Football Manager is the game that blurs the lines between the fantasy and reality.
Developers Sports Interactive (SI) have spent the best part of three decades refining the experience to make as realistic as possible, adding new features and tweaks that make it the closest thing to soccer management that many of us will ever experience (Unless this columnist can count Jose Mourinho among its readership, of course).
The series has been hugely successful and spawned a dedicated following and a subculture that was celebrated in the book Football Manager Stole My Life. Its influence in the football world has been growing by the year.
Football Manager database
There are numerous instances of people blaming real-life players for the actions of their digital counterparts, the most famous of which must be former Everton and England full-back Michael Ball being disgruntled at having to sell himself in the game because his wage demands were too high.
Football Manager is not just the most realistic soccer management game available, it’s also the more realistic soccer simulator ever built. And both accolades depend on the legendary database assembled by volunteers and professional researchers around the globe.
The first Championship Manager didn’t even have player names, but Sports Interactive’s (SI) research operations have evolved from an amateurish combination of Rothman’s Football Year Books and fanzine surveys to an army of more than 1,000 providing information on soccer players around the globe.
By 2014 it contained 250 pieces of footballing, contractual and personal information for more than 550,000 players and staff.
FMdB Football Scout app
Now SI is offering a new mobile application that lets fans access parts of that database wherever they are, using an iPhone, iPad or Android device.
The FMdB Football Scout offers more than 50 data metrics on half a million players, including current rating (out of 100), potential ability (also out of 100), best position, preferred foot, strengths, weaknesses, career history and their biography.
It’s being pitched as a companion tool to inform viewers during the upcoming World Cup and beyond, to check out players their club is interested in signing in the transfer window. It’s also designed for fans who want to gain an advantage in fantasy football or to assess which players they’ve got in an Ultimate Team pack on the FIFA video game.
SI hopes to monetise the database with advertisements, although these can be removed – and additional data unlocked – with an in-app subscription.
Real life use
Suggestions that clubs should sign a player who is amazing in Football Manager are nothing new. But the fact is that managers have been consulting the database when researching potential signings, with some even contacting SI developers and researchers directly.
The game was able to identify the likes of Kaka, Neymar and Xabi Alonso long before they became household names, but early editions were notable for players who were world beaters in the game but their real careers never quite matched these expectations. Tonton Zola Moukoko, Mark Kerr and Cherno Samba were celebrated by the community, but arguably the most infamous incident was an entirely fictitious high-rated player called To Madeira, added by a rogue Portuguese researcher.
Any mistake genuinely annoyed studio director Miles Jacobsen, and there’s no doubting that the ever-increasing professional approach to the database means such incidents are unlikely to ever occur again.
But back in 2014, this relationship was formalized with a partnership between SI and ProZone that saw the database included in its Recruiter tool – an online analysis platform used by major soccer clubs to identify talent using data analysis tools and archived video footage. ProZone was bought by U.S. firm STATS in 2015.
“For years we’ve heard stories of real-life managers and scouts using our data to help with the recruitment process,” said Jacobsen at the time of the announcement. “From now on, it’s official…real managers around the world will be finding and comparing players using data and a search system that will be very familiar to players of Football Manager.”
The use of the database beyond the confines of a soccer management simulator is evidence that it is becoming a product itself, one that could be used to power any number of sports-related applications should they be able to strike a deal with SI.
“We no longer see ourselves as a video game company but as a [soccer] company,” added Jacobsen at an event at the Apple Store on Regent Street in 2014.
Football Manager was once a piece of art that aimed to imitate life, but now it’s a case of life imitating art.
