User feedback always provides an important guide for improvements that Football Manager users want – what have they been saying in the wake of Football Manager 11?
The feedback was pretty good, although there are always things that we want to improve. One of those improvements has come from feedback from our players in Australia this year, who made it clear that they were unhappy with the way we were interpreting some of the A League rules, particularly regarding marquee players, so hopefully those are nailed this year!

Modern football is a minefield for contract negotiations between players, clubs and agents – how has Football Manager 2012 expanded its transfer and contract negotiation features to cover this?
We work with a few agents and chief executives from the real world to help us – there are a few new contract clauses in FM12, but the most important change to the contract negotiation system come from the new contract locks. These mean that if you won’t go beyond a certain wage, or contract length, or any of the other clauses, you can “lock” them, the agent will know not to try and change that, but may ask for extra clauses or other changes instead.

Match animation is an area of Football Manager that has evolved quickly in recent years – what is new for FM12?
There are lots of new on-pitch animations, including lots of new kick animations, and keeper ones, alongside a whole new crowd system, a couple of new camera angles to watch games in, new weather effects, and a whole lot more. It’s another area that has improved massively year on year.

Football Manager 2012 now offers users the ability to deliver their team talks in different tones – from cool and collected to tea cup-launching rants – can you expand on how that works and how it affects the user’s team performance?
It’s in there to allow people to get not only their own personality across, but also that of the players. Some players prefer the arm-round-the-shoulder approach, whereas others need to be told clearly what to do. There are six tones that you can use, and these can be used during player conversations, direct press conversations and team talks.

If you could pick one additional feature introduction for Football Manager 2012 that most excites you, what would it be and why?
Well, my favourite new feature is the contract locks, mentioned above! But the team talk revamp is also very cool – there’s a lot more variation, partly because of the tone system, but you can now get suggestions for team talks from any of your coaching staff, you can do them for the whole team and individual players, as well as groups of players. So if your defenders are playing well, but not your strikers, you can easily treat them separately.

When it came to creating the A-League data and structure once again, what makes the competition so different to playing the game in other leagues?
The A-League, alongside the MLS, are so different that they require one person to look after them both, with 2 people looking after the other 49 countries leagues! With all the different rules, structure, marquee players and the like, it’s very complicated for us pommies to understand. But thanks to our great research team out there, we’re getting there.

How did you go about gathering the data for the A-League?
We have a head researcher in Australia, and a bunch of scouts at the different A-league teams.

What about the Aussies overseas and their data? Who do you rate with better stats Cahill or Schwarzer?
Each player is independently rated by the researcher for each club – for me, it’d be Cahill. But I wouldn’t argue with Mark Schwarzer if he said it was him…