For todays’ blog I’m going to go through a bunch of new and improved features for Football Manager 2012 that don’t fit into other categories.

For a start, we’ve improved the modelling of pre-defined stadium moves, meaning that when a team like Brighton have a stadium move defined in the database, the researchers of those teams are able to estimate the new attendance once the stadium move has happened, rather than it sticking to the attendance at the old ground.

At the start of each season, your board give you their expectations and, where possible, you can negotiate these to and get a higher transfer budget, or lower if you want less pressure. We’ve now added in some extra levels to these expectations, such as qualifying for different continental competitions – for example, you could say that you’re going to try and qualify for the Euro cup, rather than the Champions cup.

Football Manager 2012, as always, comes with a free data editor, which allows you to edit the games players, clubs, competitions and add new competitions. Here are some edited highlights of things added to the editor this year.

You can now add international competitions as well as league ones, you have the option to edit currency exchange rates, an option to add a league split in regionalised league groups, the ability to add squad rules for continental competitions, such as having to register a certain amount of players by a specific date and all the new contract clauses that were added into FM11 are now editable in the editor. As with everything in the blogs, there are more new things in the editor too, but we’ll let you find those out for yourself once the game is released on October 21^st.

There have been a few changes in the control you have over training facilities too. For a start, if you don’t have any training facilities of your own, your board can now rent some for you. And if your club get into serious financial trouble, you might find this very useful, as you could find your board selling your owned training facilities!

There is also now another use for your training facilities that can help the club earn a bit more money, but only if an international tournament is going on in the country where you are managing – your board may well hire the facilities out to a nation, should they be good enough, and should your ground be near one of the stadiums being used for tournament matches.

A few finance changes have been made to the game this year too. Although the financial fair play rules are such big news at the moment, we’ve always made it harder in FM to get into debt than it is in real life, by limiting transfer budgets accordingly, but clubs in administration will no longer be able to get a license to play in continental competitions in the game.

Travelling costs to games are now better modelled, as are the cost of sending scouts out.

The cost of running your youth setup is also now tracked in more detail and you can ask the board to alter the level of money budgeted for your youth setup. If things look very bleak financially, the board can also ask if you want to scrap your whole youth setup if you decide not to enter your youth team into the youth league.

There are also some new “debt types” in the game, which are also in the new data editor, such as a debt repayable on promotion to the top division.

However, there are some positive financial changes too. For a start, should your players be off playing in international tournaments, your club will now get paid just as they would in real life. It’s only a small amount of money, but every little bit helps, right? And you never know – should they get injured whilst playing for the national side, you might even get some of their wages paid for the period they’re out injured for...