Made by ‘Super Bladesman’ on the SIGames forums, this file allows you to play with the correct league structure and various cups down to level ten.

DOWNLOAD – CLICK HERE FOR THE SIGames Forums for help installing the file

We’ve uploaded our first data update for Football Manager 2010. We’ve changed a few managers and transfers around, but more importantly we’ve also added a whole new bunch of leagues to the English league system. Obviously it’s still early days for the editing community, and I’m sure someone will point out that something’s not quite right with the North West Counties Premier Division – but at least we can now manage, should we choose, the likes of Padiham and Nelson. I bet half of you haven’t even heard of them.

Please read this page for help on installing the file.

DOWNLOAD THE UPDATE

(Update up to and including Wednesday 28th October)

1. Download the file from this website – we’re not using Rapidshare at the moment, so it’s going to be even quicker for you to get what you need without any need for registering.

2. Unzip the file (with something like winzip, winrar) and place the .xml file (usually called ‘1.00′ etc) in the Documents folder, like so: C:\Users\Your Name\Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2010\editor data

3. Load up Football Manager and select ‘New Game’. The database you need to select will still be ‘default’. However, at the bottom of that display box will be the text ‘Editor Date Files’. Tick the check box next to this.

4. Now when the game loads, tick the data update file you’ve just downloaded from us. You can have more than one ticked – for example, if someone uploads an Italian update, you can have that running alongside this one.

5. Now select your leagues as normal. You DON’T have to play with the lowest league added on the update, so if you don’t want level 9 of the English league system to be activated, simply change the ‘Lowest Active League’ in the league selection screen.

Click here to download the file.

When you start a new game on FM, the database will still be ‘default’. However, you should see a bit of text saying: “Editor Data Files.” There is a tick box there saying ‘change’. Tick it. Press okay. Now, on the next screen, make sure ‘tester’ is ticked. Confirm, and when the game loads, you should be able to select the lowest playable league as ‘Regional First Division’. The file, btw, goes in Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2010\editor data

We’re working on both the website and the game in order to hopefully bring you our first data update on Friday so those of you with copies of the game can play with all the latest changes since the data was officially ‘locked’. We’ll also be bringing you links to download extra leagues, graphics and skins, so make sure you return during the next few weeks!

Last Update: Sunday 6th September

We’ve just uploaded the latest Football Manager data update for you to all download, including all the English permanent and six month plus loan deals, along with some of the major European moves from the last few days. This is our ‘end of the transfers window’ update, which means we won’t be doing any big updates until FM10 comes out. However, we’ll still update this occassionally if any mistakes are spotted.

You can download the file from Rapidshare now and leave any comments below. If we’ve missed off  a transfer, or forgot to remove a loan or injury, don’t hesitate to tell us.

Need some help installing the update? Click here

PLEASE NOTE:

We are aware that some of Manchester City’s big money signings have very low values (such as Lescott – £2m). Despite trying a few different things, it seems that I can’t quite get around this problem just yet. However – City will not sell these players for such low amounts. Their ‘values’ and ’sale values’ are completly different, and it would take a big offer to entice the club to accept any offers.

Please also be aware that they may be some missed transfers in this latest update as hundreds of deals are currently being concluded. This will be the last update before the transfer window closes, so please let me know of any transfers that happened before Saturday 29th August that aren’t included in this.

Football Manager 2010 has just been officially unveiled, with screenshots, information and general excitement available at the SIGames website. We’ve got all the information you need right here too, along with some of our own thoughts throughout the day. Read on for our take on the new information and screenshots, as we delve deeper into the PR guff to see what FM2010 is really about.

See all of our FM 2010 coverage right here

Please note: some of this may be speculation, be we’re taking a good look at these screenshots and working out what is most likely to be represented by every single option!

First things first, we already know that the game has a brand new tabbed look.  Personally, I like it. As you can see from here the top of the screen now has a calendar running along it so you can quickly see what is coming up in the next few days. It’s unobtrusive and while it might not add much, it can be useful if you want to quickly see if you have a game that weekend or not.

Below that are quick links to the home page, your managerial options, and links to your own and, quite possibly, divisional news.

The tabs come into effect below that, taking away the need for drop down menus. It will no doubt be a little quicker now to access the relevant page you are looking for.

In terms of design, they will be two standard skins upon release: a light and a dark version of the look you can see throughout the screenshots.

So what about the new features?

Firstly, it looks as though SI are taking a more serious look at the issue of bugs this time round, with Miles Jacobson promising  ’a big overhaul with our bugs database’. Of course, that doesn’t mean to say it won’t be bug free, but perhaps this time we can have a playable game on release, rather than waiting for the third patch?

