Football Manager 2023 to feature UEFA license

Sports Interactive have announced that they have acquired the rights to all of UEFA’s competitions which will be implemented in the upcoming release of Football Manager 2023. Football Manager will feature official licensing of all of UEFA’s competitions including the Champions League, Europa League, Europa Conference League and the Super Cup.

This is huge news for fans of the game series as fans that are desperate for realism will no longer have to add data packs manually themselves. Fans can finally play an official European campaign with their preferred club, which will include accurate competition logos and titles.

Impact of Changes

The addition to this year’s game is sure to pull the game closer to real life in terms of realism and perhaps there will be an option to begin the opening season of a save game with the real UCL groups. In terms of the real-life UCL, in Paddy Power’s sports betting outright odds, the favourites are currently Manchester City at 9/4, followed by Paris Saint Germain at 5/1.

Fans of the game will be able to see if they can carry one of the real-life favourites all of the ways in-game to win their maiden UCL success, or perhaps would prefer to take an underdog such as Napoli, offered at odds of 33/1, all of the way to football’s biggest prize.

The deal to acquire the UEFA rights is indicative of Football Manager’s growth and success in recent years, with the number of players increasing by millions, year on year. The game has been for a long time the most realistic football video game experience on offer, and this addition makes that even more clear.

Football Manager contains a huge database of football players and coaches which is extensively researched; a number of researchers, analysts and scouts are dedicated to different leagues or in some cases individual clubs to accurately reflect their ability in-game.

The attributes players have in-game accurately represent the quality of a player to a very impressive level. Many clubs across the world regularly use the database to scout players and uncover hidden stars before other clubs become aware of them.

The game does not just exist for entertainment purposes and is about as good a scouting tool as they come, its ability to be extremely accurate relative to real life can be proven by a number of cases over the years.

World-class stars such as Marco Verratti of PSG and former City star Sergio Aguero were first uncovered via the game; they were loaded as young stars with heaps of potential.

This potential proved completely correct by their real-life progression to being some of the best players in their position in the world and they were incredibly vital to their teams’ successes.

The game puts casual fans, or qualified scouts and analysts more in touch with the game of football than any other and the UCL licensing makes the management sim even more representative of the real-life game and will provide an experience no football game has before.