The day we all have been awaiting for since the Football Manager 2020 announcement dropped last month is finally arrived! The Football Manager 2020 features are finally revealed!
Headline Features
Here we will give you a closer insight to the new Football Manager 2020 edition with all it’s changes and improvements, licenses upgrades and new features! The complete list of Football Manager 2020 features will be updated until the beta arrives sometime towards the end of October and will let you find FM20 screenshots as well as all the information you need to decide whether (or not) you shall pre-order Football Manager 2020.
For information about system requirements, release date and other information about FM20, please check our Football Manager 2020 news page.
We hope you are as excited about the Football Manager 2020 features as we! Keep on reading to discover all the coming changes to FM20.
Complete list of Football Manager 2020 Features
One of the key focus areas for the latest edition of Football Manager is long term play. The new Football Manager 2020 features reflects this, as a number of major improvements on how we will approach our save has been revealed. Just look at this!
Club Vision
You’ll face new challenges during every save and at every club you manage on the way, adapting your style and approach throughout your career.”
FM20 will let you see a major overhaul to the boardroom experience. The biggest change of all, in the entire series of Football Manager, is the brand new Club Vision. For Football Manager 2020, the club vision will let you get an unique experience with each team you are managing and are linked to the long-term development of the club.
Now, the board won’t simply lay out their expectations, but also set a course for the club to progress, either it’s through improving the club culture, meet the objectives set at your first meeting with the board, or progress towards the club’s five year plan.
The club culture objectives looks to replicate the boards dealings with footballing matters as well as the business side of the club. Objectives such as the type of club’s transfer policy (make profit on transfers, develop youngsters) and the style of football the team is expected to play will create both boundaries and opportunities in how you run the club.
The board will place almost as much importance on your ability to hit the club culture objectives as they do on your ability to hit your season expectations. Football Manager
As part of the overall objectives for the club is the five year plan laid out in a season-by-season order. Here you’ll see what’s important of you to keep the board happy with you, what’s expected of you and the long term plan for the club. In FM20, boards may act differently depending on their level of ambitions. So the long term and ongoing objectives can include everything from financial, infrastructure and competition objectives to achieve the board’s ultimate vision.
The ongoing objectives are integrated into the identity of the club. This means that these ongoing objectives are tasks that you’ll required or preferred to stick to during your entire tenure as manager, as it’s part of the club’s traditions.
The Club Vision Meetings
Objectives can be negotiated at the end of every season, or when you start a new job through the club vision meetings. Every time you’ll be provided the current club culture, ongoing and five year plan objectives before you can negotiate further by suggesting to bring objectives in, remove ‘unnecessary’ ones or push back an objective by a season or two. If you decide to alter an objective, be aware that your board may expect you to offer something in return (e.g. qualify for the Europa League one season earlier if you decide winning the league is too ambitious).
The club vision meetings held after each season is also the place to discuss season expectations and ask the board to not judge you on a certain competition. But remember that the board may expect more from you in the remaining competitions.
As life itself, the club visions are dynamic and will change as you progresses with your club. A period of success and hitting your objectives early on will ensure the board demands more of you in the seasons to come.
New 3D Boardroom Environment
Once setting up your save and selecting the club to manage, you will be presented to the Club Vision in the new welcome meeting, which let’s you discover the new 3D boardroom environment. Here you’ll be able to learn more about the club, get a brief knowledge of the players at your disposal – including your best matchday squad – plus schedule the manager inductions.
The new 3D boardroom environment is scalable and will change depending on the level of the club you are managing. This means that a lower league club will have a less fancy office than a top division club.
Board Confidence now renamed to ‘Performance’
For FM20, the Club Vision, will be part of Board Confidence module or the ‘Performance’ section which is it now called. Every month you’ll receive a report card in your inbox about the monthly performance update. Here you’ll get highlights of how pleased the board are of you together with a breakdown of each ‘category’ relating to club vision – all graded from A+ to F. The grades looks to give you a clear idea on how you’re performing in each area and which areas you need to focus on improving.