One of the first major changes is in the tactics department. While sliders will still be used, you should be able to give more specific instructions to your players. According to SI,

‘The game now has an extensive array of pre-set tactical options allowing the user to select a player’s role in the team (such as ‘Ball winning midfielder’ or ‘Deep lying playmaker’), however the option to use the old ‘slider’ controls remains.’ Options such as ‘philosophy, players roles, and player duties’ look intriquing.

There will also be a match analysis tool. Rather than relying on your assistant to give a few sentences about the performance of your team, you can use Opta-like information to see where passes went astray and who wasn’t performing well.

‘Feedback from matches has been improved to give the user better insight into where their team is going wrong, or right. A new Match Analysis tool lets players see where shots, passes, crosses, headers, tackles, fouls and interceptions have been made on the field for all players on the pitch. Managers can view this analysis both live in-game and post match, allowing them to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of both their team and their opponent’s and adjust their tactics accordingly.’

Two small, yet potentially very important changes are in the delivery of news and that data editor. A ‘Manager Subscriptions’ feature will apparently allow you to choose what sort of news you want to view and what to be ignored. We’ve yet to see this in action, but hopefully it will improve the hit-and-miss style of the delivery of news from FM09. Say, for instance, you were at a club but hoping to find a new job, one would often miss the sackings of managers because this information would be limited only to the jobs information page and divisional news. Hopefully you will be able to specify that you want to be informed of any managerial changes from ‘x’ leagues with this subscriptions service.

UPDATE: SIGames say ‘you can subscribe to news about any club, any competition, any player, any nation, plus having default ones’

Meanwhile, the data editor might allow for the removal and addition of points deductions, something that has been lacking in recent years. SI claim:

‘A brand new Data Editor will allow the addition of new divisions to existing leagues and of entirely new leagues as well as making it easier than ever to keep the game up to date, and do so for free.’

One would imagine this means users can create their own leagues easier and to their rules.

The 3D match engine has been improved, and managers can now issue quick commands during the match as seen here and here. You will also be able to make your own quick shortcuts for common commands and decisions.

That’s all we know at the moment,  but with SI promising more up their sleeves along with blogs, screenshots and videos on the way in the next few weeks, we’ll be covering every snippet of information as we receive it!

In a nutshell:

+ A new skin and new tabbed look
+ Managers home page has been changed quite a bit.
+ Promises that bugs will be sorted
+ No confirmed release date as of yet, apparently, yet the end of the press release says 30th of October.
+ A demo will be released around two weeks before official release
+ Tactics are changed and easier to implement thanks to a tactics creator.
+ A match analysis tool allows for easier, erm, analysis of the match!
+ A ‘Managerial Subscriptions’ feature will allow you to receive only the news you wish to, ‘making the football world as immersive as you want it to be.’ You can subscribe to news about any club, any competition, any player, any nation, plus having default ones
+ Data editor now allows for the creation of divisions and leagues
+ 3D match engine improved, with new camera angles? Also match commands can be given.

Football Manager 2010 has just been officially unveiled, with screenshots, information and general excitement available at the SIGames website. We’ve got all the information you need right here too, along with some of our own thoughts throughout the day. Read on for the first official screengrabs of FM2010.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Football Manager 2010 has just been officially unveiled, with screenshots, information and general excitement available at the SIGames website. We’ve got all the information you need right here too, along with some of our own thoughts throughout the day. Read on for the full press release and the first official screengrabs of FM2010.

See all of our FM 2010 coverage right here

Sports Interactive Press Release: http://www.sigames.com/softography.php?type=view&id=33

It’s great to be able to finally start talking about Football Manager 2010 and Football Manager Handheld 2010 today, and you can see the intially announced new features at the bottom of this post and screenshots for the PC/MAC at http://www.sigames.com/softography.php?type=view&id=33 and for the PSP at http://www.sigames.com/softography.php?type=view&id=34. But before you do (yeah right!) there’s a few things that I’d like to talk to you about.

The key thing with this years game is the word “polish”.

With last years game, we had a load of big new features (hence the YouTube video) and maybe some areas of the game suffered because of that. Don’t get me wrong, I still think it was a great game, and the third patch for it was, for me, the best version of any game we’ve made to date, which has seems to have been bourne out by some of the stats – 2nd best game of all time according to a Radio 1 poll in the UK, our best selling game to date and still no.2 in the PC charts in the UK and top.5 in many European countries, and each legitimate user playing the game has averaged 240 hours of gameplay, a stat that shocked us as, well, 10 days of your life is a long time. In that time, you could watch every Man Utd game last season, still have time to watch every Barcelona and Inter match, and still have time left for the whole last series of Lost.

