Football Manager
Tom still fancies himself as A Special One
Football Manager, like the sport it attempts to recreate, is the world’s greatest global soap opera. It never ends, and there are no ultimate winners. Pointless? Far from it.
I’ve been pretending to be a football manager since the ’97/’98 season (back when Eidos was running the show). I haven’t reached the dizzying heights of Vugar Huseynzade – the 22-year-old who got a job at Azerbaijani club FC Baku when his only footballing experience was playing Sports Interactive’s management sim Football Manager – but maybe I should add a line or two to my CV.
Football Manager allows you to slip into the dugout at fortresses such as Anfield or Camp Nou, as well the more obscure like Gwangyang Stadium (South Korea’s Jeonnam Dragons, naturally) where you micro-manage the club: training, tactics and, most importantly, transfers. This isn’t FIFA where you button-bash to win headers; this goes beyond picking a starting XI or rating players out of 20. As any Football Manager aficionado will tell you, half the fun is discovering the previously-unheard-of ‘wonderkids’ that lurk within the gargantuan database, signing them up for peanuts and developing them into the next Messi. Yes, it can be fun to go nuts with Manchester City’s bottomless budget, but it’s often more satisfying building a team on a shoestring and re-writing history.
With shared network games, ‘quick’ half-seasonlong challenges and 51 playable leagues around the world, regardless of how Roy’s boys fare in Rio, I’ll have something to smile about this summer while waiting for the ’14/’15 season to start.