The Performance overview is also visible at any time on the Board sidebar section.
Other Improvements When Interacting with the Board
- new board requests and several existing board requests improved
- more conversation options available when dealing with the board
- New board conversation options to push back when approached about bad form
Development Centre
For everyone as focused on developing their own youngsters and keep track of their progress comes an all-encompassing hub – the Development Centre. The development centre inherits the spot within the sidebar that previously existed for reserves and youth squads.
It looks to bring together all areas of the game which is related to the development of the youngsters, in order to make it easier for every manager (no matter their approach to youth development) to nurture the next generation of talents, by being provided with all the tools and information you need to address their development in one place!
From the Overview screen of the Development Centre you’ll get the most important information about the youngsters within your club, from the ones to watch, potential future first team starters to the players who needs your attention to hit their potential.
Your backroom staff will provide you with advises about specific players as well as to provide you with a clear guide on how a player’s current ability is developing month-to-month by the brand new Progression graphs. All of these advises is accessible and actionable from the overview screen.
At the top of the screen you’ll receive an assessment of the strength of your youth teams. The assessment is added for two reasons:
- let you gauge whether the current crop of youth performs as expected
- plus, notice how your long-term youth policy (investment into youth coaching, recruitment and facilities) impacts your youth squads
The Development Centre gives you an easier way to monitor players in or out on loan, with details about how they progresses, stats of their performance and ratings. By clicking each player you’ll be represented with a loan report card featuring valuable information about the promised playing time versus actual playing time, amount of appearances recorded, their happiness, morale and form. Action buttons let’s you easily recall players, terminate loans or get loan suggestions.
This information was previously only available in individual loan report cards, but with the new basic and in-depth information on all players appearing in one screen you are able to plan for the future (with or without the players out on loan).
While the Development Centre is beneficial for you to track all youth players progress, it’s specifically handy to monitor and deal with the high potential players right from the start.
With it, you’ll have even more information available to you right from the start to help you get the most out of their potential. But do remember, this information depends on whether your coaching staff have got it right, which makes them even more important than ever before!
Youth Intake
The Development Centre will also be the place to get a preview of your yearly youth intake. This means that the yearly youth intake won’t happen in a specific date, as we have been used to, but now you’ll get information in the months before the new crop of talent actually arrives! This way, you’ll be able to analyze the players, gauge the level of talent and plan accordingly, by simply visiting the ‘Youth Candidates’ tab in the Development Centre.
From here you’ll receive an indication of how strong this year’s intake will be in terms of whether it may be some high potential talents coming through as well as which position you will receive youth from.
When the time for the youth intake does arrive, you can view individual reports featuring each player’s current and potential ability ratings immediately.
Management options (youth and reserve squads)
As part of the Development Centre you’ll find the management options for youth and reserve squads. Each squad has its own tab with a dropdown menu containing a wealth of squad information. Valuable information such as their current match tactics, team and individual training, dynamics screens and recent match analysis are all provided for you here. Multiple decisions and changes are available for each squad, such as making First Team members available to play a reserve match.
Other Improvements to Reserves & youth Squads
- With certain B teams, such as those in Portgual where B teams are more reserve teams not separate clubs, you can now request which B team players attend first team training sessions.
- ability to ask your board to allow you to have a B team when managing in countries where they are allowed
- You can now request a reserve team from your board should you not already have one.
Backroom Staff Improvements
Team selection Advice
FM20 have more support available to you from your staff than ever before. At first, the brand new team selection advice provides you with
advises from the backroom staff about who to pick in your matchday squad and offer advises on the starting XI with the reason to include him for each player. Through this, you have the option to un-tick any player suggested and stick with your own pick. See screenshot of this change here.
These advises will be delivered in an inbox message taking into account a range of information (from form, role suitability, player ability and relevant information on all the players in your proposed starting eleven, such as skills and specific key strengths).
You are free to choose to accept all, none or some of the recommendations from the backroom staff about the starting eleven. Simply tick or un-tick the selections you want to proceed with and click ‘Apply Changes’, then that line-up will automatically be added to the team selection screen on matchday, or wait before the match kick-off to make last changes or apply the final XI.
