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Football Manager Live dated

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.