The big news this week is the announcement of Football Manager 16. There might have been some thumb twiddling, a lack of saves sticking, and a spell in purgatory, but that hasn’t stopped Ed and George from forming an opinion.

Ed gets angry about peak players retiring rather than slipping down the leagues. But then he has a conversation over Twitter and calms down a bit. George agrees with him, and they have a nice rational discussion about things rather than shouting.

George keeps his neutral head on and tries not to jump on either the good or the bad bandwagon, but he does say that the reaction to the new features has been predominantly negative.

Ed doesn’t really enthuse about the number of new animations in the game, and wonders if anyone cares about the new features that have been announced.

And then there’s all of this as well –

Is Football Manager trying to tap in to some of the audience that FIFA has? Ed thinks that they might be, and doesn’t mind so long as SI doesn’t forget the older fans.

You can create an avatar of your manager in FM16. What do Ed and George think about that? I’m sure you can probably guess.

Is there extra depth in the new additions that let you build up your own club from scratch, and will the fantasy draft give a new kick to FM multiplayer?

And we look over plenty of other new things that have been announced for the upcoming edition of Football Manager. Ed waxes lyrical about set piece creation mode.

You can listen to the podcast in the SoundCloud player below, or head over to iTunes and search Deep Lying Podcast instead.