Team selection advice is also available to you at any time on the tactics screen. Simply click the ‘Selection Advice’ button at the top of the screen.
Greater advice is available to you within every aspect of Football Manager 2020. One thing that has been improved is the advises within the tactics pitch squares, bringing up more detailed analysis on what factors are influencing your strength in that area of the pitch with information about who’s highly influential within that area.
One addition, is the inclusion of more additional information provided when a member of staff suggests not to renew a player’s contract. In your inbox you’ll get their clear recommendation of whether a player is not good enough for a new contract, too old or simply does not have enough potential.
Tactical Style Advises
In FM20, your staff will offer more advises and insight when specific team instructions departs from your selected tactical style, providing you with better tips on how to utilize your preferred tactical style to the fullest. This means that it’s more important than ever to have coaches with great tactical knowledge.
In FM20, there will be better modelling of staff progression, e.g. young coaches will improve quicker when working with better/more experienced coaches, scouts/analysts will improve quicker by regularly scouting/doing more analysis etc.
Tactics Confidence Panel
Football Manager 2020 will feature an expansion of the amount of information displayed on the Tactics Confidence panel. You’ll be able to watch a screenshot of the improved tactics confidence panel here.
Overhauled Staff Responsibilities and Settings
Football Manager 2020 lets you change even more responsibility settings to a various areas of the game within several news items. While the staff responsibilities screen and how it works has been overhauled, it includes more information about your responsibilities and the responsibilities you’ve delegated to your staff.
Responsibilities are broken down by area and you can choose to delegate or take control of each individual responsibility from under that area, whilst adjust when you receive advice and reports and who you get them from.
– Another improvement to staff in FM20 is the better modelling of staff roles at clubs so that the correct members of backroom staff are assigned to their real life tasks, not just job names.
– When replacing staff members (sacking due to hiring a new one) you will now have the option to either take over departing staff duties or not.
– Another neat little feature, is that you’ll now get an inbox item when the board allows you a change in staff numbers.
New Staff Role: Technical Director ↦ Head of Player Development
Brand new in Football Manager 2020 comes the Technical Director, who have the ability to offer backroom advice from the very top judging staff ability and staff potential. He’s a senior member of the squad who focuses on the other senior staff members and will suggest coaching courses and report on staff progression and assists you in the matter of staff development, similar to the head of youth development who assists in player development.
The Head of Player Development is also a new staff role to be acquainted with in FM20. This role is an important factor for elite clubs with a large number of loan players working on getting regular playing time. He recommends players that would benefit from a loan spell, and where he believes he shall go while providing loan reports which lets you more easily track their progress. Loan player progress concerns not only their performances but their minutes on the pitch, the role that they’re playing in and their overall happiness in the situation they’re in.
The Head of Player Development will be an important assistance to the Development Centre and the information you receive from that hub.
Re-designed Staff Responsibility screen
The staff responsibilities screen has been re-designed letting you easier to delegate or take control of a specific area. As part of this improvement, you can now ask your assistant manager to deliver touchline instructions during matches. See screenshot here:
Conclusion
Your Football Manager 2020 backroom staff team can be more helpful than ever before, giving you more detailed and contextually relevant advice to providing expertise in more areas of the game than was previously possible. All in all, your backroom team and quality of it, can become the difference between success and failure!
Playing Time Pathway
Football Manager 2020 gives you more control and freedom to plan for the long term. With player development totally redefined, playing time pathway has made it’s way into the game, to give you full freedom to set individual pathways for all your players.
At contract negotiations, you are now able to define the path for the player in question by set individual playing time promises, not only for the first season but also for the next seasons ahead. With the ability to select from 12 statuses, ranging from Youngster to Star player you are able to indicate how much game-time you’re offering them per season within their contract.
This means that you can promise a player the status as a future potential for the current season, enhance his status to Breakthrough Prospect for the next, before promising him to become a squad player if his development continues on the right track.
