So, apparently the Football Manager 2011 release date and a slight look at some new features have been leaked and are floating around the FM community. The supposed release date is October 29th, it usually is around this time so nothing’s changed there. However, there have been reports of some new features/improvements that include:

Although not officially announced yet, but we can confirm the following features and release date have been leaked.

- Release Date is Friday, October 29th 2010
- Improved training options
- More complex module for searching new players
- Improved graphics and 3D view of the game
- Introduction of football agents to the game
- Playing games in evenings (so called night effect)
- Differentiated weather conditions

This first popped up on Polish fansite Football-Manager.info but has since been discussed at Los Wonderkids, the Football Manager 2011 facebook page and various other community fansites. Oh yeah, here is the believed box cover as well!!

Nothing has officially been confirmed yet, but when it is, I will make sure I keep you updated by editing this post!

A possible replacement for the long gone football manager portal? Who knows. What I certainly know is that Football Manager Fanboys is a fantastic new fansite with features never seen to the community before. The site is primarily a blog which focuses on bringing you the best content from around different FM fansites, as well as community articles written by the FMFB team. Not only is it supplying us with great content, but the forums are rapidly becoming one of the best places for football manager discussion.

Football Manager Fanboys has some wonderful features for us die hard players so let me take you through them quickly. They come under the tactical playbook and is a cool thing to get some help with our tactics.

Positional Analysis – The positional analysis tool helps us to understand the dynamics of each role with the new tactics creator. It works by hovering over any possible position on the pitch, and gives us full details of what the role is about and what a player in that role will undergo. A possible feature I would like to see is maybe the key attributes needed for each specific role. But that info can be seen on the tactics creator in FM10 so maybe they feel it is not needed.

Positional Compatibility - The newest tool to arrive on FMFB is the positional compatibility. Basically you key in all of a players attributes on the spreadsheet, chose which position and the tool will give you a percentage of how good that player will be in the specific position. This is a very advanced featured and will be a lot of use to both experienced and inexperienced football manager players!

Tactics Creator - The tactics creator is more for sharing your formation with others and is a good tool for bloggers who want to show their readers how they play. It lets you drag the 11 players around on the pitch and add in symbols for offside trap, captains etc. This tool will come in very handy for me when I start up my story again and all of use are begging me for my tactic!!!

FMFB is probably my favourite site out there at the moment and only give us the best content around. To sum it up, all of our FM needs in one place, so if you haven’t already check it out!

Welcome back, it has been longer than expected but the new blog design is finally live after 3 days of hard work and persistence :D I think it’s a big improvement to the previous theme and this one will definately be around for a while. I really like it and hope you do to.

Anyways, the big news is that we have someone else blogging with me now. I welcome Rory Darby to Aid The Boss. I have known him for many years now and it was Rory who first started FM-View with me 3 or 4 years ago now. He has a wealth of experience in blogging and Football Manager 2010 and enjoys writing which can only be good for the site. Read more about Rory on the about page.

I was really impressed by the general idea of this site as soon as Dan linked it to me a good few months ago now. I liked the style and felt it was something I could definitely contribute towards so I thank Dan for giving me the opportunity and hopefully I can give something back through my posts. See you around!

Even though there are two people blogging here now, I am more than happy to have others join us, because the more content we have and the more we update the better. To read more about posting here, please visit the contribute page where all is explained and what sort of things we are looking for.

I hope you enjoy this new era for the blog, and we will be able to update the blog more often now it isn’t just me posting. So, what are your thoughts on the new blog design?

Do you want to win a free 32gb iPod Touch courtesy of Sports Interactive – the creators of the Football Manager series? Well your in luck! Sports Interactive are giving a way two 32gb iPod touches engraved with the Football Manager logo by the very same people who engrave the FA Cup! To be in with a chance, all you have to do is

write “Please pick me! Please pick me!” in this thread on the Sports Interactive Forums, the second one is up for grabs along with a copy of Football Manager 2010 by simply being a fan of the Official Football Manager Facebook Page.

Thats all you have to do to be in with a chance of winning these great prizes! Here is the full post from the SI Forums.

As you might have read in the announcement thread, to be able to do pre-release reviews on the iPod release of Football Manager Handheld, we did up some special 32GB iPod Touches, with the Football Manager logo engraved on the back (by the people who engrave the FA Cup, no less) which were a numbered limited edition of 55.

2 of these devices were cunningly hidden away to be able to be given away to the SI/FM community.

1 of them is being given away in a competition on the FM Facebook page (www.facebook.com/officialfootballmanager) along with a copy of the game.

The other is being given away in this very thread.

To enter the competition here, all you have to do it write “Please pick me! Please pick me!” in the thread below. A winner will be drawn out at random on Monday at 6pm.

Please note that all our normal competition terms and conditions apply, except that this competition is not open to anyone in Germany. Sorry – but we can’t sell the game there, so we can’t ship the device there either…

If you try to enter multiple times, all of your entries will be disqualified. If you type anything apart from what is written above, you will also be disqualified.

Have a lovely weekend.

Finally, after months and months of questions about whether Football Manager will come to the apple devices that are rapidly become one of the most advanced pieces of techology today – Football Manager Handheld is being released sometime tommorow.. The price of the game will be £6.99 and of course I will be buying it, which means I can finally play Football Manager on the go I will be reviewing it and posting it up here at ATB as soon as I get it and try it out so you can get a good idea of what it is like.

