We hear stories of people using Opta stats to help them in their Football Manager games and we hear of it the other way round as well, with people discovering players on the game and coming to us to find out more. Eden Hazard was a case in point, we had lots of questions about him. It’s a well known phenomenon these days that future superstars will pop up on the game before they hit the mainstream.
It might sound daft, but I really believe that there’s a movement to get more in-depth coverage of sport. We’re at the head of it, with Football Manager, other media outlets and numerous bloggers, all driving stats and sophistication further into the national consciousness.
Of course, now I’ve got kids, my days of playing the full version are over. I play it on iPad now, where it’s more like the old game I obsessed about in my youth. Sometimes, too many stats can be a problem.
SKY’S
THE LIMIT
Andy Burton
Reporter, Sky News
ANDY BURTON is a touchline reporter for Sky Sports, and has found that the lines between reality and make-believe can sometimes go blurry.
I’m not into computer games, really. I think I stopped playing them when I gave up on Super Mario Kart and discovered girls. But my girlfriend bought Football Manager 2009 for me and she regretted it almost immediately. She mentioned it to her friends and they told her about people failing their degrees and losing their jobs, going completely off the rails. She started Googling it and found the story about it being cited in a divorce case. But by that point it was too late. I was in.
I do the Premier League, because that’s what I do with Sky. It’s too much for my brain to drop all the way down the levels, because I don’t know football inside-out down there. I’ve heard of people taking Vauxhall Motors to the Champions League. I’m not that deep into it, but where I know the subject matter, that’s where I like it. I’ve got a game going now with Tottenham and I’m 26 seasons in. Seriously. I’m so deep in that it’s 2036 in this game and I just won the quadruple. I haven’t bought the new one because I can’t bring myself to end this game.
When I used to do that transfer stuff on Sky, I must admit I have checked out a player to see what attributes they have. It’s like Eden Hazard, I’m sure everyone’s known about him for ages because he’s so good on the game. I’d rather look there first than Google. Sometimes though, the lines get blurred.
I signed Tal Ben Haim for Burnley from Portsmouth and I was really deep into the game when I was sent to Fratton Park to cover a game for Sky. I was stood in the tunnel, the players were walking in from the warm-up, and Ben Haim walked past me. I was confused. I didn’t know what was weird, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but as he walked past me, I suddenly said, “What are you doing here?” He looked at me as if I was mad. And then I realised it was because I had him in Football Manager and I’d just got used to him being my captain at Burnley. It was mental. For a moment I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
I’ve had other games where I’ll set myself challenges, where I’ll only sign players whose phone numbers I’ve got on my phone, or something like that. I know a lot of players, but that really exposed some flaws in my contact list that I then had to sort out. I went out for a few drinks with Steven Taylor recently and I was telling him about it. He’s got the iPad version, but I told him that’s not the same. I also told him that he’d been a bit of a p***k recently. “You what?” he said.
I told him I’d been trying to sign him for ages, but he kept holding out for more money. I got him in the end and I’m still giving him updates now on how well he’s getting on for me. I think he likes the ego boost. For them it must be weird, seeing how their lives could pan out.
If someone’s giving me a hard time in real life, or I’ve got an on-going annoyance with someone for shooting me down in an interview, and they’re struggling in my game, I’ll put the boot in, I’ll crank up the pressure and click the button that says ‘Well, that’s football. You’ve got to get results’.
It’s an incredible game, but it will never be able to reproduce the pressure the real-life managers are put under. I spoke to Alan Curbishley when he was in the running for the England job and he was saying, “If I get it, I’ll have to take my kids out of school”. A few bad results, a few tough games for these guys and the mood turns. And there’s some lunatics out there. Some of the stuff that Harry Redknapp and Arsene Wenger get, it’s horrible. In the last few years, football managers have become more hardened to the pressure and the abuse. That’s the one thing this game could never replicate.
FRINGE
PLAYER
Tony Jameson
Comedian, Newcastle
TONY JAMESON is a comedian based in Newcastle. He is writing a show based on his FM addiction that he plans to take to the 2013 Edinburgh Festival.
It’s only just dawned on me that I’ve spent 20 years of my life playing Football Manager. I’ve gone from days spent at school discussing the signing of Marc Collis and Ferah Orosco. I revelled in the unbridled joy of my beloved Aston Villa signing Nii Lamptey, only to discover that he never fully lived up to the hype that surrounding him on the game. I’ve seen players I’ve signed as youngsters on the game become the best players in the world in real life. A friend and I bought Urawa Reds shirts with ‘Ono’ on the back, after signing Shinji Ono in separate games. We even supported Japan in the 2004 World Cup, such was his influence on us.
