So it’s that time of year again; the scent of Christmas is beginning to appear in the air, the nights are drawing in and the annual iteration of the pre-eminent football management simulator, Football Manager, has broken cover ahead of the festive release melee.

Each year reviewing the latest version of the series becomes a little bit harder. Let’s face it, the core game is about as good as it’s going to get. The mechanics behind the number crunching and the genuinely amazing level of scouting put in are already at a level that you’re unlikely to improve them significantly with any tweaks, and you’d probably be mad to try.

Really, Sports Interactive would be well within their rights to release DLC each year with updated player databases and a few graphical tweaks and the game would remain as it was before; a highly-addictive and engaging time-sink for fans of the series and a baffling mystery to non-fans.

So, I guess the review could be cut down to the basic (and slightly lazy) question: have they messed anything up? The answer is, of course no. The game is, at its core, exactly the same experience as before, with updated players, rosters and stats and a few graphical tweaks. Here, perhaps more than most other franchises, the idiom if you liked it before you’ll like it now remains true.

So if that’s all you wanted to know; there you go. Football Manager 2016 remains in essence the same Football Manager you’ve been playing since 2012 and if you’ve sunk enough hours into it to be considered a veteran manager, congratulations, you’ve got another year of enjoyment to be had from the game! Go buy it… right now!

However, as ever, there’s finer detail that bears looking at, so in the essence of efficiency, let’s look at the new stuff bit by bit:

Create-A-Club

Touted as a new game mode that lets you create your own new club, the Create-A-Club option is basically the integration of the game editor into the game interface proper, allowing you to not so much create a new club from scratch as overwrite and edit the details of an existing club. You can change the details of the club from the name through to the location, average attendance and club colours, as well as change the playing staff. In the case of the latter, you get access to the ‘Fantasy Draft’ mode, where the game gives you a budget based on the club details you’ve input and you can pick any players you want, up to the budget you have. It’s very much like picking your fantasy football team each year. It’s a nice idea, but to my mind it suffers from a slightly flawed implementation, with the lack of adequate search options when finding players to add to the team being the main one. You have to resort to searching by name, which does limit the searching considerably. Why they couldn’t have used the existing player search system I don’t know…

Manager Model

This year you get to create your own mini avatar that will sit on the touchline during games. A nice little ascetic touch that has little impact on the game proper, but welcome none the less. I seemed unable to make mine look like anything other than a drunk teenager in a court-visit suit though… This may have been more of a commentary on me, or perhaps a satire on football at large however…

Prozone Stats

Sports Interactive have gotten Prozone on board in a big way this year and, as such, the volume of available stats in-game has rocketed, including regular tickers across the screen detailing stats for any leagues you have set to run in your game.

Set-Piece Creator/Tactics Overhaul

The set piece creator and the instructions sections of the tactics have, again, been overhauled this year. The actual options available to set appear to have been left largely the same, but the layout of the options has been made more elaborate and is no longer a straight tick box exercise. Indeed, the set-piece creator now lets you drag and drop your players into position on a pitch grid, much like the main formation editor, which is nice.

And that’s largely it, excepting the usual expanded press interactions and improved injury progressions.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the version I was working with was the pre-release BETA code, so some aspects of the game may well be tweaked before full release.

Football Manager remains the same game as before and that’s a good thing. It doesn’t need to change and fans probably shouldn’t be looking for it to do so. The gradual tweaking of the small details is, as always welcome and well implemented, but don’t go into the game expecting an especially different experience to last time out.

Will you still end up spending half your year’s spare time tweaking your squad of pampered cyber players? You bet your life you will!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go practice my FA cup half time team talk…

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