When a team plays well, ninety-nine percent of the time the spotlight is all for the players. But when things go wrong, the first to lose is almost always the coach.
For the world of football it is now a real dogma, inside which is contained all the complexity of the coach’s job, to carry out which is not enough “only” to know properly how to play football. Especially in times like when we find ourselves living, coaches must be ready to face all kinds of pressures, coming both from inside and outside the team, with the ultimate goal of keeping their kids focused on their goals.
An often difficult task, if not impossible in some extreme cases, thatFootball Manager 2018 promises to translate into videogame language strong of its experience in the virtual field, now more than twenty years long. In recent weeks, Sports Interactive did not fail to present the novelties of this edition, which, as per tradition, touch on all aspects of the football manager
par excellence. In fact, it starts with important elements such as the management of changing room dynamics and scouting, up to topics such as the possibility that gay players come out . After about ten days spent in place of Maurizio Sarri on the bench of Napoli, we are ready to tell you about Football Manager 2018.
CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN!
Among the new features introduced this year by Miles Jacobson and his team is marked by the first moment dedicated to the dynamics inside the locker room, always present in previous editions but surrounded by an aura of mystery that prevented those who were in front of the monitor to understand for good that air pulled.
The importance of the Dynamics in the mind of the developers is confirmed by the presence of the homonymous section in the game menu of Football Manager 2018, thanks to which you can access an immediate glance on what are the strengths of its management of the locker room, or in the negative case, immediately note what makes footballers unhappy.
The relationship between the latter is another aspect that the Dynamics take into account, proposing a real pyramid hierarchy typically led by captain and vice-captain, plus any members of the team with particular charisma or with a certain seniority in the club.
In the team there are also social groups, in which to displease an influential player can have devastating effects. If, on the other hand, the discontent concerns a person already on the margins of dressing room life, the effects on the morale of the troops should be at least limited on paper. Beyond the obvious inaccuracy that saw Zuniga (!)
On top of the hierarchy of Naples in our game, the dynamics are quite useful, but there is to say that in practice they are to clash with those that are some historical problems of the game, still present in Football Manager 2018. Just to give some examples, after a few weeks of the season there has indeed happened that the reserve goalkeeper expressed the his own desire to play the owner, threatening to go away if he had not been granted the place between the posts.
Every attempt to calm him down was in vain, including the captain’s intervention on which, precisely because of the introduction of the dynamics, we counted the most. The whole thing has even led to a locker room meeting, with which we were able to restore the average morale of the team to acceptable levels.
Those who know the Football Manager series have now learned to deal with problems of this kind, between players willing to go away every three for two up to striking cases like that of the player who had obtained a contract renewal in August, and then return to
office after a couple of months, threatening to leave without an increase. It does not help the fact that beyond the introduction of the Dynamics the interactions in Football Manager 2018 have remained identical to those we know, both with their own players and with the press.
