Sports Interactive and SEGA have announced that Football Manager Live for PC and Apple Macintosh is available now via digital download at www.footballmanagerlive.com.

Football Manager Live is the eagerly awaited persistent-world game from award winning development studio Sports Interactive that lets you test your football management skills against the rest of the world online.

The title is said to provide a more casual experience than the traditional offline Football Manager series (of which you can check out our review of the 2009 version here), allowing you to log in from anywhere, download the small client and play against your friends and other managers from around the world. Players can exchange banter with rival managers via the in-game chat system anytime, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and you can also choose a league to suit your playing style, tailored to how often and when you want to play the game.

“Football Manager Live is a very different game to Football Manager – imagine, if you can, a cross between Football Manager, fantasy football, an auction website and some social networking, and you’ll be just about there,” said Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive. “Football Manager Live is the best way to prove your football management prowess to the world, and with a new development model dubbed as “constant development”, there will be new features being added to the game every few months, with a lot of these features being based directly on consumer feedback and what the people playing Football Manager Live want to see in the game.”

Football Manager Live operates on a subscription service, with the initial retail boxed copy retailing at £29.99 including a four month subscription to the game, with online subscriptions costing £22.99 to play the game for three months, £43.99 for six months and £72.99 for a full year.

And if you hate digital distribution and fancy yourself a boxed copy, Football Manager Live will be available in stores from 23rd January.

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