Try Football Manager 2011 this week

Two Football Manager 2011 demos will be released this week. The first arrives on Steam on Thursday, the second for everyone on Friday.

The Steam "strawberry" demo will be playable in all languages and have 12 leagues: England, Scotland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

The other "vanilla" demo will have two leagues: England and Scotland.

Both "strawberry" and "vanilla" will be available to download on Friday.

Why Steam? Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson anticipated your concern.

"Now that it's a PC and Mac distribution platform, everyone can get it via the system and it provides great download speeds. It will once again be one of the two options for installation for the boxed game (with lots of benefits) and is a system most of us here use without issue," he wrote on the SI forum.

"I've seen some posts on the forums that unfairly castigate Steam, such as blaming it for the activation issues regarding FM2009 - which were nothing to do with Steam but caused by a denial of service attack on Uniloc's servers - or blaming a bug in the game on Steam. A bug in the game is a bug in the game, and nothing to do with Steam at all."

Football Manager 2011 arrives with few headline alterations but plenty of "sizzling nuggets of potential". "If there's one word that best sums up Football Manager 2011's strides this year, it's communication," wrote Martin Korda for Eurogamer in his hands-on preview earlier this month.

"The tweaks and polishes look as though they could add up to an embellished, clearer, deeper and more rewarding experience than FM2010."