Football Manager : More than a Game
Football Manager - Stories from 3 people whose lives were changed by the game
Sometimes it’s right to use a cliché. Football Manager really is more than a game. The ambition, the hope, the pure passion that FM provokes in players is unmatched by any other career-mode football game. There’s nothing quite like it.
Especially Today, when fans can’t attend actual matches, at least FM lets them resurrect the beautiful game in a fantasy world on their screens.
But Football Manager’s power lies also in how it is shaping the actual game of football. It’s powerful enough for manager Andre Villas-Boas, of Olympique de Marseille, to use FM’s scouting network to help guide his transfer decision-making. It’s powerful enough to give dedicated Football Manager players opportunities in the professional game. Football Manager changes people’s lives.
Football Manager enthusiast Andrej Pavlovic showed a professional Serbian club his in-game achievements - this landed him a job as a data analyst there.
Football Manager has changed Andrej’s life: “Personally in the last few years, this game has been my life. I can say that openly because it made me something personally perfect. It got me a job at the football club I have fallen in love with, all because of the game and I’ve had so many good moments because of it. This game is a big part of my life and it means a lot to me.”
The life-changing impacts of FM may sound surprising, given that, at its heart, the game focuses on the off-pitch administration and micro-decisions that determine how well a manager can negotiate transfers, source talent, devise strategy, master a press conference - and keep the books balanced.
“It is football admin, essentially. Which is bizarre, considering I don’t like doing my own admin - but here I am, spending hours and days of my life simulating somebody else's administrative duties,” says comedian Tony Jameson in a show he calls ‘Football Manager ruined my life’. “I'm guessing that none of you would spend hours and days playing a video game called ‘Office Manager’, where you're in charge of a small independent office and you've got to restock staplers and maintain photocopiers and then negotiate Brenda's pay rise because there's been a little news item that comes through saying that she's been making noise about wanting a new challenge.
“I think the best we can all hope for in ‘Office Manager’ is getting a wonderkid who's a little work experience lad who’s been dubbed ‘the new Bill Gates’. That's the best you can hope for.”
Football Manager captivates its fans with more detail than you could imagine. You are the manager of your chosen club. There’s no simple thrill of directly controlling your players to execute a skill move, but the fiendishly tactical aspect of Football Manager creates an accurate simulation of managing a football club.
With 118 leagues, you are spoilt for choice on which team to lead to glory. You can adopt a particular playing style, a unique formation - you can even play Jose Mourinho during press conferences.
In Football Manager 2020, more than 1,800,000 total players have managed over 470,000,000 in-game matches. But why is FM so special? Why has it come to dominate so many people’s lives?
The Sporting Blog’s Charlie Rowan, who himself has devoted 1,527 hours of 2020 to perfecting his Football Manager strategy, found a few spare hours to research its captive powers.
He spoke to the man in charge of the game at its publisher, Sports Interactive, Miles Jacobson; Andrej Pavlovic, a Football Manager enthusiast whose in-game achievements landed him a job at a professional football club; and comedian Tony Jameson, who crafted an acclaimed stand-up gig about his attachment to Football Manager.
This article is no advertisement. This is a celebration of an influential, fantastical football universe that just keeps on growing.
Miles Jacobson
Miles Jacobson OBE is the Studio Director of Sports Interactive [SI] - he is responsible for the game.
Miles revealed his thoughts on SI’s ambition for the future, some of the craziest stories he has experienced because of Football Manager and more.
The History of Football Manager
Football Manager evolved from a game called Championship Manager. “I’d love to take the credit for Championship Manager,” Miles said, “but I didn't actually work on the first one.
So the first original Championship Manager was made by two brothers called Oliver and Paul Collyer who made it while they were at school. They lived on a farm in Shropshire and they hadn’t yet discovered girls, so they had lots of time on their hands.”
“This meant they decided to make a game instead. And part of the inspiration was what is known as, ‘play-by-mail games’.
They were games where you would send a letter, because email didn’t exist then, to someone telling them what transfers you wanted to make in your team and what you wanted your team selections to be. And then they would roll a bunch of dice to decide what the outcome of that match was going to be and then mail it back to you.
