Football Manager 2007 Issues

Football (soccer). I'm sure you're an expert on this, but nevertheless, I thought to myself you may care to take a quick look over some tips. First of all, you should keep in mind that you can either start your career as an unemployed manager looking for work or select from the beginning the club you wish to lead to glory. If you want even more tasks and more teams to manage, you can always cheat a little by creating up to 7 other identities and manage those as well (instead of sharing the fun with your friends). Also, when creating a profile, remember that there is a minimum age for a manager. You can input any date of birth, but if you look too young, you'll be automatically "aged" a bit.

Before going any further, be sure to download the newest patches (nothing simpler than hit the update button in the start of the game). You may be amazed of how many hindering things can be settled this way. Although these are mainly saved games compatible, a new game should be started for full effects.

Seems like because of the licensing, some National Teams don't have proper players (Holland and Germany, for example). It can be fixed if you go to the folder where you installed the game (in example "c:/program files/sports interactive/football manager 2007") and go through the folder to "football manager 2007/data/db/700/lnc" (if you patched the game look in "data/db/701/lnc"). Once there, copy the file "fake.lnc" and place it in a safe place as backup, then delete the file "fake.lnc". When starting a new game (remember - new game), the countries affected will have the proper squad. The purpose of the file is to put a "mask" on the national teams affected and once you remove it, there goes the mask too.

Any long term and continuous stat drop (despite the training) will be either:
- due to CA dropping, which is to be expected;
- due to poor training or constant injury;
- due to a no CD crack or similar ( which makes your training poor and hence stats drop);
- due to some stat(s) rising, meaning others have to drop to maintain CA-stat balance;
- something else hitherto unidentified.

Different managers like to use subs in different ways: some will make all of their substitutions regardless of how the game is going simply to keep players from becoming too tired, while others won't change a winning team regardless of how tired the team is. The decision is basically yours but here are some things to bear in mind (see if we think alike here). If you've made all of your subs and your keeper picks up an injury, this can spell serious trouble and could lead to a load of goals against you. The longer you play ridiculously attacking football when you're searching for an equalizer, the more likely you're to be hit on the break by your opponents. Widespread substitutions isn't necessarily the best way to mix things up, more often than not one sub can turn the game on its head equally as well.

For lower ability players, you may find it easier to keep things simple. It will help to not give them a huge amount of instructions and especially never give instructions which might potentially cause conflict. Instructions to be most cautious with are those like "forward runs", which might drag a vital player out of position.

Some installer issues were reported to the official forum and the developers came up with some of the following responses.

If Java is installed on your system but the version of Java is somehow incompatible with the installer, this may lead to some strange behavior and side effects when trying to run the installer. Symptoms may include, but not necessarily be limited to, the installer window not being drawn properly, the installer content only being partly displayed or not displayed at all or buttons not being present or not functioning. There are a couple of things you can do to try to fix this problem:
1. Uninstall Java Runtime Environment, then try to run the FM07 installer again. The installer comes bundled with Java that it will use if there is no Java present on the system.
2. Install the latest Java manually if the above doesn't work, then you can try to install the latest Java runtime environment manually. Then try to run the FM07 installer again.

If you get an error dialog that says "could not utilize start class: com.installshield.wizard.Wizard" when trying to run the installer, the Java system is being blocked and cannot run.
1. Anti-virus software blocking Java. Please check your anti-virus software setup and set it up so it allows Java (java.exe) to run as normal. Refer to the manual, help or other documentation for your anti-virus software on how to do this. An alternative is to disable your anti-virus while running the installer, and re-enable it once it has finished installing.
Users of certain versions of McAffee VirusScan are advised to disable and re-enable anti-virus, then reboot the computer.
2. Install as administrator user or the install may fail.
3. Insufficient disk space for temporary files. In some situations, it may be that the installer's own free disk space check succeeds, but it then in fact ends up not having enough disk space on the drive or partition where temporary files are stored (usually C:Documents and SettingsLocal SettingsTemp). In this case, you should try to free up as much space as possible on the drive that contains the temporary files (usually C:) - 1GB is a recommended minimum, a few GB is advisable.

Well, I do hope you won't be having any more problems. Remember, it's all about learning - learn to scout for promising youngsters, train them well and send them to feeder clubs for match practice, then show them off on the field. Who knows? Maybe you'll get enough money to even retire prematurely. Oh well, good luck to you and have fun!