Football Manager is ready to shift to 3D. That's the big news for gamers that are interested in football simulations. The game has taken motion capture footage from SEGA Japan's Virtua Striker and is aiming to add some visual realism so that the football simulation world will never want to return to text commentary or to 2D view.

The developers say that more than 100 player animations will be delivered with the game. It will be presented using an isometric 3D viewpoint which shows the entire pitch.

Of course Football Manager 2009 will still offer the possibility to switch to the classic 2D match engine viewpoint and Sports Interactive is thinking whether it is worth retaining the original option to comment matches only through text on the screen.

Miles Jacobson from Sports Interactive told Eurogamer that “We've been working on it for about three years and we've had a couple of attempts that we abandoned. Late last year we were confident that we could do a 3D match engine properly. But even up until a couple of months ago we didn't know we were going to be delivering it this year”.

Each of the players featured in the game will also have unique animations depending on their physique and role in the team so that they are easy to distinguish.

The game will offer some new features like assistant managers that provide exhaustive feedback about how each team is playing, press conferences that take place before and after each match with journalists that question the manager.

You can also teach players some special moves, like free kicks, by keeping them on to train after the normal practice session. The player and staff database will go over the 350,000 entries mark for the first time.

The game will arrive on the PC, Mac and on the PlayStation Portable. A demo is in the works at Sports Interactive.