“So there were some other games at that time - there was the original Football Manager game from 1982, there were other games such as Tracksuit Manager and Premier Manager which were around then.
The other games on the market at the time would reset at the end of the season. So you might have a five-star goalkeeper who, next season, is only a two-star goalkeeper. There was no input from computer Artificial Intelligence. You can concentrate on what you were doing and just make the rest up basically.
“All the people wanted to change that and the first Championship Manager game that was released didn't have any real data in it at all. It got really bad reviews from lots of places, but it built up a very small but loyal cult following, including me, and I was working music industry at the time, working with a band called Blur.
“I swapped two tickets to see Blur, to be a tester of Championship Manager 2 - that’s how I got involved.”
I was sending faxes because again, email didn't really exist, sending faxes to Oliver and Paul with my feedback and got a fax back from them one day just going, ‘we have no idea who you are, but we really like your ideas, so let’s meet up’. We did and we got on very well.
“I've been involved since that point and Oliver and Paul still work in the studio. Oliver works on programming special projects and Paul works on programming the match engine with the match engine team.
But both of them left the studio at one point and I've been running the studio for a long time.
“So I took over the creative reins on FM around CM03/CM04 (2003/2004) - I did some stuff on CM04, which was a disaster because the game was released when we weren't happy with it. We didn't leave it to be finished. We were a little bit blind to a point and then since FM I've been in the driving seat, but always the overarching thing for FM is to create a living, breathing world. People think of it as just a football management game; but to us, it’s a world in which we allow people to be football managers.”
How does he feel about the game being called an addiction?
“I have a big problem with the word ‘addiction’. An addiction is something that chemically changes your brain to make your brain behave in a certain way.
What Football Manager is, it’s compelling in the same way that there are lots of books that are compelling - that makes you want to read the next page and want to read the next chapter.”
“So we created a platform where people are able to create their own stories, but their own stories are really compelling. But there is nothing deliberate in the game that gives a chemical imbalance and it's actually a really important distinction, because ‘addictive’ is a medically negative word, whereas something being compelling or being a hobby that isn’t damaging you in any way.
When you’re playing Football Manager you’re learning about finance and lots of people tell us they’ve learnt English from playing the game.”
“You’re learning about football, data and data analytics. So we do not put any chemicals in the game that makes someone have to continue playing and you can stop at any point really easily without damaging you in any way shape or form, whereas with most things that are addictive, you can't just give it up that easily.”
The future for Football Manager and SI
He continued: “I can’t say everyone in the SI team is as ambitious as I am - some people in the SI team probably want an easier life than me. But yes, as a business we’re still incredibly ambitious, and our plans for the future are huge.
Obviously, we got hit this year, just like everyone else. It’s very hard making games - it is a lot harder making games during the pandemic when you have lots of other things to be more worried about like the health and safety of every single person in the team - and our consumers as well.”
“And also not being in an office together does harm creativity a little bit. So we had to change our plans consistently this year. I'm delighted with what we have coming, which I can't talk about yet. I'm delighted about that side of things.”
“But yes, we have we still have plans big plans for this year, we've got big plans for next year and we've got even bigger plans for the year after, so we're not where we want to be yet on the game and also with the number of people around the world who we are entertaining, but there aren't many games that have had the effects on what they are trying to simulate more than we have and that's something we're very proud of.”
“There also aren't many guys out there who have the network or reach that we do inside the world that they’re simulating so the number of people we can talk to on a regular basis - I'm sitting at home on Saturday night working with the football on and an England International sent me an email asking me when the new game is coming and that kind of stuff is always bonkers when that stuff happens and it happens a lot. So, you know, obviously, we achieved a lot but we haven't achieved what we want to achieve and where we want to be, and the day that we do achieve that is the day that we all start getting proper jobs.”
We asked Miles about FM’s impact
“It is really a question for the people who play it rather than for me.”
But the things that we are very proud of our play-times because that shows what great value for money the game is and you know, that's an important part of what we do, we want to provide the best value for money game on the planet because people are working really hard for the 35-40 quid that they give to us each year for the game.”
