The Trouble with FM Blogs

After launching a website dedicated to Football Manager blogs, and running my own blog that talks about the game, writing about the negative aspects of these websites might seem rather foolish. But bare with me as I try to examine this recent phenomena. Why do we blog? Is to fill a basic, selfish need, or do we genuinely want to share our material? And why do so many people want to write about the limited topic that is Football Manager?

Half a Chelsea

In an unprecedented move, the Football Association and Fifa have issued a global ban to the whole of the Chelsea team following financial irregularities. A press release this morning confirmed that Chelsea will not be allowed to field any of their current players in any competition until the 1st of January 2007. The ban, however, does not stop them from buying any new players.

Football Manager 2008 – perhaps

We’ve only been playing ohseven for a few months, but people are already looking forward to the next installment of the game. So where can Football Manager 2008 enhance the series? What can SIGames bring to the game to ensure we don’t self-combust with disapointment?

Who are the most enjoyable team?

You’ve just lost your fifth game in a row. Your star striker, a 31 year old with a gammy leg, has been forced to work overtime this Saturday for Asda, and the fans – all two of them – have put together a petition to get you sacked. Sometimes managing isn’t always fun – but some are a lot more enjoyable to coach than others.

Predictions for 2007

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what the hell will happen in the next year? It’s just a stupid mirror, so it won’t actually reply, but perhaps my crystal ball will.

WordPress Community Forum

You know me and my crazy ideas. I’ve tried (And, often, failed) to launch a few features on this website, and today see’s the arrival of another of my brainwaves: a forum based on the WordPress software!

Where is my skin?

Please correct me if I am wrong, but looking around the ’skinning’ community is somewhat like looking for a pair of size 15’s in a shoe shop – there’s not that many available!

Reviewed: FM Genie Scout

The FM Genie Scout is a powerful tool that delves deep into your Football Manager game to give you more facts and details about the players, staff and teams than ever before. While it certainly is a fantastic tool, many consider the use of it to be cheating. With a new version of the software recently released, Blog FM took a look at the tool to see just what all the fuss is about.

The 100 Teams to Manage Before You Die

With thousands of teams available at your disposal on Football Manager 2007, choosing the one to manage is never easy. So we want you to recommend the one hundred best teams to manage – although you don’t have to do it on your own.

Spot the Teams

This is quite smart and tricky. I saw this picture originally on Flickr (and I will post a link to it in a few days…). The image contains references to a number of English teams – how many can you find? Click the image for a bigger version.

Pushing the Board: Part Two

The other day we brought you the first part of our Pushing the Board guide, looking at how you can get a little bit more money from your chairman, depending on which club you are. Today we continue the guide, taking in six more Premiership clubs.

Fifteen Things You Never Knew About Football Manager

Blog FM recently delved into the Football Manager archives to root out some hidden bits of information. Now we can reveal the fifteen things that you never knew about Football Manager in all their glory.

Freddy Adu Signs for Real!

I was a bit surprised to be told that Freddy Adu, the young legend of past and present Football Manager games, had joined Real. Then I read the actual story in full. One week Manchester United are giving you a trial, the next you’re off to here. Warning: American “blockbuster trade” website: http://web.mlsnet.com/news/mls_news.jsp?ymd=20061211&content_id=80241&vkey=news_mls&fext=.jsp

StatSpot

I am absolutely enthralled and obsessed with a new past time that is sweeping the office (bedroom) of Blog FM towers. It’s not a new computer game nor is it a television programme that is hooking in millions of square eyed Britains. My obsession is a little closer to home – but I must warn you: If you are of a statistically afraid nature, then please do not read on.

Creating a Blog: Part Two

The other daywe showed you how easy it is to set up your own blog from scratch by using a free online tool called WordPress. Today we expand on this, showing what you need to do in to sustain your site, how to get more visitors and other ways to use WordPress other than a blog website.

Creating a Blog: Part One

There was a time in the far and distant past where Championship Manager players would sit in their bedrooms for hours, coding and designing page after page of website material, installing php systems and shouting in frustration as Macromedia Dreamweaver refused to work. Yet as we approach 2007 the scene, like most of the interweb, is turning to the blog for it’s quick-fix, ready-made websites. And in this guide, Blog FM will show you how easy it is for you to design, open, run and control your very own Football Manager blog website. Or so the plan is.

Patch 7.01 Discussion

The FMWiki will hold a live chat discussion this evening (Tuesday) between the hours of 20:00 and 23:00. This will be a great opportunity to discuss the game, what the patch does and anything else on your mind, so make sure you pop along at some point. If you want to see Blog FM floating about, then log on around 10.3o and we might (hopefully) make an appearance.

http://www.fmwiki.com/fmwiki/irc/ -  You do need to register for the FMWiki first.

