As promised at the beginning of the blogs, we always planned to do some more indepth looks at some of the new features inside FM08 in the lead up to it's release on October 19th.
Today I had the chance to sit down with Ed, one of the dev team at SI, to have an indepth look at the new awards features.
Award Blog
There have been some big changes in awards for Football Manager 2008, here's a rundown on the new features that I can remember! Firstly voting awards have been implemented so for example if you are international manager you now have a say in who wins the World Footballer of the Year award - there are also other awards in different countries that can be voted for. Speaking of the World Footballer of the Year - this award now takes into account performances at the big international tournaments to influence the result, like in real life when Fabio Cannavaro won the award for his performance in the World Cup. Competition based awards also take into account how far the player progressed in the tournament when deciding winners, so a player who played a major role in getting his team to the final or win the European Champions Cup is more likely to be in contention for winning the best player award. This is as well as numerous other changes to the winner selection.
Team of the Week / Season awards have been improved, firstly the selection routine was written to be more intelligent with players getting selected in the team with the position they played in for their club rather than just their best position. Any formation is now supported for these awards rather than every one being 4-4-2.
Some new award types have been added including; Quickest goal, Most Improved Team; Fair Play; Best Referee; Personality and Man of the Match.
The award screens have also been re-written to look better and be more informative, the full information can now be accessed for previous years by selecting the row in the past winners table. Award news items have also been freshened up and a couple of new news items have been added.
A completely new feature is the Best Eleven - this is a type of team award given by the supporter spokesman at the end of every season for club sides and on the 1st of January for national teams which lists the fans best eleven players (plus substitutes) using the formation the team played most in that season, there is also an overall best eleven which takes the best players from each seasonal best eleven to give an all time (since the game begins) best team. This a great feature to look at a few seasons into the game!"
Cheers
Miles
FM 2008 blog: In-depth Awards 
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