Goalkeepers will have their own tailor-made statuses, which let’s you see him go from an Emergency Backup to Cup Goalkeeper to a First Choice Goalkeeper within his career.
This will help to not only develop a pathway for each individual player but to plan your squad for the future squad using your organizational skills according to the evolution of the squad. It helps with how you deal with the coming transfer windows as you carefully finds new additions that fits perfectly.
All statuses comes with a definition. For example, Star Player implies that the player is highly important to your squad and will play both cup and first team matches. On the contrary, Backup players will only get playing time when regular starters are injured. This means that Emergency Backup players will not be unhappy if they don’t get playing time, as this is expected from them.
As the season progresses and the players develop you’ll receive regular updates on changes to their indicated statuses. After the end of the season you’ll be able to reassess each individual pathway, as the backroom staff provides clear information about where the players are progressing to (e.g Future Prospect has declined in status to be seen as a Fringe Player, and alter your overall plan for the upcoming transfer window.
The playing time pathway provides you with better control of the structure of your team, and let you be on top of your long-term squad planning whilst maintaining the squad happiness.
Your Manager Career
For once, FM20 will let you experience a better unemployed experience. This is a highly welcome feature for all those who wants to start off with no reputation and no coaching badges and work your way to the top by starting of unemployed.
Unemployed managers will now get more information on available jobs, increased press opportunities and weekly job updates. You will receive these updates in your inbox and get details about a clubs reputation, their training facility level, specific transfer policy and information about their finances. See screenshot.
Should you ever enjoy a successful spell and decide to resign from the club to seek new challenges, the board will ask you to reconsider your resignation and discuss ways of moving forward.
Finances: Transfer & Contract Changes
- More options to specify loan durations; you can set any number of months as well as end of the season, the end of the following season or until the next transfer window.
- You now have the option to protest a transfer offer that was accepted by the board over your head
- When players are released, particularly when at lower levels or youth players released at top levels, they are now much more likely to join clubs local to the club they’re released from should they have multiple choices
- you can now send a player on intensive language course when they are loaned back to their parent club as part of a transfer deal
- Allow managers to suggest transfer targets for director of football signings that’s more specific by find prospects either by all roles in a position or a specific player role. See screenshot
- You can track your transfer spending more closely with analysis of your ins and outs displayed in greater detail
- You can now ask your board for extra funds to complete a crucial loan signing
- Multiple buy back clauses are now possible in transfers, meaning you’ll be able to set different buy-back prices for different seasons
- players moved to the “discard” list will no long appear in player search until they are removed/leave the discard list. Making narrowing down searches a lot easier.
- You can now keep track of the investment your owner/board puts into the club
- Managers now have the ability to stall a loan offer. Perfect for getting in a replacement before looking to get a youngster more experience
Club Sponsorship Table
A brand new feature that has been requested for years is a club sponsorship table. The sponsorship table let’s you see how much money each
club receives in sponsorship income within the league.
Graphic Enhancements
- Upgraded Human Models. For FM20, there will be a significant upgrade to the human models, which has received a more realistic anatomy and bone structure. The end result is a more lifelike appearance.
- Overhauled Kit texture. By using a new software, FM20 will see a more realistic clothing with creases and folds that drapes more naturally over the models (players as referees).
- Improved Manager Avatars. With the new human models comes major improvements to the manager avatars, which will look more realistic than ever before. New details will also be added such as tie clips, buttons and laces. Similar to the kit textures, there are now creases and folds in the trousers and the shirts.
- Related to the club vision, you are now able to edit your manager man appearance (clothing) according to the club colors, ensuring your touchline style is in line with your team’s look, even after you change jobs.
- Improvements to the Crowd. The base model improvements has also been extended to the crowd on the stadium.
- Enhanced pitch surfaces and improved weather effects on the pitch. Pitches are as in real life affected by the weather. A dry summer evening will let you experience a dried up pitch while a rainy day will let you experience patches of a soaking wet pitch in certain areas. Visible water and mud particles flying off from the surface of the pitch is also added. You will even experience that as the match continues, the pitch will get worse and worse (perhaps due to sliding tackles and etc.).
