Good news for all the manager wannabes eagerly anticipating the release of the newest member of the Football Manager family: Sports Interactive has signed a deal with Valve to distribute the upcoming Football Manager 2009 via Steam. You can already pre-order the game, meaning that you’ll have access to it on November 14, at 9 AM GMT.

Sports Interactive also announced that a demo will be made available to download via Steam a few weeks before the full game’s release, so keep your eyes on Valve’s service!

“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” said Miles Jacobson, studio director at Sports Interactive. “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.”

Great news for us, the virtual managers! Now excuse me, I’m going to see how’s Mika Aaritalo doing in FM 2008.