JUST A GAME?
Football Manager’s journey from the bedroom to the boardroom
The game that we now know as Football Manager may not have been the first football management simulation but as it celebrates its 25th year in 2017, it is the longest lasting and the only such game that has taken on a life of its own. Football Manager has bled into the very world it attempted to recreate – as much part of the furniture of the modern game as the Premier League it predates by a season. It’s come a long way from some very unassuming beginnings. It was born in the bedroom of a farmhouse in the sleepy English county of Shropshire where brothers Ov and Paul Collyer wanted to make a management game for their school friends. This first text-heavy version, named Championship Manager, featured no real player names and only the four divisions of England’s Football League – it was the last year before the Premier League – but it was picked up by a publisher and football history was set in motion.
Simulation on saturation
The Collyer Brothers’ game was not the first of its kind. That honor went to an unrelated game also called Football Manager, which was released on the first batch of home computers back in 1982. That game was developed by one of the first celebrity programmers, Kevin Toms, and over the next decade others followed his lead: First, sequels to his own Football Manager series, then Dino Dini’s Player Manager and finally, in 1992, Championship Manager. After the relative success of the game, the brothers set up Sports Interactive, the company which oversaw the game, before releasing Championship Manager 2 in 1995. In partnership with publisher Eidos, Sports Interactive began to take the game series from a cult classic to the mainstream. The partnership with Eidos lasted until 2004 and the split was a seminal moment in football history. Sports Interactive took the database and the code, with Eidos getting the user interface and the name. This was the start of Football Manager as we know it now, the name since bought from Toms, and the contrast in fortunes with Eidos’ Championship Manager could not be more stark: They won the name but lost the war. The Eidos series was later abandoned as a PC title, the name sold and relaunched on mobile where it continues to be popular today. But it’s a world away from the runaway success that Football Manager has become.
A whole new ball game
Football Manager as a playable experience has changed beyond all measure from the days of Champion- ship Manager’s first few run-outs with frightening levels of detail, 3D match engines and a world which can be lived out in real time, as if you were actually a full-time football manager. As through every iteration, though, it has remained the same game at heart though and if anything has become more addictive. The game has been cited in several divorces as the reason for the marriage failing, and it is no coincidence that one book about the series is called Football Manager Ruined My It has been the subject of several more books and websites – many of which recount the fictional seasons played out in the game as if they were the real world – and at least one documentary. The documentary, An Alternative Reality, features many professional footballers and the real-life managers that the game hopes to recreate. Players have complained about their stats in the game and asked for them to be changed, managers admit that they used earlier versions of the game as a scouting tool, with Alex McLeish said that he tried to sign Lionel Messi on loan for Rangers based on the recommendation of his sons who were playing the game.
Scouting network
The data necessary for Sports Interactive to accurately cover 2,500 clubs in over 140 leagues in 50 nations and regions means that Football Manager has the world’s largest scouting network by some distance – over 1,300 to profile profile the 600,000 players in the game’s database. Real football got wise to the fact they could extend their own scouting network for the price of a PC game, and many clubs have mined the data as part of their recruitment and analysis processes over the years.
Nowadays Sports Interactive also sell their full database to clubs, with more fields fields than those seen in the game, and have official official but unpub- licized partnerships with others. This symbiotic relationship is proven by stories where some of the game’s scouts have gone on to similar jobs in real-world clubs, such as Plymouth Argyle’s performance analyst. Since the documentary was filmed in 2014, this relationship between the computer game and the real world has only deepened and now Football Manager’s reach has extended beyond football. The game’s director, Miles Jacobsen, recently appeared in British parliament on the back of the game. Football Manager’s forecast for possible Brexit scenarios, which played out in Football Manager 2017, made headlines and earned the Watford fan his time in front of a select committee to offer offer his opinions on the UK leaving the EU.
While Football Manager has become part of the establishment, it remains at its heart a game and that’s why many people – even professional footballers – still play it. Everyone thinks they can do better than the idiot in their team’s dugout and Football Manager is still the opportunity to prove that – and some of today’s younger managers cutting their teeth on the game proves that they might be right. Over the last 25 years it has seen off off all the competition and become a worldwide cultural phenomenon that has done more to make the football world smaller than anything else save for broadcast media and the Internet. And it can move grown men to tears. Not bad for some schoolboys from Shropshire.