“I've done my fair share of really hard jobs rather than the one I get to do now which is still hard but it is a hell of a lot fun as well. So we want to be the best value for money game on the planet and we think we are nearly there on that and, there were certain things that we introduced to the game that have become a lot more prevalent in football - not things that we came up with in the first place necessarily, but things like player roles that you just hadn't heard of, apart from Gary Neville talking about them you just hadn’t heard of them outside of training grounds. And we put those into the game because I kept hearing the terms when we were at training grounds.
“It would be arrogant for me to say that we're pretty influential inside football, but we are.”
“So, I was voted in the top 50 most influential people in football a few years ago and I was voted for by people who work in football, I didn't put myself forward for it.”
“And that's because of the data and the way that we use data. The way that has transformed from being something that we did in-game into something that now happens in football, the player roles stuff, the fact that players want to see what their ratings are in the game that we got agents trying to bribe us to make those players better in the game than they are which we always say no to, our research Network being the best in the world.
“And those things obviously have an influence out there and we’ve become part of the culture; that is not something we could turn around and say, ‘okay this year we're going to try and become part of football culture.”
“It's become part of that culture because of the game, because of the product that we make. In the same way as the data is started being used by football clubs because they realised it was really good, we didn't set out for that to be one of our reasons for existing, for football clubs using our data.
But when Andre Villas-Boas admitted, when he was Chelsea’s chief scout under Mourinho, that he was using the game to scout players. I was like, ‘Okay cool, we’ve kind of made it now that starts happening’, but it has never been a deliberate thing. We never set out to be the most influential game in the football world - but it has happened.”
Miles added: “I got a buzz out of sitting there watching the Tottenham Hotspur documentary on Amazon Prime and seeing that the laptop that’s being used on the training ground’s big screen had an FM logo on - I thought that was utterly hilarious.”
“When someone from Spurs got in touch with me the next week, I went, ‘look, none of your players or coaching staff are on the list to get the game for free, but you’ve got it in your training rooms, so if any of them do want it - just let me know and I’ll sort it out’.
All of that stuff is crazy, but it has just become part of our lives now. It’s all weird and strange, but it is also all beautiful because it reminds us that what we are doing is actually affecting people, and they like what we do which is always a nice thing to hear.”
Miles explained why he thinks the game has come to dominate so many people’s lives: “Because I think with the team in the studio, there is a clear vision of what we want to do and we've got a great team of people who believe in that vision and who want to take it forward.
It probably helps that the director of the game, being me, plays the game just as much as anybody else. There’s a lot of passion inside the studio with what we want to do. But it’s also a lot of the studio’s mantras that we have, of being the best value for money game on the planet.”
“We let people create their own stories. And we have a mantra about the suspension of disbelief, which is a video that people see when they start in the studio - it talks about the universe that we create in Football Manager in the same way as you talk about Star Wars or The Avengers universes.
It's constantly innovating, it’s constantly improving - never being comfortable with what we are achieving. That keeps us going really, it keeps us driven. Because until everyone gives you a hundred per cent ratings, until every single consumer who plays the game is happy until everyone is getting the maximum out of the game, then we haven't succeeded.”
What are his favourite aspects of the game?
“It’s like saying who my favourite member of my family is. So obviously I love all the games equally apart from the parts I let my assistant manager do. But without the data, we don't have a game. Without artificial intelligence, we don't have a game. And we've been making believable artificial intelligence since it was only part of sci-fi films.
“I think those are probably the two biggest driving forces to what we do and the success we have. But my favourite thing about what we do - it is a sum of the whole thing.”
Around 90% of people hate the job that they do. They do a job so they can afford to eat. We give them an escape from the world that they live in, we give them an escape into a fantasy world that they would much rather be living in. I think that's pretty powerful. The fact that we allow people to transport into their own world, isn't being dictated by us. That's what I'm probably most proud of.”
He said: “I want this game [FM21 is scheduled to be released in late November] to be as good as it possibly can be because 2020 has been a shitty year for everyone. We have a responsibility to ensure that we are providing an escape from that shit and I take that incredibly seriously.
