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   There may not be any footy management game from Sports Interactive this year - or at least none that we know of - something that only ever happened once (back in '98), over the studio's 15 years of history. But boy, do they have a great reason for it! Instead of presenting their fans with a regular iteration of their acclaimed Football / Worldwide Soccer Manager series, SI Games are taking a big leap forward, by entering the MMO league. Their next project will be Football Manager Live, and they describe it as a massively-multiplayer football management game, using the Football Manager match engine.

   The newly announced Football Manager Live is planned to go online in March 2008, but you can already see the first screenshots in our gallery, and - best of all - the game will enter public beta testing in mid May. Sadly, only about 1,000 people will be allowed to take part in this first beta phase, so fans would do well to keep a keen eye on the official website for updates.

   The whole idea for the game came from Oliver Collyer, co-founder of Sports Interactive, who left the studio a few years ago to go travelling, only to return with "a creative itch". "Imagine a cross between Football Manager, fantasy sports and an auction room and you'll get the basic idea", director Miles Jacobson tells us. He goes on to elabore different aspects of Football Manager Live in a Q&A published on the SI forums, revealing that FML will be spread accross many gameworlds (i.e. servers), with each gameworld supporting up to 1,000 would-be-managers.
"You don't play as a set real-world team; you make your own team and pick a squad, much like a fantasy sports game", Jacobson explains. "All players in the database have wage demands and you have a set wage budget at the start, so you pick your players according to that budget. The whole FML database is available to you when you start the game, although once a player joins a team in a gameworld they are no longer available to everyone else. In that way we can stop multiple teams having the same players."    I'm sure this introduction alone already raises plenty of questions, some of which are already answered in said Q&A, while others... well, let's just say they're still keeping some things for themselves. One thing that's apparent by now, however, is that FML will be a subscription-based game, as they hint that "it is likely to cost the price of a few pints per month to play". Too bad we don't know what kind of beer they have in mind...