A pending new year also brings us a new version of Football Manager 2021 Touch. If you want to experience the classic Football Manager gameplay on consoles, Touch is the option for you. Nintendo Switch already had a version for a few years but now Xbox players can have a go too.
Little brother
Let’s get the elephant out of the room. Football Manager 2021 like all its predecessors is best played on a PC. Crunching data on your squad and fine-tuning your tactics accordingly are much more doable on a big computer screen with a mouse and keyboard. That being said, Sega/Sports interactive knows this and made some changes to Touch to make it less dense than its computer counterpart. Football Manager 2021 Touch is still a football sim with loads of depth but cuts out some corners which would make playing it on a console a hassle.
If you want full control and extreme in-depth functions and analysis you’ll be left on your hunger with Football Manager 2021 Touch. Now everything needed to enjoy managing a football team at a much greater pace is present in this game and as such very enjoyable. I always tend to think of Football Manager Touch as the little brother of the PC version. In all fairness that’s kind of not doing it enough justice because the touch version isn’t just any old knock-off. You’ll get a full experience out of it for sure.
New look
Just like most yearly released sports games, this one isn’t all that different as opposed to last year’s. Of course, the teams have been updated with the current squads of about any football league that matters (sorry, Sunday league behemoths). Some of these leagues have the proper license to make everything look like it should, others still use generic badges but all in all the experience isn’t suffering from it. Another nice update this year is the updated look. They switch some stuff around and added some more dynamic backgrounds to make everything look less stale. It’s minor but effective.
Besides the menus, the match experience and faces of the players all have been updated to look a bit less like it’s still 1998 and Pentium is all the craze. Again, these esthetic updates are nice but in the end, don’t quite matter too much for fans of these types of games. The match experience seemed to get the biggest update because it looks far smoother than I can remember. The highlights look much more plausible than before. I’m used to only having text when I was young and didn’t mind that at all but if you’re gonna put in highlights, you might as well make them look good.
More data
The biggest addition to Football Manager 2021 Touch and arguably the most interesting for the fans, is the addition of a whole new bunch of data. Playing a football sim is all about checking every potential parameter and adjusting your actions based on them. Reading up on the number of touches or successful tackles a player did isn’t enough in current day football. Football Manager 2021 Touch acknowledged that and looked to add more of the current day available analysis tools. The XG score for example is introduced in this version. This score shows the expected goal value which is something that’s been featured on Match of The day (English Football) as of this season.
Shouts
All the hard work is done in the week and on weekends you’ll hopefully reap the benefits of your work. In previous versions, you put in some training drills, prepped for matchday, and chose your best team. Once the match started the work was more or less done. A rightly timed substitution could potentially make a difference but for the most part, the match played out without the player’s interference. Now you can adjust more during the match which is a nice addition. The added shouts to motivate or even berate your team helped to feel much more invested during matches. I tended towards just pressing “skip to result” in previous versions but not anymore with this version.
Conclusion
Football Manager 2021 touch got a really nice update and is a nice “lite” version to play for those who have less time for the bigger brother on PC. I would still recommend the Nintendo Version because of the touchscreen functionality. Going through loads of menus with the buttons is still nothing near being intuitive enough for me. I even used a stylus to further minimize some frustrations I had with the menuing.