- Improved lightning. With the introduction to image-based lighting, shades and exterior lighting during the match will appear more naturally.
User Interface Improvements
Football Manager 2020 lets you experience a revamped competition rule screen, making it easier to study specific rules and formats. See screenshot
Team Meetings & Player Interactions
Code of Conduct & Player Fines Included
New in Football Manager 2020 comes the ability to define player fines before the new season. Your captain will present the potential ‘Code of Conduct’ which you are free to personalize and make adjustments to whenever you join a new club. Different disciplinary actions are available, brought to you by your team which they are happy to abide by throughout the campaign.
The list of different offences includes fines for missing training, multiple booking bans, being send off (after two yellow cards or direct red card) or being absent from training or squad meetings.
Improvements to End of Season Meetings
You can now find additional talking points for end of season meetings between you and your players. This should give you more flexibility and clearer communication during end of season meetings. Example here.
When talking about team meetings. One improvement in team meetings are the possibility to receive advice from your backroom staff on the best option (of tone and communication sentence) to select when talking to your players. Example here.
There are also new conversation options added for when players have to be sold to help with financial fair play.
Previous player partnerships have been added into tactics.
– Players at a club who’ve got an established partnership will appear in-game and if you reunite two players who have played well together previously, they may still have a connection.
Improvements to Create-A-club Mode & Fantasy Draft
- There’s now more flexibility when creating kits in Create-A-Club mode
- You now have the ability to save a created player in Create a Club. So you can take your players into any new save you wish to start, with any club
- When creating your dream squad in create a club, you can now search for home grown players to ensure you’re adhering to registration rules
- Player values are now reflected in the transfer budget when signing a player in create a club
- In a fantasy draft you now have the option for the AI to pick all remaining players for you. This will speed up the process and ensure you only need to focus on the players you want to pick
List of Minor Improvements
- Inverted Winger available in AML/R position
- the ability to mass edit training intensity using multi-row select.
- Further randomization of new gen dates.
- Newgens can now have more dynamic personalities that change over time depending on more circumstances in game.
- A new Portuguese league squad registration rule is added. It’s a bit complicated rule, but it involves the first year senior player rule.
- Better modelling of the players who receive medals for competition wins.
- Better modelling of how AI Managers of higher profile clubs are now more likely to take some competitions less seriously and use youth players in their squad for tournaments like the League Cup/Euro Cup
- Better modelling of newgens for Basque region clubs whose players had previously been skewed to the countries they were based in, rather than the region they cover.
- The possibility to request the board apply to use the A League FFA Marquee player fund when playing in the A League, up to a maximum of 3Mill AUD per season for the entire league.
- A revamped preferences section, way less overbearing, with the most popularly changed ones easier to find and all others now searchable to make them easier to find too (when you know what you’re looking for, and when you don’t, they’re all there in sections to see).
- Huge improvements to the way MLS B teams work. Full code refactor, real life affiliations now set, much better AI to decide who should be moved to the B-team, & vice versa, min. s
- Western Melbourne Group and Macarthur South West Sydney are two new clubs who you’ll able to manage in the new expanded Hyundai A-League
- You’ll now receive warning from staff if a player has no chance of a contract renewal due to work permit issues
- New squad registration rules for Norway, so if managing in Norway you now have to set A List and B List squads, with B squad players only allowed to play 3 league matches a season and are youth/amateur players
- Season bonuses are now given for staff as well as players.
- Usability: when seeting the transfer type as “sell at any price” it locks in the minimum acceptable value of 0, rather than the price previously set
- A-League clubs can make up to three Senior players available at the start of the season to play for the Youth team throughout the season
- 3 new Steam achievements available based on the amount of money earned in game. Plus there are a host of new achievements to earn across different game modes
- Improvements to the fixture scheduling in Germany. For example – the first game of the Bundesliga season will always have the Champions playing on a Friday night at home.
