retired_deegirl41

What about pre-tournament friendlies? Are they finally included?
I hate the fact that in the half-year before a tournament you have one friendly game in march and then the next game is the first World Cup game (or European). For example in march you have a superstar in top-form, then he gets injured and in bad shape, but you don't know nothing about his performance ability for your national team when selecting tournament squad because the last game was almost 4 months ago.
Not to mention the players didn't play a single game together for almost half a year...

retired_redchyna

Good to see this area improved.

Well done SI :thup:

retired_897fitness

That's kind of how it is in real life?

retired_minstyles

Sounds decent. Not that exciting though. International management is still by far second best.

retired_redbutterfly

No, usually the national teams play 3-4 friendlies in the run-up to the tournament. In FM07 you could have one in march and sometimes one just before the tournament, but that's not really realistic...

Fitqueen

mmmmm.....sounds better, but lets see on Friday. (I hope this is something that has really improved)

retired_yara

International management has been overlooked in the past, so I'm really looking forward to these improvements.

When I manage a national squad, I also usually take over the U21 team so I have a few questions about that.

1) In FM2007, players received squad numbers for U19 and U21 tournaments but still wore 1-11 in matches. Has this been fixed?

2) Are age limitations for squads still based on current age instead of year of birth as in real life? For example, players born 1.1.86 and later are eligible to play at the 2009 U21 championships. Players might be as old as 23 by the time of the tournament and still eligible. It is very annoying when key players during U21 qualifying turn 22 a few weeks or months before the start of the tournament.

retired_rmschaffer

It sounds like a big improvement on that area of the game.

I like that players on international duty are physically away travelling.

And presumably that varies depending on the location of the international fixture.

I think it also gives the human national manager a greater sense of feeling important. Each time you view a match, it affects performances and people notice you.

Also affecting players by commenting on their club form or giving some players hope that they are on the verge of the national squad. It is a big dream of a lot of players to play for the country.

Go on holiday till the next squad selection sounds good. Hopefully it makes it easy to skip ahead to the next fixture. And makes time fly by really quickly.


Apart from match engine improvements. I think international management will probably be the big step forwards in FM08. And it is an area that people have wanted improves for a while. So well done!

retired_w0lfpack1

Woo-hoo, Nick! I'm very excited. The ability to communicate with national-pool players is a huge addition, even if it is just in the "preliminary" stages.

It should make the difference between feeling like a match-day coach and feeling like a manager.

Asking a guy out of retirement is big.

Holiday-until-next-squad-selection is excellent.

Two things I didn't see mentioned - which I was hoping were parts of this release! - were:

1. Will there be friendlies immediately before big tournaments, e.g., a late-May friendly date for a June World Cup?

2. Has the dates-of-squad-selection been fixed, so that the Senior team selects before the two youth sides, when playing "same time-frame" tournaments? Without that, it was very frustrating to place the youth sides in control of an AI 'assistant', as they might call up that wonderkid 19-year-old whom you were planning to debut at the senior level.

All told, though, a very big update, I've been holding off on managing internationally for a while now in anticipation of FM'08.. so I'm stoked to read this blog!

retired_lidaltd

Some nice and realistic additions :thup: