The next iteration of the Football Manager series from SI Games is going to be released on Steam on 14th November for $49.99. For the first time ever Football Manager will be utilising Steamworks, the publisher and developer tools that allow games to plug into the Steam service. Steamworks will be present in both the retail and Steam versions of the game, and more importantly those with the retail version will be able to register their copy of the game on Steam to fully utilise the Steam experience.

Miles Jacobson, the studio director at Sports Interactive had this to say regarding the announcement:

“Many of us at Sports Interactive have been big fans of Steam since it’s inception, so to be working with them properly this year across releases of Football Manager on the PC is fantastic. It gives us the opportunity for all of our games players to get any patches or updates that we make available quickly and easily, as well as a place for us to host any other downloads, such as demos and promotional videos, with super fast broadband speeds for download, and no issues with bandwidth, which we are hit with each time we release a demo”.

The demo for Football Manager 2009 will be made available via Steam a few weeks before the release of the game. You can pre-order the game on Steam now which will allow you to pre-load the game 48 hours before the game is unlocked at 9.00 GMT on the 14th November. Further information regarding pre-orders can be found here.

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The massive Football Manager 2009 reveal videos have gone up on the SI Games YouTube page and they show off a bunch of new features for both the handheld and PC/Mac versions of the game. First things first, the new game will be released on the 14th November with a demo coming out a few weeks before launch. The features announced in the following videos are not the full list of new features and improvements, just a handful. More will be revealed over the coming couple of months via blogs, news posts and the Football Manager podcast. Two parts to the video totally near on 20 minutes.

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SI Games head honcho Miles Jacobson has revealed on the SI Games forums that the first details on Football Manager 2009 will be revealed this Wednesday.

There currently lies a teaser image of Che Guevara holding a football on the Football Manager website, does this mean FM09 will be a revolution in the Football Manager series? The first details will be revealed in a documentary style trailer on the SI Games YouTube page. Miles expects further revelations of new features to occur before FM09 is released sometime before Christmas. It will be available on PC/Mac and PSP at release.