The Football Manager Games: For Business and Pleasure

The FIFA games might be the most popular football game series, but it doesn't have the most die-hard fans. That award, as prestigious as the Premier League Manager of the Season gong, goes to Football Manager. This game inspires levels of devotion among its fans that other games can only dream of. It's caused divorces, inspired countless pilgrimages to far-flung stadia, and given many players hundreds, if not thousands of hours of playtime. My partner often refers to FM as my second job, and it's true, I've put over 80 hours into the game in the last two weeks alone (here's hoping I don't wind up being part of the breakup stats). It's got serious staying power for other gamers too, consistently ranking among the most-played games on Steam, with 61,338 people playing it at the time of writing. The game counts professional footballers among its players, too, including Antoine Griezmann, Diogo Jota and Joe Lolley.

For players around the world of all races, genders, and creeds, Football Manager is so much more than 'just a game'. The level of detail that goes into each instalment is second to none. The English game, for instance, is represented down to the sixth tier, and fans have made their own databases that expand it far further. For each of these leagues, the developers research the stadia, the facilities, the youth teams, and, of course, the first team. They do this by hiring assistant researchers, devoted fans of both the game and their club, to scout these teams and find out everything there is to know about them. If you're a football nerd, there is no better bit of volunteering out there.

The meticulous level of detail that goes into the game has led to some people fulfilling the fantasy of players everywhere and actually landing a job based on their experience in FM!

An Azerbaijani man and avid Football Manager, er, manager, Vugar Huseynzade, was able to become manager of FC Baku at the tender age of 22. A Serbian man, Andrej Pavlovic, took FK Bežanija from the Serbian second tier to a Champions' League semi-final, and became a data analyst at the club! William Still, the assistant manager of Reims at the age of only 29, credits the series and its sort-of sister series Championship Manager as a huge source of inspiration that helped convince him to stop playing professional football and start managing, instead.

While the pipeline of FM player --> real life job at a football club is not so much well-worn as barely tread into the sod, it's heartening to see that clubs take the game's accuracy seriously. Another incredible example of this can be seen with the scouting feature. The game's ability to find suitable players for your squad from teams around the world has helped many players achieve greatness, including myself, signing a young and relatively untested Kasper Dolberg for my Arsenal side back in FM 2017, and making him a world-class player. The sheer breadth of the game's database led to Everton signing a deal with Sports Interactive back in 2008, allowing the club access to its database, which then contained over 370,000 players. Later, in 2014, a sports analysis company, Prozone, signed another deal with Sports Interactive, allowing them to use Data from FM in their Prozone Recruiter application.

While Football Manager isn't the only game that's been used in this way, with Nissan scouting skilled Gran Turismo drivers, it's one of the leading examples of games informing their real-world fields. In the future, how many football managers will have grown up on a steady diet of Football Manager instead of Subbuteo? How many pilots will have started on a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator? What will become of those that take their passion for engineering from Minecraft? The world of games is a fascinating field, and I can't wait to see where it's going to take its players.