Ben Ballance

Football Manager is a video game that allows players to take control of their favorite football teams. Widely lauded for its complexity, realism, and curious level of addictiveness, the game’s immersive quality lets participants engage in a highly individualized world of role playing. However, unlike other role playing computer games, it is not one that typically has players forming and behaving as part of a community but rather forming and molding an identity for themselves.

For the uninitiated, Football Manager allows users to take control, essentially as both manager and director of football (or what would be referred to in the US as General Manager), of a team of his or her choosing. It is then the job of the player to make the everyday decisions that go along with management: signing players, setting tactics, fining the team’s prima donna for skipping training etc. The club’s board would set expectations at the beginning of the season depending on the stature of the team and the monetary resources available. As in real life, it’s possible to lose your job very quickly if results fall short. Thankfully, the option to restart the game is always present. Do your job well and the board will reward you with an extended contract and the fans will adore you. The real rush, though, was being approached to manage one of the game’s big clubs: a Barcelona or Real Madrid.

The length and commitment to a particular game matched the players boredom level. Succeeding too much is as dull as losing all the time. Though I did meet one guy in college who played the game and had taken Blackburn Rovers to fifteen consecutive Premier Division titles and had several billion pounds in the bank.  In the novel Heart of Darkness, Colonel Kurtz creates an absurd world of his own deep in Africa. Cut off from the critical eye of his superiors, he molds a place as savage as he sees fit. Within a solo video game experience this too becomes possible. Sign an entire squad full of midfielders? Why not? (perhaps the Guardiola-led Barcelona teams of the late noughties were merely a football manager-based experiment.) Spend absurd amounts of money and sink a club into debt from which they will never recover? Absolutely!

My own experience with Football Manager began way back when the game was owned by Eidos and went under the name ‘Championship Manager’.  My school friends at the time were obsessed with the FIFA-line of games they played on their Playstations. Not having a family computer or games console of sufficient enough capabilities to handle the state-of-the-art graphics of the FIFA games, I was resigned, after many hours of anguish in a department store, to accept my father’s conciliatory offer to buy me an alternate football game I’d never heard of, ‘Championship Manager 96/97″ (a game so seemingly uncool that it referenced the entire season it corresponded with, rather than that single futuristic sounding  suffix- “FIFA 97” sounded absurdly cool and futuristic in 1996). The game’s box offered the ability to manage a team in either (!) the English league system or (new for the 96/97 update!!) the Italian leagues. Not being the debonair international student of the game I am today, the ability to become manager of Juventus held little interest to me, but I could always manage Chelsea with their seemingly endless squad of seasoned foreign stars.

So the game came home as a new part of the family and my dad and I started up a new game with him managing Liverpool and me: Chelsea (it should be noted that the Chelsea of the mid nineties were a much more likable crew of technically flamboyant players compared with today’s shower of cynical fakers and racists). I immediately fell in love with the game and would spend hours cajoling my dad into playing, even occasionally playing for him to speed things on a bit. The text-based simulation of real life events so plausible, so realistic as to defy the reality of a confluence of code and numerical databases. I would get nervous when an opposing team would launch an attack towards my goal. I would pretend to chew gum like Alex Ferguson throughout matches in the belief that this was the secret to any Premier League manager’s success. I agonized over transfer targets, losing my best players to free agency, and figuring out if there was any way possible I could sign Ronaldo (the original and best, not that underwear model dude). I swear I did manage to sign Ronaldo for an English team at one point as a high – priced free agent.

Any good video game provides an escape to its players, but this one seemed so real in its complexity and mundanity. Andy Cole wants a £300 goal bonus? Never!!
Seasons passed playing the game and I continued to be hooked. For a childhood, as with many, marked by sporadic and transient interest in things, hobbies, and dinosaurs, for some reason this game lasted. I got sucked into the endless cycle of season updates. With other sports video game, these convenient releases often provide little more than roster updated and perhaps one or two added features to keep the masses happy. Football Manager, particularly in the late 90’s and early 00’s, made leaps and bounds in its coding. Huge advances such as running multiple leagues at once and the 2d match engine (you could actually watch your players run around exactly as you’d ordered them to!) caused me to gasp out loud when meeting then for the first time. After I moved to America at the age of 12, the updated games became harder to come by. Relatives visiting from the UK would be politely asked to bring a copy of the latest version with them as a kind of right of passage.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that real life transfer fees have been inflated on the basis of a player’s standing or attributes within the game. Sports Interactive have signed at least one agreement with a club to provide access to their database of players. Whether this speaks to a shortcoming in the quantitative analysis of some teams, rather than the impressive depth of data gathered by SI, is debatable.The game, of course, has its limitations: the tactics screen has always been slightly cumbersome. It’s always been difficult to formulate a specific game plan against an opponent. Football Manager has frequently straddled the line between immersion and accessibility. As with any for profit effort, the developers must continue to attract new players as each season passes and older players fall away. I keep coming back though, as if there is more work to do, another team to take to the peak of the football world.

Before the days of dedicated blogs and fan websites which now contain databases full of valuable players and prospects, there was a unique thrill in finding a player, perhaps tucked away in Germanys second division, who would go on to score countless goals for your side and help drag them to the forefront of world football. These weren’t at to be shared with your friends or fellow players. They were secrets to be cherished and kept. In that very first game I started with my dad, he, managing Liverpool, signed Emil Kostadinov (in “real life” Kostadinov is perhaps best known for scoring the goal that sent Bulgaria to the 1994 World Cup at the expense of France). Kostadinov was one of the few players who had the aesthetically pleasing quality of being awarded playing attributes that were all in double digits. I would continually attempt to sign this player from my father, going through the ruse of shouting into the kitchen from the family computer “dad, looks like someone made you a great offer for Kostadinov!”. He never fell for this.

These past two months have been a little slow for me–primarily due to this daylight savings nonsense. Unable to be play the real thing outside, and coupled with the fact that January and February are clearly the worst months by far, I was sullen and unengaged. I came back to Football Manager, like calling up an old friend to grab a beer. It fills an afternoon with a non-challenging distraction, a way to whittle away the day without anything particularly taxing to care about. Some people choose to go to a spa to have their bodies pulverized by their very own hired sadist or “masseuse”. Instead, I retreat into the game, creating bizarre Marcelo Bielsa-like tactical arrangements full of high pressing and fast attacking. Much like the real Bielsa and the fictional Colonel Kurtz, I’ve never satisfactorily dominated the world with these tactical concerns, but my quest is still there, still available to be delved into at any time.