- owners now consider the international break as a point where it may make sense to replace a manager
- You now have the ability to save all set pieces at once in one single file
- Improved movement map function in match analysis. Reduced lag and increased functionality’.
- You now have the ability to set up your own friendly pre-season competition. As long as give it the same name every year you can track its history and previous winners.
- When creating your manager and set to “Experienced”, you can add your favourite style and formation to bring more personality to your profile
- a new free agent trial tournament entitled ‘The Bosman tournament’ features out of contract players from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Ireland.
- In the event of a takeover, new ownership may ask you to sign a certain player in line with the promises they made when buying the club
- You’ll now receive a congratulatory message from the board on any and all award wins
- You now have the choice to upload an image or use your manager’s created face for your in-game profile
- You can now extract your manager model so you’ll never need to recreate them
- Support for “Homegrown Players From Nation” transfer window types in Switzerland
- The friendly calendar (and main calendar) now shows youth team games & youth friendlies to make it easier for you to plan games for all your squads.
- semi-pro players are more likely to move to other countries, such as Wales & NI from England & Scotland, or countries with better economies
- An expansion of youth player poaching from big clubs – increased in number and
- The board intelligence is improved with transfers & contract renewals & more likely to block if something goes outside the club vision or could cause long term financial issues
- Youth coaches may now decide to get youth players training in new positions should their attributes be more suited to other positions and give advice to you about it.
- You now get feedback on the social feed about how your players who are out on loan are doing, so feedback from fans not just your club staff.
- Suggestions from your Director of Football are now more accessible in game, rather than hidden behind sub-menus
- This is also the case for all kinds of backroom advice in-game, with it appearing more often, in more default ways like the inbox, and with useful buttons on inbox items and screens where your staffs advise can be helpful.
- ability to change the sorting of player attributes to the way they are in English when you’re playing in a language that isn’t English
- We’ve added an option when adding a player to the development list to only offer players out for loan to clubs in the same country for home grown purposes.
- If loans are successful in game, that will now affect the chances of a relationship being formed by the two managers, not just clubs. And vice-versa.
- More newgens will now have second nationalities to reflect the more global world that we (currently) live in.
- you can now make youth & reserve players unavailable for individual youth & reserve matches without having to move them to the senior squad. Which is very useful for midweek cup games..
- DoF/loan manager – you now have a loan % instruction for the director of football, so that they have knowledge on exactly what you are looking for making it easier to find the right deal when putting players out on loan
- DoF, or whoever is responsible for transfers if it’s not you, will now adjust transfer/wage budgets more often whilst making signings.
- Added tooltips to financial graphs, so you’ll actually understand what it all means!
alary changes to RES, SMS & SENIn the goalkeeper profile you’ll now see added stats for ‘penalties faced’ and ‘penalties saved’
awareness when newgens in your academy are poached from age 14, even before they’ve appeared in your youth squad, with news items & reminders.
Improvements to Network Gaming
- Match Controller has been rewritten to provide a smoother and more stable match experience to users with less hang time and delays when entering and exiting matches
- Fixed issue where game freezing for user when spectator viewing match leaves match
- Fixed pauses in user vs user matches when both were making a tactical change (This was apparently by far and away the most common complaint in network game threads on the forums)
- Fixed issue where game freezes when trying to view a friendly match that has been set to assistant by other user
- Fixed issue where timers caused user to be unable to make substitutions after half-time
- Fixed issue where making a sub just before half time causes user to skip team talk screen
- Fixed issue of network saves not appearing in lobby
- Various crash and divergences fixed
- Fixed issue where if host crashes whilst processing, client is stuck on processing at the start screen
- Fixed minor issue where “Continue” button was appearing as “Match” after a game
- Fixed an issue letting pre-match timer run down changes the user’s line-up
- Fixed timeline disappears after a goal in network match when playing as client v host
- Fixed issue where user can repeat half time team talk if client does not proceed
NB!
The screenshots are work in progress and have been optimized for the website. The actual quality of them will not reflect the true quality in the game. Please visit Football Manager for more screenshots of FM20.