Football Manager 2010 new features blog Day 21: Improvements to the financial model

By Ian Cruise in Football Manager 2010

Published 17:10 30/09/09

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Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to the next installment of the Football Manager 2010 blog.

I’ll mainly be dealing with the financial aspect of the game today, but before I do, I have to apologise at not revealing the competition winner yesterday for the “go to my screens” re-name competition as per a previous blog.

We had hundreds of entries to the competition, and loads of good suggestions, but the one that came up again and again (more than 50 times in fact) was “Screen Flow”. So that’s what we’ve gone with.

The first person who sent us that suggestion was Hasdeep Sethi, so congratulations and thank you Hasdeep – I’ll be in touch in the next few days to get your details so that we can send you the game when it’s released.

Now back to business, literally.

Finance is a more and more important part of football. All the constant debates about foreign ownership, club debts, TV deals and the like show this. But the big clubs aren’t the only clubs we try and model in our games, and we have to try and ensure that all levels of club are catered for.

As well as a plethora of improvements in the financial model for all leagues in the game that are suggested by our team of researchers around the world, we’ve also found some time to make other improvements and additions in this area of the game for Football Manager 2010, some of which are revealed below in no particular order….

One change that seems small, but is actually pretty big, is that the game's financial model now deals in pennies, rather than in pounds. Whilst things tend to be rounded up on screen, it means that we’re much better able to model some of the world's smaller economies and clubs.

At the other end of the scale, with the ever changing football ownership, and the rush for success, we’ve looked to model that, too. For many years we’ve had a “sugar daddy” setting for clubs where a new owner comes in and throws money at a club as a long-term loan. But we’ve noticed different levels of this kind of ownership more and more in the last year, so we now have different levels, including keeping the current level, and adding two more.

One of them makes a club a force in the current league, but will expect them to be self sufficient if the club goes up a couple of levels. The other means the manager isn’t given any extra budget, but losses are covered at the end of the season to make sure the club can survive.

If the club does go into administration, we’ve better modeled this and what are known as “CVAs” to make it more realistic.

There have been changes to the way budgets are calculated and shown, so you can now see player and non-player wage details easily, but have them all be part of one overall wage budget for the club, too.

The season ticket module in the game has been re-written so as to more accurately model the real world, as has the sponsorship code, so you can now have multiple shirt sponsors and extra team sponsors, which are read from the game's database.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow, I’ll be looking at scouting and searching.

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