I have been playing football manager live now as a beta tester since November 2007 so i can speak first hand from my prospective of the game.
I first joined beta over a year ago, and when i got the invite, i thought to try it out just to see what it was like and quite frankly i was astonished. The game itself included so much more then just playing games. It allowed you to chat to the entire community, create competitions, be in a real football league with other players where relegation and promotion was a real prospect, i was in total control of my finances, and i was forever battling to become number 1 in the world ranks. I played this beta for many months, and continued to see the effort put in by SI to fix the bugs and implement new features and i was impressed.
I'm now back in gameworld Miller beta testing further for patch 1.1 and their are plenty of new features since i was last on the game. You can now train your different skills to bolster your intelligence in different departments, improve your stadium as well as add billboards to it and even build a new stadium!, and more importantly, most bugs i new in early beta have now been fixed!
Altogether, i believe SI have noticed a real gap in the market for online football management, and they seem to have produced a great idea. Sure their is still some bugs, and answer time to some questions can be a little higher then expected when your having problems (outside of the gameworld), however this is expected when a new online game is first brought out and i'm sure SI will fix these issues over time. Myself, i cant wait for the new updates and new features, and i deffinately reccomend this game to all of you!