Welcome to the second of our deep-dive Feature Focus articles! In this week’s instalment, we’re going to be focusing on the all-new individual player awards that are being added in SM27.
The Very Best
The awards that are coming to Soccer Manager 2027 recognise the very best players in any given save. They aren’t limited to a specific league or country, but instead go to the players who have performed the best in that year of your save. We aren’t just introducing one award though – there’s a whole set of them on the way that recognise the achievements of your players in a few different categories:
- World Player of the Year
- This award goes to the single best player in the world in that year. They are chosen based on their performances across the season, rather than just on their rating.
- World Goalkeeper of the Year
- Similar to the above, but exclusively reserved for goalkeepers who would otherwise struggle to win the award.
- World Young Player of the Year
- This award is particularly exciting as it recognises high-performing wonderkids. Definitely a useful one for planning your future transfer swoops!
- European Top Goalscorer
- This award is a slight outlier in that it is geo-specific but recognises the very best goalscorer in Europe, usually a striker.
On top of the individual awards, we also have some club-wide awards for you to compete for:
- Manager of the Year
- Think you’re the best in the world? Now you can win the trophy to prove it! This award recognises the manager whose teams have performed the best that season.
- Club of the Year
- Some clubs stand out in a season, whether it’s for a domestic clean sweep or a continental treble. This award gives them a permanent reminder of a particularly good season.
Quite a lot of awards there! We wanted to keep the selection realistic and make sure that there was plenty up for grabs to make sure your in-game achievements are properly recognised. The awards for players also bespoke UI elements, with glitzy custom messages that have the right level of glamour for how prestigious these awards are.
It was important to us to make these awards feel substantial. You’ll receive inbox messages about nominations and then separate ones for the winners. You’ll be able to access the history of these awards on demand through a dedicated button in the competitions tab. The ultimate goal for these player awards was to make them feel important and prestigious to win – you can check out the screenshots in this article to see what they look like.
Nominations
We didn’t just make it so the system solely picks winners, however. The game will pick a full list of nominees for some of the awards. These nominations are dynamically generated and are done according to the criteria of the awards, rather than just being a random mix of players. This means that they will be quite a valuable resource for transfer scouting!
Community Request
We’d also like to touch on how we process and act on community feedback in this week’s update. Individual player awards have been one of our most requested features for a very long time, so this makes them a great example to use in this case.
We keep an eye on feedback across a huge variety of channels. We monitor our social media comments, our app store reviews, the in-game support page, and, most crucially, our Discord server. All of these different avenues of feedback give us slightly different comments, but when taken altogether, we gain a clear picture of what the community is asking for, whether it’s a bug fix or a feature request. This picture is then fed back to the development team on a constant basis.
In the case of the individual player awards, we noticed that they kept coming up week in, week out, from across many different platforms. A feature being commonly requested isn’t enough to add it, however. We need to make sure that anything we add to the game fits, both in terms of design and into our schedule. Individual player awards are realistic, with a wide range of similar awards existing in real-life, and were also achievable ahead of SM27’s launch. This made them an ideal candidate for inclusion.
As part of the process of deciding to add something to the game, we look at the feedback we have received and see if we can realistically achieve what our community wants to see. Sometimes, a request for a feature is more of a way of avoiding a frustrating situation, and it is better to avoid adding a whole new feature and just address the problem at source. Other times, some of the ideas we receive are great in principle, but might not quite work out in practice. We spend time discussing and designing ways to add the feature to the game in a way that is realistic, fun to engage with, and that addresses a community need. In the case of player awards, that resulted in the system you see today!
Conclusion
Thanks for reading through this week’s Feature Focus! We have a particularly exciting one lined up for next week, so make sure to keep a close eye on our social channels to find out more about the Match Motion engine.
