An exhaustive level of detail takes a lot of the fun out of this long-running management sim.
The reason behind the success of the FM series has largely been down to greater levels of detail and better implementation of it than its rivals, such as the ability to create and customise training schedules, match tactics, set-piece scenarios, hire and fire staff, develop young players and scout the world for up and coming talent. This has all worked (on the whole) because this is the kind of stuff that the player of a football management game wants to be able to do in order to best do their "job" as manager of their chosen football club.
Unfortunately, the series has been adding even greater levels of detail in recent years that while undoubtedly realistic, are too much like hard work to be enjoyable. Upon taking charge of your club, you are deluged from all angles with a myriad of things to do. For example, you can attend press conferences to answer questions that are quickly shown to be re-hashed and recycled and that take no intelligence to really work out what the best answer is, or choose to send your assistant instead which the A.I. can punish you for by causing your squad to react negatively to either his comments or your lack of attendance, damaging morale and causing unrest.
As well as that, agents will bombard you with their offers, usually for players of little or no consequence - or talent - and even though you can choose to filter these out, it'd be better to turn them off entirely because none of them offer you a player better than one you can find yourself with a little effort.
One way the detail works is in the actual match itself: you can choose to watch all of it, or just key highlights, or commentary only - which you probably will switch to once you've worked out a good system that brings success - and this allows you to see in real-time how your formation works and how effective your style of play is. However, this isn't perfect, because often defenders won't make a tackle or play offside when they should - or would, in real life - so your very realistic yelling at them to "push up!" falls on very unrealistic ears. That said, it's very satisfying when a corner tactic works to create a goal, or your front three knit together an intricate passing move to unlock the meanest defence in the league.
Day-to-day management of the club is simple enough, but you have to frequently interject in regard to the automated areas of the club such as training, because there's no option to tell your coaches to rest the players the day before and after a match, so this constant need to assign them to rest days lest they become too exhausted to effectively perform in the match is tedious and repetitive.
Your board will often impose limits on budget which are reasonable enough, but there's little flexibility here. For example you can offload some big earners to free up the wage budget, but this won't adjust automatically and allow you to sign a player that previously you couldn't afford to pay. It's an annoying, minor gripe, but the longer you play, the more of these there are, all to a collective detriment in the experience.
The A.I. is good in that it learns your tactics, so you can't play the same formation and players in every game and win 5-0 (mostly), so you have to have a few more tricks up your sleeve which is a good thing on the face of it. In practice, it can take an age of trial and error, by which point you could be sacked anyway and left very frustrated. Unsurprisingly, the vast fanbase for the series has collaborated on this and come up with all manner of tactics and training regimes for download, so it's no surprise that most resort to these to stand a chance of sustained success.
The problem of detail in this game proves that you can have too much of a good thing. An entire season takes about the same time to complete as your average RPG, due to the amount of news (often irrelevant), press conferences, player research, tactical meetings with your backroom staff, dealings with agents, your board and your players. If you choose to have even one other league running in the background, this also has an impact on the game's speed, even if the game states that your computer can easily handle however many playable leagues you want - or all of them at once.
Fundamentally, Football Manager 2011 overwhelms the player with a level of detail that isn't unwanted - because in every game of its type, the player wants to unearth an unknown gem of a footballer and win every game, either winning the Champions League with a European giant or taking their hometown club to the heady heights of the top league in the country - but which requires simply too much time and attention to make worthwhile.
There's next to no need to deal with transfer speculation over a player you're not interested in, or worry about feeder clubs supplying yours with promising young players when there not only aren't any, but which would take five seasons' worth of time to see if they'll make the cut or not - and usually, the latter.
If you're a big club, you have a Reserve and Youth team and may also have a partnership with a feeder club, so before you know it you're dealing with players from four clubs when in theory the backroom staff you have working for you should be taking care of all this, but instead frequently require your input. It's not consequential enough to really matter to what you're doing and in that respect damages the fun you can really have with the game.
I might be old enough to remember the heady days of Championship Manager 93/94 on an Amiga 600, and whilst those games had their flaws, you had to manage your first team squad, buy and sell players and that was it. It kept things simple and the experience was a lot of fun as a result - it wasn't easy at first, but when you hit on a winning formula, you still played it until it broke - literally - and nobody ever gets bored of success anyway. Football Manager 2011 has lost sight of that pick up and play mentality, and has served up a football management game that is too much like an actual job instead of a fun and challenging way to waste a sunday.