Football Manager 2009

Dear all

Well, it's that time of year when we're getting ever closer to revealing the new features for our forthcoming Football Manager releases, Football Manager 2009 on PC & Mac, and Football Manager Handheld on PSP. I can confirm that they are both coming, and will both be out before Xmas. And out on the same date too.
As those of you who visit footballmanager.net might have seen, there's a bit of a teaser image up there. Guesses at what it is and why are more than welcome in this thread

As for the new features announcements, release date announcement and first look at the packshot, these will be coming in the evening of Wednesday September 3rd. So slightly later than the end of August originally promised but there are very good reasons for this, mainly involving global co-ordination for the announcement, and half of Southern Europe being shut down until next week.
The announcement itself will be in the form of a documentary type thing, made by Remedy Productions who do a lot of work with Channel 4 in the UK mainly on the music side of things. This will be initially viewable from our new You Tube channel, which can be found at www.youtube.co.uk/sigames. The video will be put up there first, and we'll then embed it into the various sigames and FM websites once it's encoded properly, sometime after 6pm next Wednesday, so it's well worth subscribing to the channel if you want to get it first. The documentary is going to be between 15 & 20 minutes long, and include many surprises along the way.
The day afterwards, when we've had some time to type it up, we'll post up some of the features that were discussed in the video for those of you with very short attention spans, or who are just too lazy to watch it. Which will hopefully be no one.

Please note that what we're announcing next Wednesday is not everything new that will be in the games, but a snapshot of some of the new features from the games. There will be further announcements as we get closer to the release date through some blogs (the site of which will be revealed when the first blog happens), the podcast and a few other places too. I'll leave it to others to then find these and post them on the forums here, although around the release of the demo will colate everything together to give as full a feature list as we'll ever give out. We don't want to ruin people's fun finding little things here and there during their game playing!
We look forward to the discussions of what we announce next week, although I'll be late to that party as at the same time as the announcements are going live, I'll be off at some press conference thingy. Just try to keep it constructive please - we hope there will be something for everyone in the announcement, but we can't please everyone all of the time, however hard we try

Cheers

Miles