Finally some of the new Football Manager 2016 features have been announced throught out the last day, something I have been eagerly anticipating for a 3 month time. While Football Manager 2016 will be available for PC, MAC and Linux, Sports Interactive have not forgotten about the tablet and mobile users by introducing an all new line up of different Football Manager 2016 versions giving you the chance to play FM16 wherever and whenever – building on the mantra of FM15. New this year is Football Manager Touch 2016 and Football Manager Mobile 2016.
With a number of exciting new Football Manager 2016 features plus some early match engine footages announced by Miles Jacobson and Football Manager Monday 7th of September 2015, we were introduced to one of the most promising Football Manager versions in the series!
To give you all the information needed to pre-order FM16 from us or a participating retailer we have created this all-in-one page featuring all the new major and minor features of FM 2016, as well as giving you an exclusive chance to watch the official FM16 screenshots or the early footages of the work in progress FM16 videos.
Our list of Football Manager 2016 features will be updated regularly with all the major and minor changes, improvements and revamps as well as giving you the chance to see the latest FM16 screenshots and WIP videos as soon as they are revealed by Miles Jacobson and the official Football Manager team throughout the next months.
Which new Football Manager 2016 features would you like to see in the game?
NB! All screenshots related to this article has been captured from Miles Jacobson's official Twitter account, Football Manager 2016 feature videos published at Instagram and Youtube or the official Twitter account of Football Manager. All images are work in process and doesn't capture the full quality of the actual product delivered at release.
Short description: The new FM16 dynamic rivalry feature means that new rivalries with clubs can develop over time.
One of the first exciting Football Manager 2016 features is the chance to develop new rivalries against clubs within your league or other clubs of foreign countries within your managerial time. With dynamic rivalries in Football Manager 2016, derbies and rival clubs is no longer hard-coded ultimately meaning that you can build international rivalries against a fierce competitor, something that could happen if two clubs are battling for the same trophy season after season.
Apart from gaining rival clubs and derbies, you can also experience that common real life rivalries are being deleted.
What we do not know yet is if the dynamic rivalries will also be attached to national teams and international tournaments.
At the 1st of April 2015 a new work in progress video about the recording of manager motion captures were published on the official Football Manager facebook page. Despite it was announced on April Fool's Day, Sports Interactive have argued it was just coincidental.
The new managers motion capture feature for FM16 will finally let you be able to see different managers personalities like Josep Guardiola or José Mourinho who are known to be rather active on the sidelines versus Carlo Ancelotti and other managers who rather hides their feelings for the media. Now you will have the ability to see the managers yelling instructions and engaging with the players on the bench by sheering and waving their arms.
For FM16 you will be able to see your manager on the touchline – read more below!
The manager on the touchline feature lets you get closer to the action than ever before with your own customisable character to bark out instructions and join the celebrations from the touchline.
One improvement to the setup of your own unique manager profile is the introduction of Touchline Manager Character customizing. After the integration of tracksuit and tactical manager in FM15, where you could set your own coaching badges and managerial attributes comes a new way to style your manager character to your own preference. In the start up process of a new save you will now be able to customize your manager character according to your personal preferences.
With the ability to design how the manager shall look according to your height, weight, hair style and skin type you will also be able to see the managers at the touchline throughout the match giving you a visual perspective of the managers mental state, either its you or the AI manager.
With your own custom avatar which you can either create or upload you will be able to see yourself on the touchline cheering.
One of the improvements to FM16 is the revamp done to staffs. Sports Interactive were quite early to reveal the screenshots of the new staff overview and backroom staff profile screen, giving us a taste on how we can handle staffs in FM16.
Not only are staffs grouped together according to their job description: coaching team, scouting and transfer team and medical team, but the new user-interface of the staff overview screen reveals we are finally able to let us compare our different staff teams with the level of staff teams of the other clubs in your the league. A small improvement perhaps, but can be an highly beneficial feature for those battling to take a smaller club into the top of their league.
The new staff comparison feature will let you see which area you will need to improve to be competible.
The new backroom staff profile screen reveals the ability to highlight key attributes for the role or for the specific overall coaching category. This will let you be able to find the best coaches more easily.
Hopefully there will be bigger changes than the minor improvements made to the user-interface for backroom staff overview and staff profile screen as revealed of 15th of September.
Non-players who aren't interested in joining your club will now tell you the reasons why they refused.
