14 DAY TRIAL // I love management titles and have done so since I was a child, playing around with Sim City and Railroad Tycoon, at times without actually understanding all the concepts but always interested in what was happening.
I didn't always love football but social and family pressure led to an interest in the sport, which was inflated by the media blitz that has accompanied the Champions League for some time, and by the time I tried my first football management game I was hooked.
Football Manager 2012, developed by Sports Interactive and published by SEGA, is the latest installment in the best series for virtual coaches and chairmen and, as I always do, I picked the game up and quickly chose to once again try to lead Liverpool, my favorite English team, to domestic glory.
The pre-season is the part of the game that, in many ways, determines how the actual fight for the Premier League will go, as clubs battle for good players and try to put together the best formations and tactics combination possible.
The new game offers more in terms of options for preparation, including simpler ways to see tactics and tweak them quickly and a new system for speaking to the team before and during the match, which makes it much simpler to see how they are influenced.
The transfers are also more exciting, although it seems that all clubs that have a decent young player on their hands want to get more than three times his current value in order to agree to the transfer.
Liverpool have a pretty decent team, with some good reinforcements in the form of Suarez, Adam and Caroll, so I decided to drop any search for better players in order to focus on getting a set of better trainers and some world class scouts.
I also used the friendlies to set up a classic 4-4-2 tactics system for Liverpool and take a look at a few players from the Under 18 team, with Suso being the highlight of the crop.
I also organized the first team meeting and have apparently managed to motivate my players for the first clashes of a long campaign.