Hello everyone. I hope you all had nice weekends and that your teams did as well as mine, the mighty Watford, who beat Sheff Utd to not just go up to fourth in the Championship, but also cut the amount of points needed to avoid relegation to around 30!

When you are attempting to create a believable football world, which is the whole essence of the Football Manager series, everyone inside the “game” has to have a personality, just like you as someone playing the game has a personality. We have a bunch of different character types in the game, so you might have players who are ambitious, determined, laid back, need careful handling, will do what they are told, won’t listen to reason – just like real life.

You’ve been able to talk to your players and board inside the game for many years, with manager mind games added a few versions ago, and backroom advice added into Football Manager 2010. With Football Manager 2011, most of these areas have gone up to the next level, and this is what I’ll be blogging about for the next couple of days.

The first major change in this area is that we’ve made the system more “conversational”. What this means is that you can talk to players, staff or the board about multiple topics at the same time, and look to resolve any problems in a better way. This also means that you get instant responses from the conversation too, rather than having to wait to hear back from the player.

A couple of examples.

I want to ask one of my players to try and not use his weak foot so often, but also want him to recommend a player who he’d like to see join the club. In FM2010, I would have had to choose which of these I wanted to ask about, then wait a few days before I had the option to have another conversation with him. Now I can simply ask him the first, try and resolve that (he may say no, and the discussion may continue) and he’ll ask me if there’s anything else to discuss, and I can choose the next option.

 One of my players in unhappy, as he wants to move to a bigger club. He comes to me and asks for a move, and I tell him that I have big plans for the club, and I want the club to grow to meet his ambition. He might agree, and decide to stay, but he might also decide that he doesn’t believe me (all of which is driven by his, and my, personality).

If he says he doesn’t believe me, more options open up, and I could either dig my heels in, tell him that he’s disrespecting the club, offer to sell him straight away, at the end of the season, or in the next window. Each player will respond differently to any of these options based on their character, and you could find yourself with a player who becomes even more determined to help the club succeed, or one that just sulks and you have little option to sell him.

There are various different stages of player unhappiness, so you really want to nip it in the bud early if a player is unhappy, or else eventually (and the speed will depend on the players personality), they may go to the press and make their unhappiness public and eventually become so angry that they won’t talk to you at all!

As well as the multitude of options for player interaction that we’ve had in Football Manager for a while, such as being able to ask them to recommend staff or players or change their style of play in training, we’ve added in a bunch of new interaction possibilities too, with some of my favourite new additions to Football Manager 2011 below:

* The ability to tell a player why they’ve been dropped to the reserves.
* A warning for youth players that if they don’t improve, they won’t get a contract
* Being allowed to comment on a players performance in training.
* The option to threaten a player with being transfer listed if their poor performance continues.
* You can even ask a player to be less vocal in the media.

      Tomorrow I’ll be looking at boardroom interaction, and backroom advice. As a sneak preview, in the slideshow above is a screenshot that shows a conversation whilst it’s happening with your board!