Football Manager 2021

My FM20 Player of the Year

by @_JDFM

 
 

You might know @_JDFM as the founder of the FM Creator’s Championship, or as the Official Virtual Football Manager of Margate FC for FM21. More recently, he has completed an FM Journeyman save for FM20 as well as his “Call of the Dragon” save in Wales, so we asked him to name his Player of the Year from this year’s version of the game.

Football Manager has really got me in a pickle over the last decade. Amassing well in excess of 10,000 hours of gameplay from FM10, it’s had a grip on me stronger than Peter Crouch’s dancefloor repertoire. It’s been a love affair that has brought joy and despair across leagues, nations and continents. And with FM21 looking so good, it looks like the draw is here to stay.

I only jumped into content creation for FM20 and the art of putting your content in the public eye certainly adds an added realism to the save, strangers commenting on fictional characters is something that takes getting used to.

In all of my time playing FM, my tendency has been towards building youth, developing my own world away from the usual suspects, favouring unknown wonderkids rather than the big names. Considering my usual style of play within Football Manager is to assemble an arsenal of overpowered newgens that make Barcelona look like Bradford (sorry lads), naming a real player is huge. But that’s the effect that Ilaix Moriba has had on me..

 
 

The world of Moriba was an FM20 Journeyman save, starting with nothing and climbing to the top. My Journey started with an obvious move; the Romanian Second league and the legends that are Daco-Getica. After taking a team of part-time farmers and bootleggers up a division, Astra Giurgiu came calling like I knew they always would. My first season was successful but brought no rewards or silverware. I needed a bigger challenge.

That’s when Bordeaux came calling, let’s be honest moving from Romanian football to the dizzy heights of the PSG league is a bigger step than Crouch’s dance routine. But they clearly liked my penchant for swanky Romanian designer clothing and baguettes. So in 22/23 I became the Manager of Bordeaux, coming in during the middle of a season is never easy but I dragged them up to 3rd position in my first season.

The next season is when things pushed on a gear, coincidentally when Moriba arrived on loan from Barcelona. His first season was good if not glamorous, but it was enough for me to spend £35million on the guy which in reality was a steal!

My love affair with Moriba came from my preferred tactical role of a Mezzala, admittedly a little OP this year but it just offered everything that I loved from a player, and Moriba was a worldie in this position. He’d constantly pick the ball up from deep, charge forward and score screamers for fun.

In total Moriba played 182 games for Bordeaux scoring 65 goals and chipping in with 42 assists

 
 

It was so much more than the numbers alongside Moriba’s name, he was the big game player we always needed.  Popping up with huge goals in cup games, pushing us to Champions League glory and even completing FM by toppling the mighty PSG and winning the Ligue 1 title.

Our relationship wasn’t always perfect; not only did I break Moriba’s heart whilst in charge of the French national team..

 
 

..but there were also times when he wanted bigger and better things, in reality he had outgrown the club.  And to be honest, I think I had too. I told him with confidence that we’d one day leave together and take over the world..and that’s exactly what we did:

 
 

Liverpool came calling, and I ran there quicker than Peter Crouch down that right wing for a goal and a robot celebration. Moriba was already on speed-dial and he along with a couple of other Bordeaux favourites came in the door for a measly £60million. That season we lifted the Champions League, Premier League and FA Cup.

That save will always stay with me as my favourite FM20 save and the legend that is Moriba is one of the main reasons for that. Maybe we’ll continue our love affair in FM21…

Thanks for reading,

@_JDFM

If you would like to catch up with more of @_JDFM’s Football Manager content including his Welsh-only FM20 save with Hiraeth then get on over to his Youtube channel, drop a sub and brace yourself for some great content to come with the arrival of FM21.

Interested in writing a Guest Author piece for WeStreamFM? Drop us a DM or else feel free to reach out to @MaddFM directly.

FM21 - What We Know So Far

by MaddFM

 
 

Throwback - the date is September 24th 2020, and after much commentary and deliberation about Football Manager 2021 potentially being delayed, postponed and at times rumoured to be in jeopardy altogether due to Covid 19 restrictions, a glum year all round is jolted back to life by the heroic announcement from Sports Interactive that this year’s version of the game will in fact be released as planned and most importantly, just in time for Christmas.

 
 

Not much was mentioned about new features, licensing, leagues, match engine or gameplay in general aside from the sleek new kits and colour scheme which we love here at WSFM towers - however shockwaves rippled through the Football Manager community at the announcement that not only will the game be available on PC and Switch as well as the usual Mobile and Touch versions, but will also return to Xbox for the first time in over a decade since Football Manager 2008 (context: Lionel Messi was a 20 year old hot prospect in that version who could only be nullified by the wonderkid that was Anthony Vanden Borre).