Staff can now have dual roles at the same club. This little feature may come in handy for all lower league clubs or clubs with small staff transfer budgets.
Director of Football can now be given full selling responsibility.
Press Conferences are now more varied with new conversations added and more contextual questions and responses with the press and the media. The expanded press conference and exclusive interviews also lets unemployed managers use media interviews to help them get them back into the game far quicker.
There will now be held Press interviews when you have resigned or sacked from a club – giving you the chance to express your feelings about the departure.
You'll now be asked about the prospect of facing a newly appointed AI manager. This may include questions on how you'd plan to approach the match against the newly appointed manager.
Ability to discuss backroom staff philosophies in job interviews meaning you can influence on the clubs level of backroom staff and the amount of money the club shall spend on it – the allocated staff budget you require to reach your goals.
When the sliders were removed for FM14 and the introduction of team instructions it became harder for us all to know the level of the settings of team instructions in regard to player role settings and mentality. An early screenshot of the FM16 team instruction screen seems that SI have finally given us the visual tool-tip of the level of team instructions plus player instructions. The ability to visualize the level of tactics settings has been requested since the removal of the sliders and will be a great addition to understand how short or how direct the team will play, or how narrow or wide your match tactics will be with your current setup of team instructions.
The visual tool-tip lets you discover the original level of the tactics setting, if its conflicting or how much the team instruction selected will impact on your match tactics and playing style.
An improvement seems to have been done to the description of the different match mentalities making you able to understand far better how the different match mentalities will behave. It's not only the interface of the team instruction and player instructions in Football Manager 2016 which has received an overhaul. New instructions have been added such as the ability to tell players to 'dribble less'.
Another new team instruction is the option to tell your team to 'play much narrower' something that can be valuable when facing an opponent playing through the middle. On the contrary you can also instruct your team to 'play much wider' to benefit from the quality of better players on the flanks. Play much wider can be highly effective when employing a strong wide attacker.
All in all, the overhaul to the FM16 tactics creator seems to be one of the best features of Football Manager 2016.
Improved layout of the Football Manager 2016 Player Instruction screen making it easier to understand how the player role interacts according to the preferred instructions you can set.
With the work on improving how you create tactics and tactical systems in FM15, comes a major change to how you create and setup set-pieces in Football Manager 2016 in additional to improvements to the match engine itself.
The Football Manager 2016 match engine comes with 3,937 new animations, where 2681 are totally brand new while 1256 animations will replace old ones according to a tweet from Miles Jacobson at 22nd of October – making the match experience and the on-pitch behavior even more realistic. One important improvement are the changes to the AI – hopefully making it even harder to exploit any AI weaknesses.
Brand new multi match highlights package which lets you easily view other fixtures in your own competition (or others) to keep you up-to-date with everything that's going on in the world around you. The highlights package is just like an evening TV round up – showing comprehensive, extended, key or just the goals for each match in the division played that day.
Managers can replay talking-point incidents immediately after they happen giving you the ability to study and analyze what just happened. By replaying highlights of key talking points during matches, such as red cards, fouls or controversial goals you will have better terms to make up your opinion of the incident which the media might talk about in the pro-match press conference or any half/full time tunnel interviews.
One highly welcome improvement for Football Manager 2016 is the more advanced set-piece creator, which gives you more choices and a deeper control to create set-piece scenarios, something I've personally have been wanting since FM14. As the screenshot below reveals it seems you can cycle between different set-piece routines which can come in handy when your opponent has figured out your set-piece tactics or you need to alter your current defensive or attacking set-piece routine. The set-piece routines created can be used across multiple tactics; with different set pieces for each set piece taker, new zonal marking options and much, much more.
With individual instructions and a tool-tip of the most important attributes for the player tasks within the set-piece scenario it seems you will get a deeper control and a better understanding of what it's required from him.
All in all, it seems the new set-piece routine creator makes you able to create hundreds of different types of set-piece routines according to your team strength and your opponents weaknesses.
Tactics creation in Football Manager 2016 will be a wonderful journey both for advanced users and 'rookies'. With the ability to enjoy at least 4 new formations. The new pre-defined formations will let you experienced both popular systems such as a new strikerless formation; the 4-2-3-1-0 DM or some new balanced systems such as a new 5-4-1 diamond formation where width is provided by wingbacks. The other new formations in Football Manager 2016 is the highly trendy 3-1-4-2 DM and a 5-2-2-1 WB build on numerical superiority in the center and width coming from the wingbacks.
