Sports Interactive has announced details of Football Manager 2012, the latest instalment in the developer's long-running footie management simulation. Designed to give in-depth control over almost any professional club in the world and featuring a database of hundreds of thousands of real-life players, the series has so far sold over seven million copies.

Due out this winter, FM 2012 will apparently boast over 800 new features. Key alterations include a revamped transfer and contract system, including better implementation of amateur and youth contracts, and the arrival of loyalty bonuses (you won't need to pay many of those in the Premiership).

"We're constantly watching the whole of the football world, and dealing with people inside football, to find out out what's changing," says Sports Interactive MD, Miles Jacobson. "One thing people may notice from the screenshots is that the signing on fee isn't there anymore – it's been replaced by a loyalty bonus. It's fortuitous this has happened just as the news broke that Febregas was going to be paying back Arsenal some of his signing on fee for the next few years, because they paid him a loyalty bonus upfront. The featureset for this game was nailed down in December, but sometimes we go along at the pace of the real-life sport. Life sometimes imitates art!

Indeed, several high-profile clubs now use Football Manager and its vast database of players as a means of discovering new talent. Sports Interactive employs a huge network of its own scouts around the world who watch and rate players in their local leagues. This information is then passed into the game. In 2008, Everton signed a deal to use the Football Manager database for scouting players and staff.

"It's interesting how involved we've become in football, and how much the football world accepts us," says Jacobson. "Certainly among the younger people involved in the sport, they grew up playing Football Manager, and now they're going into positions of power in clubs; its influence is only going to become more prevalent."

Scouting of opponents has also been tweaked to provide squad analysis and tactics information, allowing users to be better prepared before kick-off. "We've used real-life scout reports to re-think our in-game reports," says Jacobson. "We've had that planned for two years, but we wanted to ensure we had the resources to do it properly. That gave us the time to speak to the people who actually do the 'next opposition' reports for managers and clubs, and look at the technologies they use to see where goals are score from, which have only just come about in the last couple of seasons."

Intriguingly, there's also a new 'tone' system for talking to your squad members, allowing you to comment on their performances in six different voice tones from icy cool to Fergie-style hair dryer treatment.

There are plenty of graphical updates, too. The 3D match viewer, which shows your players in action, has new animations, a new crowd system, improved weather system and more stadiums.

The interface has also been updated to allow those with hi-res monitors to open multiple windows at the same time. Players are able to open up to nine boxes, allowing for a completely customisable experience, great for obsessive multi-taskers.

So, the big question in terms of realism: we know that its possible to simply set up a simulation of a season in FM and let the computer run through the whole year, playing out every match and finishing with a table prediction. Has the team at Sports Interactive run such a simulation of the Premiership 2011/12 season? "Not officially as we're still waiting for the final transfers to come in," says Jacobson. "However, I ran one at home for fun, based on the squads as they were a couple of weeks ago. In that one, the top four, in descending order were: Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal."

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Football Manager 2012 will be released on PC this winter.