The brand new Data Hub area in Football Manager 2022 helps you make smarter decisions with data.
FM22 Data Hub - Quotes by SI people
Miles Jacobson (studio director):
This year we've got a lot more interaction and information in the game to really help that world become alive, even more than it normally does.
We've got the data hub and all the extra information there.
Elliott Stapley (software engineer):
The introduction of xG and the analytics stuff in Football Manager 2021 was pretty big for us.
We think that Football Manger is quite important for how people in the community in general view sports and statistics.
We saw a big uptake. We saw a lot of people really liking what we did with xG.
We wanted to really push on this because we think it's important.
Not just for fans and not just for representing reality, but because of our aim to make Football Manager an accurate representation of what being a manager at a football club is like.
We know from conversations with football clubs.
We know from the perception of what football clubs are now, that these data teams and analytics in general are very, very important for the function of modern football clubs.
People credit analysts in interviews, people talk about the fact that they're making these marginal gains. We wanted to be able to push that and make sure that our users are getting a similar experience.
So what I loved when looking at the data hub was that it allows you to take in things quickly.
New elements in FM22 in the data hub
We've introduced 'momentum', which gives you a perception of the flow of a match.
It might give you information about this team has been performing particularly well in these time periods.
You've had a load of shots, you've had a load of touches in the final third.
This gives you a way of diagnosing match performance that's agnostic from the result.
We've also made improvements to pass maps. You'll be able to see in much more detail, much more intuitively, the way a game is played out between your players.
You might see that your centre-backs are circulating the ball between each other really well but they're not getting it up the pitch because there's a strong line between them.
It's just giving users more ways of diagnosing what's going wrong with their team, or going really well, without having to dig into huge repositories of information they might not know about.
So much data in the data hub
We've tried to make sure we cover all bases. We've got this 'Ask For' system, where users can literally ask their analysts for pieces of information.
The momentum map, the pass maps, you can request these for matches. You can also request your Shot Maps, the xG timelines, but also added a few different things.
You can dig into specific information about a metric you really care about.
If you care about how well you defenders are heading the ball, you ask your analyst for a graph on Heading.
It shows you where your players and you know straight away how well they're doing.
There's also stuff like Zone Map information. It breaks down the pitch and shows how frequently you're doing things in different areas.
It's just ways of turning existing, large amounts of data into something someone can learn something from and make changes because that's what we care about.
Being able to tinker, being able to learn from seeing all this information that can be quite overwhelming. We want to turn it into something intuitive.