Remember you can tailor the tactic by selecting different player roles than what is selected on the few screenshots below.
Another promising improvement to Football Manager 2016 is the revamp and overhaul to the team and player analysis with the inclusion of Prozone integration. The partnership with Prozone begun in 2014 prior to the FM15 release, which let Prozone get access to all data from the Football Manager database. The partnership with the leading sports statistics provider, Prozone, has seen a wide reaching revamp of the in-game match analysis tool, adding lots of useful functionality whilst also making it a lot more prominent and easier to use.
With Prozone integration in Football Manager 2016 it gives you an even deeper match analysis, more team stats and the ability to analyze player performance on a totally new level. Now the analysis screen is diverted into different zones and channels which let's you better analyze where weaknesses in your formation and use of player roles are.
The ability to scroll through match analysis for every minute within the total 90 minutes by the help of a time bar let's you get a deeper understanding and statistics of players' performance on an event by event basis. This meants that you can set the analyze time bar to for example 20 minutes and you will see all records between 0 and 20 minutes, between 45 and 90 minutes or use the slider to get stat packs from a lesser time period.
The tactical analysis lets you select a number of different stats ranging from passing to fouls for both your team and your opponent at one screen! The ability to narrow down the stat analysis to a particular player or only your team in regard to shots will come in handy to improve and/or alter your match tactics at the current match or for the next ones.
A new shot zone analysis will be far more detail than ever making it more visual where shots where coming from within or outside the penalty area by splitting the final third into zones. The amount of shots and where the goals came from let you analyze how accurate your player are within a specific zone.
With the Prozone integration for FM16 comes the Prozone rolling stats processing panel. Here you will get all the latest stats from your league and hopefully from the leagues you've selected as playable when creating your save (not confirmed).
Together with the big overhaul to the statistial approach to Football Manager 2016, the team stats overview have received a purposeful tweak build on improved visual view of which teams who conceded the least goals in the league, or who has recorded the best average possession stat. In additional you will also be able to see how many players a specific club has used throughout the entire season in the season review news item.
The integration of Prozone and the improvements to statistics let you get access to more detailed statistical information than ever before! In additional will the in-game match analysis tool add lots of useful functionality whilst also making it a lot more prominent and easier to use.
The improved layout on the end of season review screen will get you more information about the seasonal best players of your squad, such as highlighting the top goalscorer, the player with the highest average rating or the one hitting the most accurate passes.
The pre-match analysis screen will now show key battles featuring information about the current club status and key players to watch.
The ability to see the results of past meetings between managers will give more information to the head to head table we¨re used to from FM15.
After each match you will be able to get more information about the fans' reactions on the match result. Such feedback can be found in the board confidence screen letting you know if the results are within the fans' expectations for the season. See screenshot here.
With over 40 matches per season in the biggest leagues, the task to maintain each players fitness has never been more important. Injuries has become an integral part of football. Injuries and players out of form is what every manager wants to avoid in order to build a strong squad. In Football Manager 2016 you will experience a more realistic approach to the way you will approach maintaining player fitness and handling injuries.
Football Manager 2016 will see a more realistic depiction and treatment of injuries than ever before, as Sports Interactive have worked alongside a number of real physiotherapists, doctors and related organisations within football. This does not mean that fewer injuries will be sustained, but that those which do occur will be treated and develop more realistically. Injuries will now be determined during matches, while new injury types have been added and there is now a tangible distinction between player condition and match sharpness.
In FM16 you don't need to worry about the financial cost if a player gets injuried in a match, at international duty or wherever he gets injured as player insurance is now added to the game. This means that when ever a player gets injured his salary will be insured.
Watch an early video of the new match engine related to more realistic injuries in FM16 here.
Related to the changes to injuries in Football Manager 2016 and how to handle it, there is a new chat mode for managers if the player are unfortunate to get a severe injury. The ability to have conversations with injuried players can be a nice opportunity to improve his motivation and morale.
Another great feature in regard to injuries is the ability to get a real-time injury status message in-match of the potential injury the player has received. You can see a screenshot of the new feature: nature of a players injury is now immediately visible when you hover over the injury icon here.
One interesting feature was announced 16th of September. In FM16 you will have the ability to get reports on late fitness tests for players who are in doubt to play, either because of a minor injury, lack of match sharpness or other issues to his physical state (read condition).
