14 DAY TRIAL // There were times when I played Championship Manager with a list besides me which contained the names of those young talents that were pretty much guaranteed to become superstars in a few years, and much of my playtime was spent trying to convince them to come to my club.
The series no longer allows for such approaches to long-term player development and Football Manager 2015 goes even further and introduces an entirely new way of dealing with uncertainty in scouting, making time one of the most important resources.
Let’s say I need a player to replace Steven Gerard, who might be retired from international career but still plays a major role at Liverpool.
I have some options in my own team, but I want to take a look abroad and see what they can offer so I can instruct my scouting team to look for someone similar, using a wide variety of parameters, including age, potential, actual skills, or favorite role.
Once I have a few potential names, I can simply take a look at their profiles to get a feel of how they might perform, but my information is limited, as I can only see intervals for their ratings and have only a small amount of actual info about how they can slot into my team.
At this point, I need to assign a scout, preferably one who can evaluate the player correctly, to follow him for at least one month, so I can narrow the range for all characteristics and find out if a bid has a chance of succeeding.
Small quests, great potential rewards
Young talents are even harder to evaluate and riskier to sign because it’s impossible to tell how they will evolve based on club culture, the amount of game time they get, and the way they interact with their teammates and their coaches.
The unpredictability that Football Manager 2015 introduces is impressive and creates a lot of diverging paths that gamers are interested in exploring, although it’s physically impossible to do so.
At the same time, a player needs time to push a club ten years into the future, and these two concepts mean that gamers are always left with a feeling of missed opportunity.
Football Manager 2015 offers a lesson about life and about how choices are final and their results in the long term are impossible to predict when the decision is actually made.