Anyways, here was the official post by Miles Jacobson on the SIGames forums earliar today.

Over the last few months, the most asked question of me on Twitter and Facebook has been “when is Football Manager coming to iPhone/iPod”, and I’ve confidently pointed out that it wasn’t coming.

When people have asked “when is Football Manager Handheld coming to iPhone/iPod” I’ve been very quiet.

I am beyond excited to be able to announce today that FMH2010 is coming to iPhone and iPod touch. And even more excited to be able to announce that what has been our best kept secret ever, it’s coming out in the next 48 hours!

We don’t know exactly when it will be available in the apps store, although we’ve set a midnight local time release for tonight – it takes a while for all servers to propogate though, hence me saying it’ll be live in the next 48 hours.

We are expecting some reviews today from journalists who received ridiculously limited edition Football Manager Handheld iPod Touches (engraved by the people who engrave the FA Cup!) with the game pre-installed on it, which has been the only way anyone outside of SI and SEGA has been able to see the game. I will put links to the reviews when they are available. There will also be a competition to win one of these devices in the coming weeks!

I will also add to this post later with feature information and some screenshots.

Meanwhile, if any of you are in Australia, I reckon you’ll be the first people getting the game due to time differences, so please let us know if/when you see it in the app store!

At last, the antipicated release of patch 10.3, released by SI a few hours ago. You can download the patch via Torrent, Steam, or Direct Download. Check out the download links here. Here is a preview of some of the changes made in the latest Patch.

—————————–
Football Manager 2010 v10.3.0
—————————–

Crash Fixes
===========
- Fixed crash when clicking on the backroom advice button.
- Fixed issue causing runtime error in network games

General
=======
- Players who say they are willing to leave the club to help with the clubs debts no longer get upset if you transfer list or offer them out.
- Fixed scouts completing their nation assignments too early for small reputation clubs.
- Adjusted generation of names for Croatian newgens with second nationalities.
- Fixed older newgens in some cases getting youth contracts instead of regular contracts.
- Playing for a clubs A and B teams now does not count as having already played for 2 clubs in a season when joining a new team.
- Past meetings tables are now sorted by goal difference and goals for after points.
- National team facts information panel now only uses first team players.
- Adjusted changes in very low average attendances
- Fixed newgen name issues where some African newgens for example were getting English names because of their birth city language being English.
- Players no longer get unhappy about the clubs league position until after a reasonable amount of games have been played.
- Fixed bug where a person loses a language skill when changing from a player to a staff member.
- Stopped inappropriate manager to manager comments been available on Brazilian State league games.
- Adjusted newgen attribute creation and development
- Adjusted Danish cup attendances
- Players don’t get called up to Olympic qualifiers if they have important club matches.
- Automatic rejection of other national job offers if offered multiple jobs. When you accept an offer it auto-rejects the other jobs just like it does with club management.
- Adjusted Turkish Super Cup attendances
- Adjusted Bulgarian attendances in continental matches
- Adjusted attribute progression
- Adjusted newgen PA levels
- Adjusted conversion of negative PA values
- Stopped players constantly feeling under media pressure.
- Cancelled friendlies now don’t cause entire tours to be cancelled.
- User achievements screen now displays the date left after the user has resigned from a national youth team job.
- Stopped user been able to interact with players who are away on loan.
- Stopped two player happiness contradictions, wanting a new challenge/agreed a future move and also wanting to stay at the club.
- Improved the selection of players parent teams send to their affiliates.
- Fixed shots off target in quick matches sometimes being displayed as a negative number.
- Increased the number of strikers selected in U20 World Cup squads.
- Fixed German First Division games being refereed by lower division refs (requires new game).
- Improved international squad selections.
- Stopped unavailable players playing matches in inactive leagues.
- Stopped player conditions dropping so much in the quick match engine.
- Removed some pre-game histories that were being retained when playing with fake players (requires new game).
- Removed inconsistency in a players decision to try to learn a new preferred move or not.
- Stopped staff members joining much smaller teams for a minor job promotion (Steve Gatting etc.)
- Fixed an issue that could stop a human getting an international job when he is the best candidate.
- Made some improvements to Best Eleven selections.
- Fixed an issue whereby a scout was hired but couldn’t perform scouting duties, mainly affects long term games.
- Stopped duplicate news item appearing for human manager’s former team when appointing a new manager.
- Removed Chelsea transfer embargo.
- Fixed an issue whereby a player could become unregistered if user went on holiday over the registration deadline.
- Got the board to take into consideration the time left on a player’s contract when deciding to veto a free transfer.
- Fixed an issue whereby the board would state you can scout a region, but the option never appears for that region on the assignments dialogue.
- Fixed incorrect contract rejection reason when a coach rejects a contract due to basic wage.
- Fixed an issue whereby a human manager was prevented from accepting a management position at an amateur club upon the first time of asking.
- Fixed an issue where the incorrect match sequence milestone could be displayed pre-match for the away team.
- When a player complains in the media the unhappiness isn’t removed until they have responded to the manager’s response.

Finances
========
- Adjusted wage and contract length demands of players with long term injuries
- Adjusted English manager wages
- Adjusted Brazilian sponsorships
- Adjusted Uruguay wages
- Adjusted English non-league finances
- Updated Brazil top level ticket prices.
- Stopped Chairman investing in club when not required.
- Fixed Swiss youth wages being too high.
- Adjusted Swiss finances.

Read the rest of the change list over at the SI forums by clicking the following link: http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php?t=192934