But back to the matter at hand. Basically, SI as a studio has grown quite a lot in the last few years. The squad is now sized 60 (full time) alongside our amazing teams of researchers, translators and beta testers. As we’ve grown, we haven’t really changed any of the dev practises in the studio, and this was causing growing pains.

Even before FM09 came out, we knew that we needed to make some changes into the way we worked. Just subtle things to make everyone’s lives easier, and get a bit more organised now that we were getting bigger.

The first of these was a big overhaul with our bugs database – we use an external tool called Testtrack which is really good, but much better if it’s managed properly! With lots of different personalities here, and different ways of working, some people were using it properly and others weren’t. So some bugs were being looked at, fixed, retested by QA and closed. Others were being fixed and just sitting around there, waving at us. Others weren’t looked at at all.

We also had far too much stuff in there. All feature requests were in that database, for example, going back 5 years. Many of them had been filtered out due to having the wrong setting here, or the wrong setting there. And, believe it or not, we had around 500 feature requests sitting in there, sad and lonely, never looked at. Over 100 of which were already in the game.

So we’ve split off the 2 databases, and now have a separate bugs and features database (the latter of which, to date, stands at over 800 feature requests – the vast majority of which didn’t make it into FM10, but certainly make it easier for planning FM11 and FM12!). We’ve gone through the vast majority of the open bugs in the bugs database, and re-tested them to see if they’re still valid, and, if they are, have set them accourdingly. We’ve closed down ones that aren’t valid, or are fixed (some of which were fixed in FM2005!) and, well, attempted to fix the ones that are still valid. I’m not saying that the release will be bug free because, as is often said on these forums, there’s no such thing as a bug free game, particularly one as complicated as ours, but we’re doing our best.

We’ve signed some top talent, both young and old, to join the dev team at SI many of whom you’ll get to meet when our new website launches later this year. We’ve also restructured our QA department, so rather than having a couple of lead testers on FM, we’ve now got a lead tester in every key “module” of the game. There are lots more meetings now amongst the dev team on FM now, with those split down into the various modules too, although anyone can attend them if they want to.

As well as the restructuring of QA, we’ve also restructured the way we do beta testing, and have handpicked a couple of hundred or so new beta testers to help us test the game, mainly recruiting via posts on these very forums where we’ve agreed with, or disagreed but understood, the constructive criticism given. This has been a massive help, and hopefully those people and the beta testers who have been with us for a while, have seen the difference in the new QA structure with their regular builds.

As I’ve got your attention (if I still have), this is also a good time to try and kill off some of the cynicism and misinformation that seems to be rife on these forums sometimes. Everyone out there has a right to their opinion, of course, but when things are factually inaccurate, it does hurt sometimes.

First off, this is not a customer service website, and is not meant to be. SEGA deal with customer service. This is a community, and a place to talk about our games, directly with us, the developers. Personal attacks are not welcome here, and are not needed, nor fair. To correct some of these… SI are not lazy. SI are not complacent. SI try our level best with everything we do. We might not always get it right, but if we get something wrong, we do try to fix it. And we care, passionately, about our games and the people who buy them. Which, hopefully, is you.

Secondly, we work on 3 games here at SI towers. FM, FMH and FML. FMH and FML are separate teams to the FM team. Each game has a different producer. Each of the games has a benefit for others in the studio – more talent around, more experience of different systems and, with FML, the ability to try things out that we’re looking to put into FM sometimes, particularly with the match engine and, this year, the newly announced tactics creator.

Thirdly, and possibly most controversially, what we’ve found over the years is that the customer is not always right. They might think they are, but if you look at these forums, there is nearly always an opposite point of view somewhere, normally on the same thread. It’s part of our job to decide what is right, and what is wrong, with those opinions, and we know we cannot please all people all of the time. But, again, we do try.

Anyway, back to the announcements.

What you’ve seen on the feature lists today is the start of announcements about this years releases. As always, we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeves and I’ll start blogging properly about them, with more screenshots and (hopefully) some videos too over the coming weeks.

The blogs will be a bit different this year. There are bound to be some of me prattling on about this feature or that feature, but I’m also going to attempt to give you all an insight into the development of the game, with chats between me and some of the dev team working directly on it, interviews with some of the beta testers who have been helping with the testing of the game this year, and some indepth guides into a few of the new features which should really wet your appetitie for the release of the demo, and then the game.