Scene Review

The third scene review should be online either later tonight or at some point early tomorrow morning. This is your last chance to plug something that you would like to see mentioned in the article – perhaps a new site that has opened, an especially good article or the demise of another site.

 Incidentally, you will have noticed that the design has changed a little. I’m not going to apologise for this – not that I am being moody here. I think everyone will agree that it takes some time to decide what style suits a website. When you design a site by yourself you can design it to your specifications. But Blog FM is kindly hosted by the good people at WordPress, and using their software limits the design of the site to a choice of a few dozen.

For what the site is trying to achieve, I think this current look is useful. You may have also noticed a few areas of the site are being developed and tidied, such as the FM 07 page (with a ‘Latest FM News’ box) and the Features section, enabling easier navigation to various features that are being run on the website.

So please leave a comment with any links you have seen. Until next time, Auf Wied….Goodbye.

FM07 hits 360

I haven’t seen too much mentioned about this, but Football Manager 2007 on the XBox 360 was released late last week. The game appears to have ironed out flaws on previous console releases and is, according to Eurogamer, “a far more intuitive and thoughtfully designed effort in every respect”. For those of you with an XBox 360 at home – rather than a PC - then this is the best football management simulation you’re going to find.

Read EuroGamer’s Review / Buy the game

New Patch Released – Rejoice

Grab your grubby mitts on the 7.01 patch today. Released to fix and tune a number of aspects within the Football Manager 07 game, the patch is a vital addition for anyone wanting a (hopefully) bug free game.

Hints and Tips

You should have noticed by now that while playing Football Manager 2007 a ‘hints and tips’ box will appear while waiting for the game to progress. While there are some good pointers here, they often don’t stay on the screen long enough to read. So, after a brief search on the SIGames forum, here is a complete list of all of the hints and tips that are displayed during the game. My thanks go to those who documented all of these and I am reproducing them here for those who may have missed them on the forums.

Here for the Highlights

Over the last few days two websites have discussed the use of the ‘Full Match’ highlights mode within Football Manager. While Balls discusses the ability to watch your side play from start to finish – as opposed to selected highlights – in order to get the most out of the game, Saint and Greavsie argue that finding the time to watch the full match for every game would be nigh on impossible. These two posts did raise a question within my own head, and while I can understand both sides of the arguement one must look at how they wish to play the game for themselves before making their own decision.

Play it like it’s (CM) 1999

Peter Crouch was just an 18 year old youngster with Tottenham, Bradford City were taking on Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal, and a 19 year old Ronaldinho could be yours for less than £5m. Championship Manager 3: 99/00 may not have the features nor graphical interface than its predecessors, but stepping back to a time when Andy Hinchcliffe was fighting with Graeme Le Saux for a place in the England squad is certainly quite revealing.

Frequently Pondered Questions

In our attempt to do something worthwhile, we today present a Frequently Pondered Questions section. Techincally nobody has asked any of these questions to me, but I’m sure that someone out there must be wondering how to do these things. I know that most of us probably know these like the back of our hands, but then again, I never realised my right hand was a different colour to my left…Sorry. If you have any questions, feel free to ponder them in the comments section and I’ll try to ponder an answer back.

FM:DS – An Update

You may have read my earlier post pondering a Nintendo DS version of everyone’s favourite football management sim. (No, not LMA Manager, silly.) I’ve since found that this has been discussed on the SIGames forums and the general consensus seems to be that the DS lacks the sort of power/ram/memory that is needed to run a game of Football Manager’s standard. Which is a bit of a shame really. Marc Vaughan of Sports Interactive comments that “There are no plans to port FMH to the DS at present”, although there are a few people who share my idea that it would be quite a hit. The forums also seem to be coming up with some similar ideas to those that I had for the game, although I must admit that I hadn’t seen this post before writing my own.

Anywho, I don’t think we should quite give up just yet on the lack of FM:DS. If anyone can think of any concrete, solid, proved-by-doing-loads-of-tests facts for why this won’t work, I’m not going to disregard my ideas just yet.

FM:DS?

Once upon a time, they were two genres of football management sims, with each genre offering one title that dominated that particular market. On one side sat the expensive Personal Computer with the realistic and statistic filled Championship Manager series. On the other was the home games console and, specifically, the pretty Premier Manager series. PM may have had the looks, but when it came down to real gameplay, the PC and CM took the crown.