The report from the pre-match fitness test can be ignored if you like, but if ignored it may come back to hunt you if the match sharpness is low and you are giving him full 90 minutes.
The late pre-match fitness test will give you a second opionion from the medical team abouta players condition and the staffs recommendation on if the player should feature in the match squad or not.
Finally the in-match player condition bar has been added to Football Manager. This minor feature has been requested by myself for a long time and were one important part on how I looked at improving the match morale and player condition, and how you address it both in-match and at half time both prior to FM14 and FM15. With a viewable condition bar it will let you address players far earlier in my perspective while you don't need to have hundreds of extra tabs open on the side of the pitch.
if managing a club with a b-team you can ensure that specific players are trained towards a certain role to get them ready for the main club, something that was impossible in FM15.
The news inbox is your main go-to-page for all headlines, news items and important assessments within Football Manager. Here you will get reports of players, advices from your backroom staff or weekend previews from subscribed or playable leagues. While the news screen has seen an overhaul there are also an amount of new inbox messages and revamp of currently existing news items.
Here you will find a list of the most interesting new improvements to specific news items or changes to the inbox.
Added a Transfer window opening news item featuring transfer rumours of expected major signings for the transfer window within your league.
New user-interface and revamp of the award news item by making the most information more clearer like top 3 players featuring their average rating.
Improved the weekly competition round-up news item with the ability to watch highlight packs and get more information surrounding the key event of the round.
New interface and layout for the Training Camp squad selection screen making you able to see how many players you've selected for a specific area of the field.
Monitoring the player development and progress of the youth players abilities is oen important task of taking your managing club to another level. For FM16 the news item backroom advice on players career progression will let you get a situational report on the players development for example from the past six months.
Recommendation from the Assistant Manager on the Best XI based on your selection will let help you with the squad selection for the next match if preferred. Here the Assistant manager will pick what he believes is the best players for a particular formation for the next match according to the squad depth with the assistant managers opinion of each players best player role to be used. His opinion on best player role is based on players current ability, natural position, preferred foot and level of the key attributes for the role.
One minor improvement for all those managing a club they not completely know in and out, suggested substitutions may come in handy. Here it will highlight which players who can play in the same position as the one you will sub out.
Several changes have been done to the transfer, contract, player and contract screens. The early footage of the FM16 player contract offer screen seems to offer a more compact user-interface giving you the most important information on-hand.
For example there is more advice on what to do with new signings who don't qualify for a work permit.
English work permit regulation changes have been implemented. This means that it may be more difficult to obtain work permit of non-EU players. Now players from lower-ranked countries will need to have played a higher percentage than 30% of international games in order to obtain work permit in UK.
Read more about the new work permit regulation put to place before this season at SkySports.
If you should be as unlucky to sign a player who is NOT granted a work permit, you can now send the player out on loan until he is granted a work permit with the new loan duration setting. This "get a work permit loan duration" will let you send the player out on loan to one of your affiliate clubs until the end of the season. If work permit is not granted the loan will be extended on a yearly basis until his contract expires or work permit is granted.
With the ability to see how much a player will cost you per month in fees and salaries you will better the odds to predict how benefical a potential loan target will be compared to buying the player. With cost per month in fees and salaries per loanee player you will get an exact sum on the cost of the player.
In order to comprimize the contract offer screen, bonuses and clauses has been merged together in one coloumn in FM16. You can see screenshot of the new contract offer screen here. SI have also tweaked the contract offer news item screen providing more information about the demands of the player and the terms of the contract. For those laptops with higher resolutions new in FM16 will be the ability to make changes to the contract offer bonuses and clauses directly in the news item saving you some clicks with the mouse button.
Apart from some changes to the interface of contract offers you will now have the ability to view the future contract of a player who has agreed to join on a future transfer. This will come in handy when you have taken the hot seat as the manager of a new club and you'd like to check if the new arrival will fit the wage bill under his set squad status.
The head physio will have an important role in regard to player signings too for FM 2016. The head physio will now inform you of any problems with a players' medical before you agree to sign him letting you know if he has failed his medical or not, or if there are any doubts if you shall accept the signing.
We will come back with more information about the biggest improvements to transfers, contracts and finances in Football Manager 2016 later.
The FM16 finance screen have seen a major overhaul in regard to its layout. Now the interface is even more detailed due to the split sections of overall balance, profit/loss this month and income this month. Here you can also adjust the transfer and wage budget or make any board requests as well as monitoring how you do in regard to the financial fair play regulations set.
