In FM Live we make our own club from the very beginning and then manage it. It is all done by one person. We do not have any staff to help us (at least we cannot see it, look at the attributes or simply fire and employ new - just like we do in Football Manager). Here there is only one way to get your players a better medical care or training: acquiring manager skills. This kind of solution, in which a player is being described by a table of attributes which can be raised in some sort of training, is pretty popular in the MMO games. How does it look in the FM Live?

First of all the skills are divided into six categories: coaching, physiotherapy, scouting, management, tactics and learning. Thanks to this the navigation is much simplier, because there is a lot of them to acquire throughout the game. Each ability is described carefully - we can read what benefits do they carry, what skills do we have to possess already to be able to learn one, to which degree can we train it and how much time it will take. Let's take a closer look on the categories - this time I will describe what skills can we find there and what do they give to our team.

1. Coaching - we can affect the team's training only by acquiring appropriate skill from that category. In FM Live we cannot make a schedule for the whole week (in fact it is impossible even to make a training regime for a group of players). If our will is to make our footballers play better - we have to learn a proper skill first. There is a bunch abilities to acquire - those more universal like Coaching, Physical Coaching, Technical Coaching and those covering each playing attribute (Marking Coaching or Finishing Coaching).
2. Physiotherapy - thanks to skills from this section we can shorten the time of player's treatment. There is one general ability - Physiotherapy - and a big group of detailed ones, which are connected to the body parts.
3. Scouting - skills from this section reveal more footballers from the particular parts of the world. I have to add one thing here: in FM Live managers do not see all footballers from the game's database. Thanks to this - players who join the game later can pick players on the same level that others did earlier. There is one additional skill in this category - Judging Potential. Training this ability makes manager able to judge player's potential more precisely.
4. Management - the choice here is not very impressive but interesting. Finance skill will help us to make our club's revenue bigger and negotiation abilities will help us in lowering the cost of signing free agents or the footballer's salary while extending a contract.
5. Tactics - this category surely is the most controversial one. Games from Sports Interactive accustomed us to a quite complex tactical engine so a new player might be pretty surprised when he will find out that most of the options are blocked. We cannot use them unless we will learn proper skills and this generally applies to everything - counterattacks, using the playmaker or target man, passing directions and even using the arrows on the tactical screen (by the way: they are limited to two directions - forward and backward and they reflect forward runs of a player - I am curious if this option will be left like this in new FM 2009…?). What's more - the tactics are divided into two groups: Individual and Team. Learning the marking skill does not mean that we can make our central defenders take care of strikers and the rest of our team will zonal mark. To do so the manager has to learn the individual marking skill. This type of limiting the 'power' of manager will surely find many opponents among the players. However, it gives the opportunity to adapt the tactical options to our needs (ie. each level of Tactics increases the available notches on the Team Tactics sliders - if one wants to have 5 notches and it is enough for him he can have 5 as well as the other player can have 21 - and everyone is happy).
6. Learning - without this category everything would be much easier. There are five skills here and learning them makes you learn faster in one of other 5 fields. This is complicating the whole education thing. If we want to be the best in technical training it may turn out that it is better to learn one of Learning skills before concentrating on the technique training ability. The existence of this category made the Skill Planner a useful little thing. There we can choose the kind and level of ability which we want to learn. After this we get a step-to-step guide which tells us what should we do to get the picked skill in the fastest way. In addition to this we can see the time needed to accomplish the training. Honestly - You can get close to breaking down sometimes.

Well, that is all about one of the most controversial features of FM Live - the managerial abilities system. However, the progress, which is the topic of today's part of Road to FM Live may not only be connected to managers. The clubs can be developed too and it is worth mentioning, that You can create Your own teams like U-18 or reserves. At the beginning every club has only one team, which is quite obviously the senior team. You can have up to 5 teams in your club in the later stages of the game. It is up to us how do we use them. Making junior teams is rational and most federations support the official junior competitions. What are those federations and those competitions? We will tell you in another part of Road to FM Live.

Attention! If you have any questions about the FM Live - ask in the comments! We will try to satisfy Your curiosity in the next parts of our series.