So what it means to me is everything. It's afforded me the life that I get to live. It has afforded me the position that I am in and I will continue to give a hundred percent back to make it as good as it possibly can be. But I don’t have a job; I have a vocation. And that might sound really wanky - I’m very lucky with the fact that I have had two vocations, the music industry and FM.”
“But FM is the one that trumps all of that.”
Tony Jameson
Tony Jameson is a comedian who has a passionate attachment to Football Manager - he wrote and performed an acclaimed stand-up gig all about it, called, “Football Manager ruined my life.”
We spoke to Tony to uncover some wonderful stories, his opinions on the game and its power and more.
Tony told us how he got into FM
“I was very young, I was into video games when I was younger. When the first Football Manager came out it would have been over on the Omega, so way back in the day in 1992 or 1993. So I would have been about 12 or 13 when the game came out.
I was playing games, Sensible Soccer and things like that - and the Premier League had just been formed. It was very much my time, essentially. This just dropped in and me and a few guys at school, we all sat at the back of the class and wrote down formations and players who would sign - it was super simple and super addictive. Everyone thinks they can do a better job than the real manager can, so this game gives you the chance to do that or at least try it and here we are 20-odd years later, still doing it. There’s obviously something to it.
“It probably consumed about at least three years of my life!”
The last couple of years have been quieter, but I think now, it’s starting to ramp back up again. I actually get a little bit more time because I’m not driving up and down the country on tour, and I have much more free time now. All of my evenings are spent with me questioning myself, ‘I could watch the telly or have a game on this.’ It's had its claws in me from day one and I don’t think it’s ever going to let go, but I won’t stop enjoying it!”
He revealed how his gig originated:
“I had a save game with Blyth Spartans and I just tried it as a little five-minute routine, a bit of a sketch about winning the Champions League with them.”
“It was a strange thing to talk about on stage because you go to a comedy club and it’s couples, work-dos, office parties, birthday parties, stag-dos, hen-dos - they’re not there for Football Manager chat, but it kind-of worked, people were getting on board with it and then I ended up doing a couple of warmup gigs for Kevin Bridges and he’s a big Football Manager fan.”
And he was sort of saying, ‘look, there is a couple of guys in Glasgow writing a book, which was called ‘Football Manager stole my life’ and he told me to get in touch with them, mention the story, and he told me he was sure I’d get into the book if I did that. And I wrote that off and it did end up in the book, and by chance, I got an email from someone who was saying that Miles Jacobson was talking at a games conference in Newcastle - I was living in Newcastle at the time - and I was invited to come and meet him; I obviously said, ‘yes, this sounds fun’. And I turned up and I was asked by Miles about my comedy sketches, and I said, ‘I think I’m going to write a show’.
“To do gigs about Football Manager - it’s such a niche topic to do, I think there was a little bit of caution. My wife thought this might be a bad idea or it might be a really good idea and I wasn't so sure myself which way it was going to go over but let's have a go at it and it will be fun if nothing else. So we did a couple of warm-up shows and they sold out straight away. So I was like, ‘okay there may be a bit of interest’ and I sold my first gig - in Edinburgh - out, which for a first show was a big thing.
“We came back and Miles said that he wants me to do a show in London, he told me he’d get some Sports Interactive guys down there, get some guests and have a great time, we’d get some drinks, some food. And I thought it was a great idea - I turned up and there were around 300 people in the Camden Dingwalls. I remember before the show, we were chatting and Miles was like, ‘I’ve just realised we’ve not seen this show have we?’, and I was like, ‘nope.’ It would have been really awkward if he doesn’t like it.
But I went along and did it, it was very enjoyable, and everyone seemed to have a nice time. So I did ask him, ‘What’s the next step?’, and we somehow managed to start talking about a tour - I didn’t have an agent at the time, but I knew a guy who did, and he was sort of considering doing slightly more niche stuff.
“So I invited him along to watch the show in Hull - I remember it was the night Arsenal played Dortmund in the Champions League - it was absolutely lashing it down with rain.
