Football Manager 2007

Football Manager 2011 was the most pirated PC game in the series, Sports Interactive has told Eurogamer.

SEGA and Sports Interactive have unleashed a data update for Football Manager 2007, bringing the game up to date with all the transfer window activity from last month.

That includes both playing and managerial staff, apparently, and SEGA says the patch will also fix a range of minor issues that had been annoying a small number of users.

It's available now from the Sports Interactive website for PC, Mac, and Intel Mac, so you should be able to take advantage whether you're a sheepskin-clad Mitchell or Webb.

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You've got to run to stand still in the fast-moving world of football management. The same can be said for the virtual 'soccer' universe, where Football Manager has been setting the pace for years. The latest FM for PC (and Xbox 360) upped the series' canter once again with a locker room bursting with 100 gameplay additions...

But what of FM 2007's chirpy sidekick - the Keegan to the PC version's Toshack, the Beardsley to its Cole? Surely an improvement list as long as Lee Bowyer's rap sheet is beyond even our plucky PSP. Yup, of course it is. And, as for running just to stand still, FM 2007 handheld barely breaks a sweat.

You see, titles are always a lot harder to retain than they are to claim the first time round. The original FM for PSP was so welcome to those of us who dreamed of playing SI's unsurpassed masterpiece on the move - without lugging a glorified typewriter around - that we forgave its shortcomings. Heck, who could expect the glorious detail and unrivalled depth of a game that has taxed many a half-decent PC to port in fully-featured form to Sony's black beauty, anyway? Even stripping out the 2D match engine - which actually provided a welcome reminder that life before semi-decent visuals was little worse than what we have now - didn't bother us. Nor did the absence of detailed finance sheets and a bag full of subtle features.

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There's no point in beating around the bush - the first attempt at bringing FM to the Xbox 360 was a proverbial 'game of two halves' of such extremes it was almost impossible to attribute an accurate rating to it.

On the one hand, it was - pretty much - a perfect port of the PC/Mac original, which is to say the definitive football management simulation on so many counts that it's almost embarrassing (for the competition at least). But on the other - extremely important - hand, it was hamstrung by an interface that required a ridiculous amount of getting used to, thanks to inconsistent and unintuitive button mapping that made it a real headache to peel away the layers of depth and access the things that you knew were there somewhere. Even as an old hand of Sports Interactive's games stretching right back to the very beginning, I found myself, at times, utterly stumped. When I wrote the review, I kind of assumed it might just be a case of me being a bit dim - but as it turned out, it was an experience shared by pretty much everyone who played it.

In truth, FM needed a complete control overhaul on 360 or risked losing its console audience for good - and no one knew this more than SI itself.

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SEGA and Sports Interactive have released a patch for the PC, Mac and Intel Mac versions of Football Manager 2007.

SI says that the patch deals with a bunch of issues that were brought to its attention by the game's loyal fanbase, "the majority of which only affect a small amount of users". (They mean the bugs, obviously - we're all deeply affected by the fanbase.)

"The patch is saved game compatible," the teams note, "but for the full effects, a new game should be started."

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Sports Interactive and SEGA have announced that the Xbox 360 and PSP versions of Football Manager 2007 are finished and due out on 1st December.

As you'll know if you follow Italian football, last week was a good one for Juventus, Lazio and Fiorentina - and we're not talking about what happened on the pitch.

Because last week the Italian Olympic Committee decided to reduce the penalties meted out to each club in the wake of this summer's match-fixing scandal. Juventus remain in Serie B, but see their points penalty reduced from 17 to 9, while Fiorentina got four points back and Lazio got eight.

There was one group of people for whom the news came too late though - the developers of football management titles, with Sports Interactive, Beautiful Game Studios and Codemasters having already delivered their 2007 efforts to market in the preceding months.

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Sports Interactive's soccer sim, Football Manager 2007, has taken the top spot in the UK All Formats Charts on its first weekend of release, knocking EA's FIFA 07 into second place.

The back of the box asks us to "think like a manager". Now that's just asking for trouble. We don't want to end up the subject of a Panorama expose - not until we're close to making our first billion, anyway. By then we'll have a castle in space and find ourselves eating dates off the toned backsides of nubile princesses and will laugh in the face of financial investigations. The Wikipedia entry will read like Hunter S. Thompson's secret life as Ron Atkinson's therapist.

Let's think [sharpens knives]. Dare we even speculate how a football manager really thinks in this money-obsessed age of bungs, divers and prima donna underwear models masquerading as professional sportsmen?

Okay, let's get into character. This could be fun.

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Sports Interactive's latest, Football Manager 2007, is now available to try out in demo form on both PC and Mac, giving you the chance to break in this year's tracksuit. (I can't do that joke in both items?)

Another year, another Football Manager. Or so you might think.

Sports Interactive plans to release a demo of Football Manager 2007 next Sunday, 1st October, for PC, Mac and Intel Mac.

Football Manager 2007 will support managers with dual nationalities, and can be tweaked to take advantage of the specific processing capabilities of your machine, while user-friendly additions like menu wizards, the ability to select and apply changes to multiple players at once, and support for multiple databases, ought to make the game more accessible to old and newcomers alike.

Reliably cheerful and talkative Football Manager developer Sports Interactive has set up a page on MySpace, where the team intends to blog about some of the new features going into the 2007 edition, as well as its other games, and engage in a bit of banter with the likes of you. Well, maybe not you.

Sports Interactive's preparing Football Manager 2007 for release this Christmas, and aims to deliver over 100 new features across PC, Mac, Intel Mac, Xbox 360 and PSP.