One of the things that the people behind the remarkably successful Football Manager series have learned is that when they bring out the new season edition, people will buy it. But it’s not just a case of people buying any old crap: it’s a case of people buying it because they have a history of producing the best football management sims out there, and so people have come to expect a high quality game.

I do know somewhat of which I speak — I have been playing the game since its earliest incarnation as “Championship Manager” (although I would suggest that they weren’t really producing the best quality football sims until the next version — Championship Manager ‘93. So in that respect I’ve been playing the football sims these people have produced for 16 years.

Bloody hell. When I think of all the time I’ve spent doing that, I could have actually done something constructive with my life.

Of course, that’s only if you assume that building a quality Newcastle team capable of winning trophy after trophy (even if it is only on my PC) is not something constructive. And for the rest of you afficionados, you might be content with my brief review: “yeah, it’s good” — before rushing off to order Football Manager 2010 for yourself.

If, however, you’d like to know what I thought of it first, then read on…

Well, all I can say, having played as Newcastle is that the realism is stunning. Not only will Ashley not allow the manager any money at all for transfers, he expects you to finish top of the Championship with a paper-thin squad. If that wasn’t realistic enough, my Newcastle side started off the season with a 1-1 draw away to West Brom, followed by 3-0, 2-0 and 2-0 wins against Reading, Sheffield Wednesday and Crystal Palace.

As usual, they’ve tinkered with the screen layout slightly, and have the tooltip affair which may be helpful to any beginners, but anyone who has played the game before might as well just switch this off — you should find your way around without any problems.

The 3D match engine hasn’t changed much (I still prefer the ‘elevated’ view) but one key thing has changed: rather than just being a pitch with advertising hoardings around, you now have a view of the stadium and the crowds. In this example, you can see Peter Lovenkrands crossing for Nile Ranger to score a diving header and get Newcastle off to a good start in the pre-season friendly against Falkirk.

Depending on the stadium, and the team, you’ll see different actions (fans cheering a goal and so on) as well as stadiums which are virtually full to those which are half-empty. It’s a nice touch.

Not so useful however is the “back room analysis”. The idea behind it is quite useful: it compares your team against the team you are about to play, tells you where relative advantages and disavantages lie — in this example I have a height, strength, speed, aggression and determination advantage over the team I’m about to play. Less useful is what you can do with this advice: you are simply directed to visit your tactics screen whereas some suggestions by your assistant or coaches would be more useful “try to play a controlling game; we don’t want these to hit us on the break” or similar.

Secondly, there’s the goal analysis. This simply tells you which 15-minute segment of the game the opposition have scored and conceded the most goals in. Really, what is the point of this? Without any further information (“team tires easily, likely to concede goals at the end particularly against fresh, fast players”) it’s just bonkers statistics. It would be fine for the media to quote it, but why on earth would my assistant manager feel it necessary to bring this to my attention unless he had something useful to add?

However, despite my quibble over this “backroom analysis” stuff, I do have to say that I very much like what they have done with the tactics screen. Instead of the previous thing, where you have arrows drawn forward and backward all over the shop to tell people to drop back (or run forward) depending on who has position, you know assign players to a particular role associated with the part of the pitch they are in.

For example, for a person playing right-hand side of midfield, you’ve got winger, right-midfielder or defensive winger: for your centre halves, you can decide who is a ball-playing central defender providing more deep-lying cover, and who is your stopper; there’s roles such as ‘ball winning midfielder’, ‘box to box midfielder’ and so on, and the number of different roles available to your centre forwards really need to be seen to be believed…

Of course, getting all of this right will improve how effectively your team plays, and might even result in you scraping past Coventry on a wet wednesday evening at the Ricoh. I suspect that this is one of these things that will eat up even more of your time as you attempt to tweak your formations and methods of play until it is just so.

So be warned: this game will take over your life; eat into all of your free time, and no doubt put a strain on your ability to carry on a meaningful relationship with anyone but your computer. But if you’ve played Football Manager before, that’s just the way (ah-ha ah-ha) you like it.

Get the game, get playing, and I’ll see you on the other side.