 
 

Fast forward to Monday 12th October - Prime Minister Boris Johnson has just made some important announcements about new Covid 19 restrictions, however this isn’t the announcement people are talking about. The big news is, Football Manager have released their first feature announcement trailer, and needless to say the team at Sports Interactive have come up trumps yet again #FMToTheRescue.

 

Introducing Football Manager 2021 in 60 seconds. This marks the beginning of our FM21 feature reveal period. Screens that only get a few seconds of air time ...

 

ICYMI ☝️

 
 

If you are in any way like our friend Brian and slightly overwhelmed by the abundance of features, graphics and absolute video production mastery from the Sports Interactive content team, below is a quick synopsis of what we know so far in terms of Football Manager 2021 features.

Recruitment Meetings

Many FM players have trust or control issues, and at times our scouts don’t do a lot to appease the situation. The introduction of Recruitment Meetings appear to give us additional input and control over the types of players our scouts will both source and recommend - hopefully gone are the days where your Chief Scout recommends a 33-year-old Left Back when you already have a worldie and a wonderkid in that position!

 
 

Body Language

 
 

Something makes me think this little guy could have a big future in the FM community - representing all that is good and pure in the world, or in the Football Manager world at least! Player interactions have been given a completely new dimension of reality with the addition of body language in the conversation; we all know how a 121 meeting with a player can take a sudden turn for the worst at the flick of a button, and hopefully this functionality will enable us to keep morale high, motivate and spur on your key player to kick on a notch in your next game, or most importantly convince him to stay when other clubs are sniffing around - we’ve all been there 👀.

 
 

Player Availability



This could be the Football Manager equivalent of Tinder. How often have you pursued a player or played hardball with a club to negotiate an acceptable transfer fee, only to find out that the player has no interest in joining at the contract screen? Now you can approach the player’s agent to identify whether or not the player is open to a transfer that the current time - if the response is positive, it might make you think twice about asking said player to sack their agent later down the line when it comes to contract renewals 😏.

 
 

Press Conferences

 
 

It would appear that Press Conferences are about to get a hell of a lot more real - the trailer eludes to multiple members of the press being in the media room, upon which you can select which member of the press or media publication you would like to receive questions from and perhaps more importantly who you wish to ignore! We all know a certain United States President that might enjoy this feature…

 
 

Tactical Instructions/Advice

“We should switch to a shorter passing style”.

Changes to Short Passing Style.

5 minutes later.

“We should switch to a more direct passing style”.

Unless we’ve hired Ant & Dec or the Chuckle brothers to be our Assistant Manager, nobody needs to be this confused right? It appears that pre-match tactical advice at least has been given a makeover, hopefully making it more intuitive and user-friendly as many of us tend to ignore this advice due to lack of trust and/or control issues. In the Assistant Manager we trust?

 
 

xG (Expected Goals)

Many have campaigned and advocated for this in the past, and finally it’s here. xG i.e. Expected Goals basically allows you to more critically assess just how clinical your attackers are and overall how likely you may be to score and win games based on how and where you tend to have more shots at goal. By assigning an Expected Goal rating to chances from different areas of the field, it enables you to measure the quality of goal-scoring chances that are created against the likelihood of them being scored. While the trailer leaves much to the imagination, it would appear that the Data Analyst will now present a more in depth illustration in terms of goal-scoring opportunities and statistics based on your team’s tactic, strategy and playing style. Stats nerds, ASSEMBLE.

 
 

Matchplay Graphics

While there is no mention of changes or additions to the match engine (yet!), it appears that the in-match presentation has been freshened up, with noticeable changes to the match score, menu and dialogue boxes that appear - no complaints here, we like what we see so far.

 
 

Licensing?

 
 


We all love a good cliffhanger. While there is no official confirmation as yet, the appearance of Leicester City’s official logo in the trailer suggests that some form of licensing agreement has been reached. Is it with the club specifically or is there more to this than meets the eye? Might we see Premier League licensing in the near future?

There’s only one way to find out - Football Manager 2021 is out on Tuesday 24th November 2020, with the beta expected to drop a couple of weeks beforehand. Your season starts here.

Be sure to follow WeStreamFM on Twitter for reaction to the latest FM21 updates - you can also get involved in the hype by joining the WeStreamFM Discord where you can find hundreds of like minded FM enthusiasts as well as some of your favourite WeStreamFM streamers, bloggers and YouTubers all gearing up for the next edition of the beautiful game.

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