First of all, it may turn out that despite participating in several leagues and cups there are no opponents to play against at the moment. In that case it's better to find somebody to play a friendly with. It can be done in two ways either manually browse through the list of active managers and challenge one of them or, what's recommended, ask the game to find us an opponent. It is done by a tool called Opponent Finder. We can select the type of matches that are to be taken into account, prospective opponent's reputation, or even if we want to play at home or away. Upon confirming the game starts to search for a matching opponent. If there search returns no results we're informed about that and we're left to wait until a team matching our specifications uses Opponent Finder itself entering the criteria our team meets. After two players are paired up the 'match procedure' begins.

This is how it looks like where we have no one to play against. Otherwise, we can take a look at the list of available opponents and pick one of them. After seeing the information about our opponent and the match we still can cancel the match (comes really handy when we accidentally challenged the world's best team whilst our team's form is rather poor at the moment) or confirm it. A player being challenged receives an information and can either reject or accept the challenge. In the latter case both managers proceed to pre-match.

From the moment both players accept to play a match they are given five minutes for preparation, i.e. mainly selecting the match squad but also analysing the opponent and adjusting their tactics accordingly. At this point, until the first whistle, we can still cancel the match but, as a result, the opponent will be awarded a win by a walkover. We can also bet our opponent on who's going to win. There is also a possibility of checking the previous meetings results. After both managers field their teams it's worthwhile to take a look at your opponent's line-up and formation. There should be still some time left till the kick-off so you can make any necessary tactical adjustments. If both players manage to finish their pre-match quicker than in five minutes, the match will start sooner.

We've mentioned some of the differences between standard FM and FM Live already today, there were some more in the rest of Road to FM Live series, however, there are no such differences when it comes to the graphic representation of the match and the match engine (although it's not entirely true as in FM Live the match engine is more up to date than it was at the time the last patch to FM was issued). So we get a 2D view, well-known blobs run up and down the pitch, the only new thing are the advertising boards around the pitch. During the game we can make changes 'on the fly' or, alternatively, pause a game for approximately 2 minutes (if we manage to complete all of our changes earlier we can resume the game sooner). Apart from that after a red card or an injury to one of our players the game is also paused and we get a few moments to make a change to our personnel or formation.

During the game we can browse through well known statistics screens but also we are able to talk to our opponent, hence comment on the events taking place. After the match we can issue a press statement but, although we'll be quoted by the journalists, what we say won't make any real impact on player's morale, etc.

Finally, I would like to say a word about one interesting option loosely connected with the match itself, namely the clips. Every game's highlights (goals, situations, bookings, etc.) are 'remembered' by the game. In the right place we can watch all the possible clips, but that's not the most interesting thing. Thanks to the fact that each player now has a tab with clips related to him searching for new players got another dimension. If a given player's profile looks appealing we aren't restricted only by this, now we can see how he performs on the pitch. However, this system isn't very efficient for defensive players but should the game learn to distinguish good tackles the clips will be a perfect tool for quick verification of a player's skills represented by parameters. And if it could make it's way to a standard Football Manager... I wish it'll happen.