Among the new features in Football Manager 27 (FM27) is the expanded ability to tweak your manager’s visual appearance, including an option that means wheelchair-using managers are represented in the game for the first time.
“It’s something we are really proud of,” Jacobson told BBC Sport. “Some might think it is only a small thing, but for wheelchair users it is an absolutely massive thing to be able to be represented in the game that they love.
“I am not a teary person, but I have to admit I had some tears in my eyes last weekend when I was watching some Instagram videos from our free trial of the game, of disabled people who just wanted to be seen, and represented.
“It seems really obvious to those of us who have been represented in games for years, but just giving people an opportunity to be represented, when they haven’t been before, really does mean a lot to them. That has just been brilliant to see.”
A more immersive world has been created for FM27, which includes a new training system called Tactical Effectiveness.
“It reflects what happens in real life when a new manager comes into a club and does something different – it takes players a while to get used to the new tactics,” Jacobson said.
“So, when you are the manager coming into a club, you have to decide whether to spend more time training the players in a really complicated tactic – which is going to take them a long time to learn and which means less time training them on other things – or do you start off with the basics, and build from there?
“It’s a little bit like what Nottingham Forest boss Oliver Glasner talked about after their performance in their defeat against Brentford last week, when he said he had been nice to his players, but now they have to listen and do what he is saying.
“I expect he is spending a lot of this week doing tactical effectiveness training in the background, or focusing on one part of it, because there are multiple elements.”
Chris Sutton and Miles Jacobson were speaking to BBC Sport’s Chris Bevan.
The AI predictions were generated using Microsoft Copilot Chat – we simply asked the tool to ‘predict this weekend’s Premier League scores’.