I’ve also become so involved in the games, that in their current incarnation, I’ve walked into the kitchen at home to be confronted by my partner asking ‘what’s wrong with you, you look quite confused?’, only for me to reply, ‘I’m trying to think of what to say in this press conference that isn’t going to make me sound like a dick.’
I think it’s safe to say that Football Manager has definitely taken over my life.
My crowning achievement was my career game with Blyth Spartans. I’ve heard of people taking a club from the Blue Square to the Premier League title, and often wondered if I’d a) have the patience, b) the backing of the board, and c) the time to undertake such a challenge. Thankfully, doing stand-up comedy, free time is something I’m blessed with. I’ll often sit down to write a new routine, and more often than not find myself loading up my saved game after believing I can have ‘just one game and then get back to work.’ Suffice to say, I usually find myself playing the game all day at the expense of my material.
I eventually got Blyth Spartans into the Premier League. I celebrated the way any man would, by popping the champagne I had in my fridge, and then got told off by my partner as we were ‘saving that for a special occasion’ (we got engaged two weeks later and I still hadn’t replaced the champagne).
Every season we were improving until one season, we reached the FA Cup final. It was time to don my best suit and set sail (metaphorically) to Wembley. We won on penalties against Chelsea – my first major trophy. I felt the need to celebrate, so I booked myself onto a City Tour bus the next day to give myself an open-top bus ride of Newcastle to celebrate. I even took the laptop and a small trophy with me.
The following year, something just clicked with the playing squad, and I led the club to the Premier League title. The adulation of winning the title was easily the proudest moment of my life. I hadn’t realised the impact this would have on my career. When Steve McClaren got sacked by Nottingham Forest, my mate Jim announced on TV that I would be interested in applying for the job. I actually felt the need to tweet the show to ‘distance myself from these malicious rumours as I was more than happy at Croft Park’.
However, this wasn’t the only real life job I was linked with. At Christmas, Blyth Spartans sacked their manager, so I genuinely believed it was my destiny to step up to the plate and apply for the job.
The problem with this game, is that you lose all sense of reality playing it. Even still, I genuinely thought that given my achievements with Blyth Spartans that I’d at least be given an interview. Even if was always going to be a no,
I thought they’d see the funny side of it. They didn’t, and I received a fairly damning reply as to why I wasn’t suitable for the job. They cited my ‘lack of genuine experience’ as the main reason for not hiring me, and there was also a fairly lengthy rationale for not renaming the behind-the-goal stand, ‘The Tony Jameson Stand’.
I felt a little disappointed by their decision to not even interview me, but after an email conversation with the FA, I can confirm that ‘it is not possible to use Football Manager as a way of attaining accreditation of prior learning in order to obtain a recognised coaching badge’. Oh well. I guess it’s back to the drawing board for me.
This experience touched me in a way I never thought. So much so, that it’s even inspired me to write an Edinburgh Fringe show about it which I’m hoping to perform in 2013. Ha’way the Spartans! Here’s to another 20 years.
TALKING
TACTICS
Michael Cox
Creator of zonalmarking.net
An increased demand for tactical discourse enabled MICHAEL COX, the creator of zonalmarking.net, to move from blogger to professional football analyst. And Football Manager helped.
I think I first played one of the Football Manager games back in 1999. I’d been aware of them before, but we always had a crap computer, so it couldn’t support the data. It’s been a while now since I played it, but you can see how it’s influenced so much of modern media. The statistical data in the games, the attributes, the positioning, it was phenomenal. The way that everything was determined by numbers. If it is possible to collect statistics and data about absolutely everything, then you could probably recreate the game of football quite accurately and they get closer every year.
I think football fans are far more sophisticated now than they ever used to be. We’ve seen a growth in serious analysis of football recently, something I’ve been desperate to see for years. Cricket was about 10 years ahead of football in that respect. I always hoped that football would catch up, and it did so eventually, with things like The Guardian’s chalkboards.
There’s an increasing and widespread familiarity with foreign teams and leagues that has come, in part at least, from the success of these games. There are other factors, of course, such as improved coverage on television and internet streaming, but a lot of the tactical familiarity and the knowledge of names comes from Football Manager.
