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Football Manager 2011 coming this year

by: Chad -
More On: Football Manager 2011
Sports Interactive is hard at work on Football Manager 2011.  (This is soccer for those of us in the USA.)  This year's iteration adds contract negotiation, a new training system, as well as a host of other improvements and updates.  Football Manager 2011 is set for release on PC, Mac and PSP "before Christmas 2010" so expect more information as we progress through the year.  Find out more here or follow Sports Interactive on Twitter (@si_games) to keep up-to-date.

FOOTBALL MANAGER 2011 UNVEILED

Sports Interactive Confirm Football Manager 2011 Release This Year

SAN FRANCISCO (August 11th, 2010) – Sports Interactive & SEGA® of America, Inc., today announced that Football Manager™ 2011 for PC and Apple Macintosh, and Football Manager Handheld™ 2011 for Sony PlayStation® Portable (via download only) will be released before Christmas 2010. With more new features than ever before, including real-time contract negotiation, a revamped training system and a number of match engine improvements, Football Manager 2011 will once again raise the bar for Soccer management games.

Football Manager 2011 will be more polished than ever this year, and Sports Interactive will again set a new standard for the genre by adding a host of new features. For the first time ever, aspiring managers can now negotiate contracts with players in real time. And by working with a multitude of real-life football agents, Sports Interactive gained an insight as to how these negotiations can be made as realistic as possible in-game. Prepare to meet different types of agents in your contract talks; each with their own personality so will therefore need a different approach.

“At Sports Interactive, we always strive to give the end-user the best experience possible,” said Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive.

With the implementation of the most intuitive training system in the series history, there is a new match preparation area of training so that managers can give their team specific areas to focus on in the lead up to a match. There are also more basic training schedules for players, and 14 different individual skill areas that you can focus your players on. Interaction with players, staff and the board have gone to a whole new level, with a host of new boardroom and backroom requests, a new player interaction module that allows the manager to have private conversations with players, as well as public conversations regarding players at other clubs.

Two years after the launch of the 3D Match Engine, players will see a number of improvements implemented for this year’s release. With over 100 new animations added, as well as more player emotions, new player models, new stadiums, pitch textures, improved lighting, floodlit night matches, more goal celebrations and lots of other extras which improve what was already the best match simulation on the market.

The other new features announced today include a revamped media module, which will keep the managers better up to date with events going on in their football world, as well as being more customisable than ever before, and the most requested feature that the Sports Interactive community have asked for in the last few years, dynamic league reputation, which makes for an even more realistic model of the soccer world.

Further new features will be announced via Twitter (@si_games), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/officialfootballmanager), a series of blogs and the popular Football Manager Podcast in the months leading up to the game’s release. With more new features than anyone could ever fit in a press release, Football Manager will retain its position as the most realistic, most played, annually best selling, and highest reviewed football management simulation in the world.

Football Manager Handheld 2011 will also be available for release this year on PSP, (via download only) including improvements in the tactics screen, a completely new skin, the updated database and improved match graphics.

For further information please go to www.sigames.com or www.footballmanager.com.

About SEGA® of America, Inc.
SEGA® of America, Inc. is the American Publishing arm of Tokyo, Japan-based SEGA® Corporation, a worldwide leader in interactive entertainment both inside and outside the home. The company develops, publishes and distributes interactive entertainment software products for a variety of hardware platforms including PC, wireless devices, and those manufactured by Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. SEGA’s global website site is located at www.sega.com.

About Sports Interactive Ltd.:
Sports Interactive (SI) is the world’s leading developer of football management simulations through its Football Manager series of games Founded in 1994 and based in the Old Street area of London, SI has a full-time staff of 60 and employs services of more than 1,500 part-time researchers across the globe, alongside over 100 offsite beta testers. The company’s games have enjoyed an unparalleled history of commercial and critical success, with ten of its creations among the UK's Top 20 fastest-selling PC games of all time, and 5 in the UK’s top 20 best selling PC games of all time. Sports Interactive became a wholly owned subsidiary of SEGA in 2006. Further information on the company and its games is available from the SI website, www.sigames.com.