“We can’t wait to see the reaction of the Football Manager community to Football Manager 2006, having hit our optimum release date, rather than the previous announced estimated date” commented Miles Jacobson, Managing Director of Sports Interactive. “The team at SI have worked amazingly hard this year to improve on Football Manager 2005 and we are all delighted with the outcome. We all look forward to losing many hours playing the game properly, rather than testing it!”

The new set of features being announced today are the final selection being implemented into this year’s game. Football Manager? 2006 can now reveal that it boasts a massive 34 NEW ANNOUNCED FEATURES on top of last year’s version and offers a whole host of surprises for consumers whilst exploring the FM world. As well as new features, Sports Interactive have in excess of 270,000 players and staff in game with more than 5,000 playable teams in 50 countries leagues.

FM 2006 Features :

• FM06 Is Quicker To Set Up! – Creating new games and loading times are now significantly reduced, despite the huge level of detail remaining.
• Tutorial – For those who have found previous SI games a bit daunting they will be happy to know that a huge 30,000-word tutorial has now been implemented. Each screen has it’s own tutorial with hyperlinks to any area of the game you need help with.
• Quick Flicks – SI have introduced quick flicks at the top of the screen, this makes browsing easier around the football gaming world.
• Internet Play Improvements - Packet size has been optimised on screens with a large bandwidth requirement in order to improve network play.
• Graphical Attributes – If all these numbers seem too much then why not use bar graphs instead. A quick change in the preferences section means your player’s stats will be shown in graphics, rather than numerically.
• New Comparison Screen – Comparing two players has never looked better.
• Fair Play – Manage your team well by reducing your amount of bookings and for those teams in the top flight who play fair, extra places will become available in continental competitions.
• Finance Graphs – In one user-friendly overall analysis, tracking your finances is now much easier with finance graphs.
• Height & Weight – Adding to an already impressive database of player’s stats, Sports Interactive have now introduced player’s heights and weights for the first time.
• Tactic Change Panel – This is an easier way to edit your whole teams individual tactics rather than having to change each player separately.
• Saved Game Compression – Running out of disk space? Saved game compression makes your saved game…smaller!
• New Match Engine Composition – For the first time dugouts now appear in Football Manager? 2006. Not only this but technical areas and a small icon when a player has a minor injury all make your management experience more authentic.
• New skins! - Thanks to Kev Radestock (Chameleon) & Gavin Thomson (Cappuccino) from the Sports Interactive community, we are proud to present the 2006 versions of the their hugely popular skins in the box of Football Manager 2006.

Football Manager? 2006 for PC-CDROM and Mac is developed by Sports Interactive and published by SEGA for release October 21st, 2005.