From the very first moments the Football Manager 2009 has been officially announced a great deal of attention was drawn to the option the programmers, fairly justifiably, presented with pride and, using the image of Che Guevara, called it a revolution. The fans started to speculate about how the new way of presenting the match will look like, sometimes giving full rein to their imagination. Their ardour was, however, cooled by one of the founders of SI, Paul Collyer, who said: 3D is a long-term project. We [the SI team] won't be overly ambitious with its first version, but we'll strive to make it better with every year.

Paul answered to some of the questions raised by the fans concerning the 3D, and for the most part they were negative. He underlined that he doesn't want to make it as detailed as FIFA series, however most of his statements were concluded by maybe in the next version. So what exactly has been said?

• players' detail level - limited to four elements – height, weight, hair and skin colour. There will be no possibility of seeing FaceGen generated faces, as such close-up won't be available. There won't be animations of Player's Preferred Moves (PPM), at least not in this version. And those who thought the players are too small were wrong. As the older of the Collyer brothers put it: The players and the pitch are in the right scale. We think that other games use too big players' models.


• the pitch and the stadium - the pitch will be improved, it should be a lot better than what we can see in the first pictures and video clips. We won't see, however, no rain nor snow, so the weather conditions will be recognized exactly as in 2D by the pitch condition. We can, however, expect seeing light reflexes in the matches played earlier on the day. As for the stadiums, let's hear from Mr Collyer himself: There is no chance of re-creating the stadiums. You won't see anything more than the abstract stadium seen on the screens. I think this should be an option everyone could turn off in the preferences.


• match engine - Paul denied the rumours that had it there were two match engines one for FML and one for 'regular' FM. There is only one and its constantly being worked on; a slightly modified FM 2008 engine is present in FM Live, whilst the significantly improved one – for the SI can analyse thousands of matches played on it every day – will be featured in FM 2009. So, the only unknown thing is the behaviour of the ball for its physics has been written from scratch especially for the 3D as the one from 2D was unsuitable.