Scouting and getting the best scouts as possible will be one essential part of FM16 according to Miles Jacobson himself in the latest Guardian Podcast talking about Football Manager 2016 and Iain Macintosh's new book "The Football Manager Guide to Football Management", which I highly recommend!
Finding the best gems will not only be about your abilities and time spend scouring through different leagues and nations but comes very much down to the scouts' abilities.
In FM16 your scouts will now suggest scouting certain players who could help you meet squad registration rules for example in terms of meeting the home grown rules.
A screenshot of the improved scout report summary reveals a minor adjustment to the layout of the screen. The knowledge level bar is emphasized giving you a better picture of how accurate the scout report will be. While the layout of the scout report is simply tweaked, with none specific new features as far as we can tell from the screenshot the comprimized screen will let you find all worthy information better.
While the scout report screen is tweaked, one new feature in terms of scout reports is that the scout report will indicate how marketable a potential signing may be.
When managing in the lower leagues in FM16 you are finally able to search for staff who are described as player/staff. Now you can hunt down the young talent coaches as early as possible by letting them be part-time coach and player.
For FM16, your backroom staff set to be responsible for the scouting team, either it's your chief scout or director of football, will now put together a shortlist of potentially suitable targets for the up coming transfer window at the start of any transfer windows. This minor improvement will hopefully give you a head start to find players who might want to join your club according to your chief scout/ director of footballs recommendation.
The transfer window potentially suitable targets shortlist will come in additional to the option to put together a shortlist of backroom staff. The backroom staff shortlist lets you save backroom staff you might find, such as the best coaches or assistant manager to a shortlist, similar to what you would have done to the top Football Manager 2016 players.
Ability to request specifically for an increased number of First Team Coaches, Under-21 coaches or youth coaches (U18) – an option which hopefully divert the maximum backroom staff allowed for the specific squads rather than the overall number which is currently in FM15.
One area of the game which has been massively revamped is B Teams. More details about all the new changes to B Teams will come in the next weeks. But here is a list of the changes we will see in FM16 in regard to squad management of B-Teams.
You will now receive backroom advice on moving players to and from your B team based on changes to their ability and form. This will help you to promote players to the first team squad which evidently will boost his morale and hopefully development progress.
if you should be as prominent to manage a club with a b-team you can now influence the b-team starting line-up making it easier to focus on specific players' development and progress.
Share your favorite or best XI to friends with the new Football Manager 2016 Team Sharer feature. Here you will be able to put together your most title winning squad featuring which player roles you used, the formation and which club you played as.
Most importantly the FM16 team sharer feature lets you share the screen to facebook or twitter.
Improved auto-save options and usability: better the chance to not loosing game progress when computer crashes or turns itself off due to lack of power.
Information is now easier to find as a result of a revamp to many of the main screens, including player overview, tactics, the manager's home screen and the transfer offer screen.
World class players will be more likely to retire while they're still in their prime rather than spend the last years of his career in lower leagues.
Major improvements to collaborations in situations where one person/one family own multiple clubs.
also included: staff shortlisting, improved manager and staff movement, revised board requests, a revamp of board confidence, more contextual team talks, fully updated competition rules & squad information, an improved financial module, improved AI transfers and team selection, new social media features and many more – all of which combine to make Football Manager 2016 the most complete and immersive simulation of football management ever.
The new head-to-head Fantasy Draft mode is an online mode for up to 32 players will give you a chance to pick your favorite team … from a database of unallocated players starting with a fixed budget. The progress of the draft will give you a X amount of squad budget and each player will get to pick a player in turn round after round until the squad is filled competing eachother in a mini-league. This new network mode gives you the ability to pick a team from scratch, competing with other managers to sign the best talent before going head-to-head against one another in a mini-league.
The new single-player Create-A-Club Mode gives you the ability to replace an existing team with one of your own, in additional to choosing a name, adding yourself and a friend into the game as well as editing the squad to your heart's content and even edit the kit colours of the club and style the club colours to your own preferences. The new ability to custom build your own club from scratch and add yourself into the game without using the editor makes you able to compete with your new club in an existing league.
Owner of Passion4FM since 2012. Football Manager content creator with a special love for tactics and player development. Also passionate about cooking and running. Follow my running form and quest to beat personal records in 2019 via espenspassions or Strava."The body achieves what the mind believes"