Today I’m going to talk about international, rather than club, management, and the new features and changes we’ve made in this area.

For a start, we’ve tried to make it so that there’s a little bit more to do, and see, when you’re managing an international side. This includes an increased amount of news, and a better replication of what an international manager does between matches, as well as making the build up to tournaments a bit more exciting.

As an example of this, we’ve added provisional international squads to the game for the first time. This means that in advance of the major tournament, you can name a squad of up to 30 players, where applicable.

But how do you choose which of the players to then drop from the 30 to the 23? By having friendlies before said tournaments, of course. You should be able to fit in 3 or 4 into the time allocated to these in advance of having to name your final squad.

The media in real life love speculating about who is going to be in the squad, so a week before the preliminary squad announced, you’ll get a news item telling you who is injured or suspended, so might not feature.

You’ll also find increased news items during the tournament too, but I’ll leave you to discover those for yourself!

Both in and away from tournaments, there’s a lot more feedback on how the youth international teams are doing and who is performing well, so help indicate who you might like to move into the main squad.

There are also lots of new international manager press conference questions, to add more depth to that part of managing an international team.

In time for the Olympics, we’ve added in under 23 managers, and tried to improve the squad selection process so that average players are included, but still with the club managers being allowed to refuse for them to be in the squad.

Nations also now have an overview screen, with information such as the countries nickname, population, rival nations, formation year, when they joined the world governing body, the managers profile, when the next match is, their current world ranking, major clubs in the country, major transfers, top players and a world ranking history throughout the time you are playing Football Manager 2012.

We’ve also added in a few new international competitions, and not just inside the game, but have also added the ability to put more of these kinds of competitions into the game via the data & competitions editor. Some examples of these would include the East Asian football federation cup qualifiers, the Pacific games, an expansion of the Gold Cup, the ASEAN football championship and the Asian Games.

And we’ve added the new rules regarding international allegiance for players, so those that have only played in friendlies can still choose to declare to play for another nation that they qualify for.

One thing that’s become more prevalent in real life is also the bidding process for tournaments, with more interest from both the media and the public regarding bids for international tournaments, with three different types of news for this process for the invitation for putting in bids, the bids deadline, and the host announcement – plus some club related touches which I’ll go into a little bit in the miscellaneous blogs.

The successful bidders in these tournaments even look at building new stadiums now if their country is selected to host a major tournament.

But my personal favourite of the international management new features is one that was, erm, ripped off from something that we at SI did for the mirrorfootball website in advance of the previous world cup, providing you information on players to watch out for in the forthcoming big tournaments depending on which nations or competitions you’re subscribed to.

Oh, and don’t forget that the team report which was discussed in the recent scouting blog is available for all international managers too. And there’s a new international round up screen for club managers, so you can see more information on how your international players have performed whilst they’ve been away playing for their country!