Football Manager 2007

Football Manager is a series of football management simulation games first released in 1982 by Addictive Games, and lasting until the mid 1990s. In 2004, the series was revived by Sports Interactive to replace the name of their Championship Manager series. The original series is credited as being the first ever computer game to use the concept of managing a football team. Football Manager 2007 is the latest in the series.

In the United States and Canada the series is sold as Worldwide Soccer Manager or WSM. This is similar to the name of the series on the Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast. These games were published by Sega who, incidentally, are now Football Manager's publishers, in the place of Eidos, who published Sports Interactive's Championship Manager series until their split in 2003.

On 8 June 2006, Sports Interactive published details on Football Manager 2007. "Packed full with more than 100 new features, Football Manager™ 2007 is set for release on PC, Mac and Intel Mac, as well as the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft. Football Manager Handheld on Sony’s PlayStation Portable handheld entertainment system (PSP) completes the format line-up, with all platforms set for a Christmas 2006 release."

On 24 September 2006 it was announced that Football Manager 2007 would be released on the 20 October 2006.

On 1 October 2006, Sports Interactive released a Gold Demo of FM 2007, available in two versions, vanilla and strawberry. Both versions allow users to play 6 months into a season. The strawberry version contains a larger collection of quickstarts so users can try out more leagues. It also contains more graphics than the vanilla version.

As a result of certain retail outlets ignoring the official release date, Football Manager 2007 was actually released on 18 October 2006.

New Features in the 2007 version of FM include the ability to include pictures for you as the manager; substantially increased media interaction such as approaches from national newspaper journalists about the upcoming match or asking for comments on a player's performance in recent matches; new varying degrees of criticism or praise for players (happy with form or very pleased with form rather that just one generic good term), a similar feature has been included for such actions as admiring players or attempting to unsettle transfer targets. Improvements have also been made to board request interactions.

The main improvement lauded by Sports Interactive for this version of FM is the improved scouting system. Scouts' and coaches' experience is now shown graphically via bar charts and scouts gain knowledge from areas they have scouted previously. To go with this it is now possible to get feeder/parent club status which allows you to either send your players to lower league teams to gain experience, make it easier to get work permits, merchandise sales in other areas etc. or work from a similar angle from the opposite end gaining parachute payments from higher league clubs and their reserve players on loan for no cost. In turn the parent club gains scouting knowledge for the area that the feeder club is in if it is in another country than that club.

A patch has been released to combat some of the main bugs in the game, such as unrealistic scout reports and high amounts of injurys sustained whilst playing on the pitch. The latest build of this patch is 7.0.2 94768.