One of the next week’s entries is to be written by Paul Collyer, the maker of the series and one of the founders of SI, who currently works mostly on the match engine. And match engine interweaves with tactics, and tactic changes in Football Manager 2009 will be the main subject of Paul’s note. A great deal of attention will be devoted to limitation of importance of the arrows in team’s formation set-up. But that will be next week since there will be nothing happening on the blog this week. All that is left is a bunch of news given by Miles Jacobson in the latest entry, everything concerns changes in FM 2009:

• if a player has his favourite shirt number it will be displayed on the assign number screen
• there is a transfer clause that will guarantee the club selling a player with an incentive after another sale
• whilst buying a young player there will be not only the equivalent for training to pay but also for first team appearances and a percentage of further transfer fees
• descriptions of competition rules were enhanced, now the rules of Asian or South American leagues should be easier to understand
• there are three “new” goalkeeping attributes free kicks, penalties and first touch
• scouts will be more self-dependent, if a user fails to set them a field for searches they will travel somewhere on their own and report upon finding interesting players

Additional novelties are to be announced in today’s podcast, as well as next week on the ShortList magazine website. Meanwhile, an updated game version is undergoing tests by the publishers and if she passes them, what is expected to happen next week, work on FM 2009 could be officially considered completed and the demo will be just around the corner. So, let us hope the SEGA testers will not find many bugs.