There were like 7 people downstairs in this pub, and upstairs I had 80 people crammed in a room and the agent came to me before the show and he was like, ‘I don't know this show is good or not, but I'm already looking at the numbers and there's a lot of positives to take.’ And after the show, he got on board. We were chatting away and he told me that he liked the show and we wanted to do something with it.
“So then he spoke to a bunch of venues, and we went on tour. Which again was crazy because I was very unknown that the first part of the tour went really well then we got asked to come back and do more places and slightly bigger places and they just kept extending and then we went back to Edinburgh again to do a second half of the show and we came back in the tour day - the show was just getting longer and longer. It was really good fun ‘cause the audience got on board with it - it was their show just as much as it was my show.
Whenever we spoke to anyone we spoke about their saves, their achievements, what they look out for, their star players. It was just a chat. And it was great.”
Tony added: “We got into the book, which is good. I was also in the Football Manager documentary, I’m in that quite a lot. That was broadcasted in Vue Cinemas and all around the world. I am still, I believe to this day, the only comedian with a stand-up special on Steam.
So that's pretty cool. There’s something else which is pretty crazy - I'm in the game! So my name is in the database and my name turns up sometimes as a regen, it’s just completely random. In the Fantasy career draft, I’m definitely in that, I manage a team called the DC Presidents.
“When I talk in the show about going to a friend’s wedding and taking my laptop, that’s quite crazy. I got a bit bored during the wedding and I nipped back into my room, loaded the laptop up and did a bit more playing. I’ve also bought some shirts with regen names on the back.
“I’ve got a friend of mine called Johnny - one of his regen players was called Ivica Strok, he’s a Croatian guy who played for Celtic. He's got a Twitter feed just for the player - Johnny sent me a programme from Strok’s testimonial, and for my birthday I got a signed photo of Ivica Strok. It’s outstanding. He does quite a lot for the Mental Health charity CALM; it’s a great character and for a great cause.”
He said: “Comedy has kind of died in this Global pandemic, so there's no real stage to perform at anymore. So I turned my head to Football manager content creation. So I'm busy doing that putting stuff out on YouTube.
There's a football manager podcast I do now called Football Manager Therapy with myself and my friend Matt Richards so we’re kind of keeping our hands and it and trying to keep busy. I’m obviously still playing the game and counting down to FM21 and basically doing that with two small children running around the house. So yeah, that's pretty much the standard day.”
Tony continued: “FM means a lot to me. It’s the game I have played every single year. Currently, in the way the world is, it's a nice bit of escapism from all the problems. You can just take your head somewhere else and go and play for a few hours and retune yourself and recalibrate. It allows for a bit of exploration - it’s great now off the back of this game, I’ve gone and done various stand-up shows that I would have never had the opportunity of doing without FM.
I’ve gigged in different places, I’ve met so many different people that I would have never met otherwise, I’ve been in a film, I’ve now started this content creation stuff which is weird because I’ve done that and I’ve got a few messages from big content creators who have said to me jokily, ‘you’re coming onto our turf now, are you?’. But we are the FM community and it is special.
“You can go pretty much anywhere and mention Football Manager, and you’re talking to people straight away and they’ve got their own stories, you’ve got your own stories, you can talk about players, you can talk about teams, experiences; and I just think it is great. I genuinely think this game has got such a massive appeal - football is the sport of the world - and this game is easily one of the most popular games ever created, and it has just given me some of the greatest opportunities.”
“It has worked out really nicely and I continue to do it and I’m looking forward to the next thing that happens off the back of it. I still don’t know where it’ll end, I still don’t think we’re anywhere near the end; I thought it had ended a couple of years ago, when I stopped really doing the show but people were still buying DVDs in the background. For that, I can only still be grateful that people have kept an interest. I don’t know how people find the show!”
Tony said: “It’s also immensely powerful. You can look at the fact that FM is used in the football world now, I think that says a lot, for its validity, I think that if managers are trusting it as a source for scouting or player recruitment or even opposition analysis, using it to try and get a little bit of info, I think it’s great. It certainly means the data is very good quality, I don’t think clubs would use it if it wasn’t. I think it is great that it is part of football culture now. It isn’t just a video game. It’s part of football as we know it.
