Football Manager 2010 Arriving On October 30th News

This year's Football Manager has just got the announcement treatment from SEGA and Sports Interactive, which includes a range of new features as well as a release date of October 30th for both PC/Mac and PSP versions of the title.

Highlighting the new features is a Match Analysis tool, which will allows users to "see where shots, passes, crosses, headers, tackles, fouls and interceptions have been made on the field for all players on the pitch." This information is available both during and after a match, allowing users to analyse the data and either pick apart the opposition or improve their own team's performance.

Additionally, a new Tactics Creator in FM 2010 will allow managers to tailor their team's strategies to a greater depth than was previously possible, while the introduction of touchline 'shouts' and quick tactic changes are set to open up on-the-fly changes to your managerial approach during a game.

Player roles have been expanded, allowing users to assign specific players to roles such as 'Ball winning midfielder' and 'Deep lying midfielder', while enhancements to the game's editor will now make it possible to create entire leagues and divisions.

While Sports Interactive introduced its 3D match engine to Football Manager last year, this year's title will improve the engine with AI enhancements, over 100 new animations, realistic pitch degradation, better lighting, and new stadiums/crowds.

FM 2010 will also usher in a News Centre to the interface, which is an in-game feed that allows players to select which news feeds they want to follow and ditch those that aren't providing any useful information.

"We have worked very hard with the Football Manager community to target not only the areas of the game that needed re-working but also what we could add to improve what's already there. We've also conducted extensive usability studies which has led us to overhaul the whole presentation of the game, which we're really excited about," said Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive. "There has been a lot of polish to existing areas of the game but it's also driven us to introduce changes to answer some of the feedback. We're extremely confident that having done that we will deliver the very best Football Manager to date in October."

Before you go, here are a couple of interesting facts on FM 2009 that SEGA sent over as part of the FM 2010 announcement: last year's game was the most successful in the series' history, notching up over a million unit sales and staying atop the UK's PC Charts for a total of 22 weeks. Data retrieved on FM 2009 by Sports Interactive shows that the average user played the game for a total of 240 hours.