Football Manager 2009

LONDON (September 5th, 2008) – On Wednesday night, Sports Interactive and SEGA Europe Ltd. announced a vast array of all new features for the Football Manager™ series in two videos that aired exclusively on YouTube’s global network. Since the videos launched, they have been watched by over 165,000 users and the two videos achieved the No.1 and No.2 slots in YouTube’s ‘Most Viewed’ category for the UK in the following 24 hours. For the same period, the Sports Interactive channel on YouTube was also the most viewed channel across the UK YouTube site and the second of the two videos, which details the new features for the series, was the third most commented upon video. Both videos are also in the top 20 globally across all of YouTube's network.

"It's great to finally be able to announce the new features for the Football Manager series," said Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive. "Making a web TV show to do this was a bit of a gamble, but one that has definitely paid off looking at the stats we've seen so far, and the feedback we've had so far on the new features has been incredibly positive, which is exciting to see."

The videos highlight the new features for both Football Manager™ 2009 for PC and Apple Macintosh and Football Manager™ Handheld 2009. The biggest news of the night was that Football Manager™ 2009 will see the match engine being brought into full 3D with motion captured animations for each player.

You can view the Football Manager™ announcement videos, which were made by UK TV production company Remedy Productions, now at www.youtube.co.uk/sigames where you can see footage of the new features, including the 3D match engine. Further features will be announced closer to the launch of the game in November via a series of blogs, podcasts and news stories.

Football Manager™ 2009 for PC and Apple Macintosh, and Football Manager™ Handheld 2009 for Sony PSP are both set for release on November 14th.

You can also embed the announcement videos on your own site by using the following embedding code.

Video 1:

<object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/y27MmCvAtcA"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/y27MmCvAtcA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"> </embed> </object>

Video 2:

<object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/77URmWUc-1k"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/77URmWUc-1k" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"> </embed> </object>

For further information please go to www.sigames.com or www.footballmanager.com. For assets please visit www.sega-press.com.