I don't know how anyone can prefer 2010. I felt that FM had slipped considerably after their 2007 game; which was brilliant. 2008 was good, but 09/10 were awful. The fact you couldn't use wingers was terrible. How can that be realistic? Your telling me that players like Robben couldn't bag around 10-15 assists a year from the wing?
The thing I love about this game is that you can actually get results with tactics made to suit your players, and not like the old ones where one tatctic would smash it up, no matter how poor the team. So, for example, I made a 4-4-2 for Spurs (I wanted to see if you could now utilise the wingers) and it was really good. I'm now playing a 4-4-2 diamond with Arsenal based on their players. I won me the league first season and I'm top in 2nd season. So their match engine and tactical side has to be considered the best yet. Normally I find the first few trial runs a nightmare and resort to using downloadable tactics to get an idea of what people are doing right before making my own. This time I've not had to do anything other than use my tactics as works in progress and tweak here and there.
The only thing you could say is that the skins and sounds are not great, but isn't that why we have the face packs/backgrounds/skins/sound files created by the people that play it? Us! Well, not me, but you guys? Surely that's a good thing. I think that's why they keep it simple, knowing we don't actually care or use it for long any way!
This is the best one by a mile. All hail FM2011, the king of their domain. Football management.