“Did FM ruin my life? FM probably ruined my enjoyment of football, that’s the way I think about it. My opinion changes on this all the time. I think the title of the show came and it is a great title; I don’t think it has ruined my life. Every year it allowed me to do some stuff I couldn’t do before - without FM I wouldn’t have gone to the LMA awards, I wouldn’t have met the guys at SI. I think it hasn’t ruined my life. I think it has changed my life, it has the power to do this.
“I’m an enthusiast that can’t stop playing.”
Andre Pavlovic - “Football Manager landed me a job in football”
Andrej Pavlovic showed professional Serbian side, FK Bezanija his impressive FM achievements and they amazingly offered him a job. He is now a data analyst at the club.
We discussed his story, FM’s influence on his life and more.
Andrej said: “When I was a kid, I started playing football games, and all my mates were playing FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer or winning eleven and things like that. But I stumbled upon a game called Championship Manager - it was the early version of Football Manager.
I stumbled upon this early version of football manager and to be honest, I fell in love with it. It was kind of hard. It was much harder than FIFA, or anything like it. Everybody else was playing those easy games as I would like to call it, but I fell in love with Football Manager because it was more challenging, and that is why I started to play then and continue to play now.
“When I play Football Manager, I take a lot of time to analyze the opponent, analyze their tactics and scouting players is also a big part of my job in real life, and FM.”
“There is an option to unmark those tasks, but I always like to leave the mark ticked so I can send my scouts and do the job. Maybe it'll be a little bit more realistic and based on that. I always analyze it even further to make the right signing for my Football Manager save. So when I compare it to real life, it's not that different but maybe those human interactions are something I can make up. I can make a parallel to compare with.”
He added: “To be honest. I became obsessed with FM. If I didn't get this job at Bezanija, I think I would have played probably a thousand more hours. When I got the job, I stopped playing FM for a while. I took the time I had on my hands away. I was actually at the stadium doing bits and doing the things I can help the club with in real life.
At one time. I was so obsessed, I was living with my brother at the time, we had some friends over, our mutual friends, and I spent the whole night just taking Bezanija from the second division to the Serbian Super League. I didn't have the courage to save at that point and continue later. So, you have our friends here, sitting, drinking, talking.
And you have me two meters from them just playing Football Manager. So yeah, I was kind of obsessed.
“It was kind of a punt when I sent my achievements to Bezanija. I was just finishing my FM save and I thought to myself what would happen if I just wrote to them all of my achievements. And I wrote to their Facebook page and they wrote back - which was a surprise for me.
“They gave me a phone number and said that this is the number of our sports director, give him a call. I wasn’t brave enough to give him a call, I didn’t know if the man would call me crazy!”
“So I write to him, also, sending the same message, and 10 minutes later I get a call from him. I say hello. This is Andrej and he says, ‘I like you, and if you think if you have that knowledge, you should really help us.’ He told me he didn’t know much about games but that he liked my passion a lot. And also he said, ‘I see you know about the club so it would be great to have someone like you here at the game on Saturday. Maybe we can do data analysis and we see what we do from there.’
Of course, I said yes, I went to the game and I sent them a report. After that report, they were ecstatic and wanted me to stay, to volunteer - of course, I love football and it’s not about the money for me. I said, ‘yes, I would love to stay with you’. And the rest is history.
“It’s been pretty fun, being a data analyst. I try to take statistics and analysis out of everything I do. I like to go to websites to see deeper analysis and statistics with these games. Not just football, with most things I do, I like to keep a statistical track of everything.”
Andrej explained: “Football Manager is immersive. This game has details. I think it is because it’s all about getting to know yourself, your style and then making something unique from your tactics, your styles of play, your transfers. It's something that people can connect with. That's why I think Football Manager is something that is connecting so many people all over the world. So many people love this game.”
Football Manager clearly has the power to change people’s lives, even immersing itself into the world of football. But the growth of FM isn’t finished - this fantastical football universe will continue to provoke passion and love for the beautiful game, all through the screen of your computer.
Written by Charlie Rowan for The Sporting Blog.
