Sports Interactive and SEGA Europe announce that Football Manager Live is, well, live, offering a persistent-world installment in the Football Manager series of football/soccer simulations. The game is currently available for download from the Football Manager Live Website, where the client is free, but play requires a paid subscription. A boxed edition is due in stores on January 23, which includes a subscription. Here's word on pricing in British currency: "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, which equates to less than 20p per day." Here's a bit on gameplay:

“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 is an exciting step forward for the Football Manager brand, and with Sports Interactive being behind the helm of the very first live football MMO, it couldn’t be in better hands,” said Gary Knight, Marketing Director of SEGA Europe Ltd.

Football Manager Live lets you create and manage your very own football club, choosing your team name, colours, badge, home ground, and also deciding which players to sign from Sports Interactive’s famous database of over 330,000 real world footballers.