Oh, and to stave off the normal questions, the demo will be released a couple of weeks before the game is released, and we won’t have a firm date for it until the game is in full manufacture. There will not be a public beta demo, due to the leak a few years back – the lawyers just won’t allow it. No decision has been made on copy protection yet for the game – we’ve been asked for our recommendation, and that’s been given, but it’s SEGA’s decision, not ours. And yes, the podcast will be back, although I’m not sure exactly when.

I hope you enjoy the announcements and screenshots that we’ve released today – I’m really excited about not only today’s announcement, but also being able to reveal more about the game in the next few weeks. I’ll be posting blogs directly onto the forums and websites, likely starting the week after next depending on whether we need to get them translated or not, and the SI_games twitter account will be tweeting when anything is put live.

LONDON (August 12th, 2009) – Sports Interactive & SEGA® Europe Ltd. can today announce that Football Manager™ 2010 for PC and Apple Macintosh, and Football Manager™ Handheld 2010 for Sony PSP will be released on October 30th.

Football Manager 2009 is the most successful in the Football Manager series to date, clocking up 22 weeks at No.1 in the UK (PC charts) and selling in excess of 1 million copies worldwide, as well as being voted the 2nd best video game of all time in a recent Radio 1 poll.

According to data gathered from Football Manager 2009, people played the game for an average of 240 hours each and developer Sports Interactive has spent the last year working closely with consumers and the Football Managercommunity to implement key improvements to this year’s game. Football Manager 2010 features new tools and changes across the board including some big additions to improve ease of use, navigation and feedback from the game with the introduction of a brand new match tactics system, the debut of a Match Analysis tool, a completely new look and new User Interface among other features.

“We have worked very hard with the Football Manager community to target not only the areas of the game that needed re-working but also what we could add to improve what’s already there. We’ve also conducted extensive usability studies which has led us to overhaul the whole presentation of the game, which we’re really excited about,” said Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive. “There has been a lot of polish to existing areas of the game but it’s also driven us to introduce changes to answer some of the feedback. We’re very confident that having done that we will deliver the very best Football Manager to date in October.”

The introduction of a Tactics Creator makes it easier to instruct the team to play the way the manager wants, alongside the introduction of touchline ‘shouts’ and quick tactic changes for instantly altering your team’s playing style during the match. Working with coaches from various levels of football, alongside some of the Football Manager communities most respected independent tacticians, the game now has an extensive array of pre-set tactical options allowing the user to select a player’s role in the team (such as ‘Ball winning midfielder’ or ‘Deep lying playmaker’), however the option to use the old ‘slider’ controls remains.

Feedback from matches has been improved to give the user better insight into where their team is going wrong, or right. A new Match Analysis tool lets players see where shots, passes, crosses, headers, tackles, fouls and interceptions have been made on the field for all players on the pitch. Managers can view this analysis both live in-game and post match, allowing them to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of both their team and their opponent’s and adjust their tactics accordingly.

Football Manager 2010 features a brand new User Interface, with a light and a dark skin to choose from as part of a vibrant new look and has undergone a complete navigational overhaul. The side bar navigation of previous years has been replaced by an intuitive tab system at the top of the screen, making Football Manager’s famed depth easier to navigate and will make the game more accessible to new players.

A brand new Data Editor will allow the addition of new divisions to existing leagues and of entirely new leagues as well as making it easier than ever to keep the game up to date, and do so for free. The delivery of information to the manager has been refined with users now able to sign up to the News Centre, an in-game subscription based newspaper that lets you get the news that you want about the football world and filter out the stories that you do not need, making the football world as immersive as you want it to be.

Following the debut of a 3D match view in Football Manager 2009, this year’s release sees a revamp with improved AI, over 100 new animations for the 3D pitch view, new stadiums, crowds, realistic pitch degradation and better lighting, creating an even more realistic match experience.

Further new features will be announced via a series of blogs in the months leading up to the game’s October 30th release date which will ensure that Football Manager retains its position as the most realistic, most played, highest reviewed and best selling football management simulation in the world.

The screenshots can be viewed here

Sports Interactive’s very own Miles Jacobson has just announced on Twitter that the first official Football Manager 2010 announcement may be made this week.

The game has been in development for a few months now and SIGames recently confirmed that the first information surrounding the release would be released during this month. With the game apparently well into the testing stage it seems that we won’t have long to see what new features – if any – will be included in the next release of the big selling gaming franchise.

Writing on his Twitter page, Miles said:

Just got back to the studio from a really great PR meeting for #FM2010. Announcement should hopefully be this week

This isn’t the first time Miles has used the website to reveal information about the game after apparently ‘accidentally’ leaking an in-development screenshot of the game in July.

We’ll have more news on the game as soon as it’s available.