Football Manager 2019 adds mid-season training camps, smarter contracts

As Tom reported last month, Football Manager 2019 shakes up its UI, overhauls its training system, adds VAR and introduces a fully-licensed 36-team German Bundesliga. The footie sim's official Twitter feed has now revealed a fresh load of incoming features—including mid-season training camps, smarter contracts and better commentary. 

Starting with the latter, commentary is now linked to touchline team talks which, in theory, should better reflect incremental changes as they're made—be that at half time or during matches on the fly.  

As a means of combating the huge amounts of money being spent at the highest level, youth development is more important now than ever. FM 2019 hopes to reflect this in its AI managers. 

Furthering its player-management team relations—most noticeably improved by last year's Dynamics system—Football Manager 2019's assistants will now inform why certain players may not be best suited to lead your team. 

It's not uncommon for European teams, mostly British teams, to take mid-season breaks to warmer countries when winter kicks in. In January this year, my own team Celtic visited Dubai—FM 2019 adds this feature.  

Despite the money involved, signing foreign players is far from straight forward. This year, Football Manager gives AI players more autonomy should complications arise regarding work permits. 

And when it comes to loan deals, mandatory future fees—i.e. loaning players with a view of signing permanent deals during the next transfer window—are now marked by a "pending transfer" status. 

Onto scouting, and intrepid incoming managers can access their new club's previous scouting reports, should they wish to pick up where the exiting staff left off. 

Moreover, player match-ups have been introduced to scouting reports ahead of match day which might in turn inform your next starting 11. 

Football Manager 2019 is due November 2, 2019. Stay tuned for more on its new features in the coming weeks.