!

  • Wash #9 3 years ago

    Being part of the b3ta was enough to put me off this, i wish they'd gone a different route.

  • Cannibal #10 3 years ago

    Playing the beta was great... until the novelty wore off.

    You have a TON of info coming into your mail box constantly that verges on annoying.

    Once you play the couple of guys in your league that are on all the time, it is really hard to get the other guys on to play and you end up playing the AI team which always seems to do better than the actual team for some reason.

    In the off season, it just seems like you are killing time. You spend a whole week just bringing players in/out and playing an ENDLESS stream of friendly tournaments. I find after a day of transferring and friendlys I lose interest, and have to remind myself when the season starts again.

    It is NOT casual. To be good you will have to log on and play at least a couple of times a day.

    The skills are annoying the way you have to learn them. They need to be retooled I think. As it is you just pick a management skill you want to learn and drop it into a box, and it can take from minutes up to weeks to learn. I don't want to have to wait weeks just to use a simple tactic that Sunday League Managers use! It is an attempt to give it more MMO elements but detracts from common sense I think. No coach would have to learn about about 6 or 7 different things, taking him the best part of a month just to tell his team to hoof the ball up to the tall guy up front. It is ridiculous how few tactical options you have available to you right at the start.

  • jakswan #11 3 years ago

    They have changed direction somewhat with Version 1.1 which is in test now. Version 1.01 (you can play this now) is a bit Football Trader Live where 1.1 looks set to be building a team over a longer time period, stadiums etc.

    It's not easy to play with 1000 users chasing the same players but if you do well then you've done it against 1,000 other managers!

  • marcduffy #12 3 years ago

    The original article is slightly misleading. Football Manager Live did soft launch in November and there are a very select amount of gameworlds currently running 1.0.1 code.

    We've been working on a new version (1.1) for a number of months and it introduces a number of new elements to the gameplay experience which can be read about in full here http://ma nual.footballmanagerlive.com/?q... Some of the changes address some problems specifically mentioned in this thread.

    Marc Duffy
    Sports Interactive.

  • CableNut #13 3 years ago

    Also can i add these 2 links for stuff in 1.1.0
    About fans go to [link url=http://blogs.sega.com/fml/2008/10/01/its-all-about-t he-fans/
    ]http://bl ogs.sega.com/fml/2008/10/01/its...[/link]
    About stadiums go to [link url=http://blogs.sega.com/fml/2008/10/03/the-stadium-of-d reams/
    ]http://bl ogs.sega.com/fml/2008/10/03/the...[/link]

    have a read, some good stuff on the way :)

  • T-Bag #14 3 years ago

    By buying retail you are basically just buying a sub then because you don't actually need to buy the game.

  • sadat #15 3 years ago

    try hattrick.org, not really the same deal but it's [a] free football and [c] playing against real people all over the world. have been on it for about a year and a half, it's a once a week thing that isn't a huge drain on your time and worth checking out