I’ve spoken to a few people who feel that the game is too complicated, but when I last played it, it looked fine. I liked the way that you could use sliders to set tactics, that you didn’t need FA coaching badges to organise your teams. I think it does football very well. It is, after all, a very simple game in some respects and very complex in others.
It does have its drawbacks. I do occasionally get feedback on my articles from people who base their opinions of real-life players on their Football Manager versions. That can be risky, even though the scouting on the games is very thorough and they do often get players bang on. Tactically, as well, you wonder how far it can go. People in football are always innovating, always searching for a new edge. Can you do that on this game or will it just look on unorthodox thinking unfavourably?
I can’t play it now. I always remember this Jack Dee joke about service stations and the sight of men taking a break from driving by playing arcade driving games. I think it would just be too sad to take a break from writing about football to playing it. Plus, there’s always the chance that it would pollute things, that I might get mixed up between the game and real life.
However, you still have to admire the fact that there is something out there appealing to real football fans. Too much gets directed to this ‘laddish’ ideal, there’s too much shallow stuff like Soccer AM out there. Football, when you think about it, really is quite a geeky pastime.
PYRAMID
OF POWER
Jonathan Wilson
Tactical Guru, Inverting The Pyramid
JONATHAN WILSON has been hailed as a tactical guru since the release of his seminal work Inverting The Pyramid and honed his skills on the older versions of the game.
I first discovered Football Manager back in the early 1980s. Yes, the original Kevin Toms version. I loved it, as I did so many of the games that followed it. The early Championship Manager games were extraordinarily addictive. Those games were what passed for a social life for me, back in the day. I actually did the stats for Sunderland in CM2, you know. That’s why Richard Ord is so massively overrated.
I wouldn’t say that the games got me into tactics. I’d been fascinated by that side of the game since I was very young. I’d pore over the Ladybird World Cup books and diligently prepare my Subbuteo team for battle with my father. I was always interested in football and how it worked, but those games certainly enhanced my understanding of tactics. They enabled me to experiment, rather more than you could with, say, Kick Off 2. You were forced to sit back and watch, you couldn’t take control with a joystick.
They also enabled me to live out fantasies. I’ve always been interested in Eastern European football and it was wonderful to be able to sign Krasimir Balakov for Sunderland, playing him in the hole behind Don Goodman and Phil Gray. I’m telling you, that would have worked in real life.
Quite apart from anything else, Football Manager has given people a new vocabulary. Now when you see someone saying that Manchester United need a new DMC, you know exactly what they mean. When they say Chelsea need an AM R/L, you know what they’re talking about. It’s a shorthand for a new generation of football fan.
In recent years, the intelligent football market has boomed. It started with Italia 90, then with Euro 96. You had books like Football Against The Enemy and Fever Pitch. Football Manager has been a huge part of that, and it’s led to the development of the intelligent football fan and the market they provide. Blizzard, my quarterly football magazine, exists thanks largely to a social development that Football Manager helped to facilitate. A lot of people say that they read Inverting the Pyramid and then experimented with the formations on the game. I love that. Someone was even doing a blog where he worked through a season going through all the formations, 1–2–7, to 2–3–5 to W-M and so on. Of course, it failed dramatically because the players you want for a 1–2–7 are quite different to the ones you need for 4–5–1, but it’s fascinating to see these kinds of experiments going on. Football Manager has given people more of an insight into the way that football works. If you play the game, you know that possession statistics are not everything. You know about weak spots, high defensive lines, offside traps. In a way, that’s helped.
There’s nothing better than writing something abstract and having people take the theory and put it into practice. When people tweet me and say that they’ve done that on the game, or even better, that they’ve done it with a Sunday league side, that’s incredibly gratifying. If playing Football Manager enables people to conceptualise some of the things I write about, well, that’s just fantastic.
SCREEN
SAVER
Peter Sleeman
Screenwriter
FM: The Movie? It might be closer than you think. PETER SLEEMAN wrote a screenplay based on the game and was soon fighting off bidders for his work as if it was Kennedy Bakircioglu and he was the manager of Hammarby in 2001.
I’m not actually an FM player, but it still managed to steal a fair chunk of my life.
I work in the computer game industry, but if I could do anything else, I’d be a writer and I used to always get told to ‘write what you know’. I would start scripts and then never finish them. This idea was probably triggered by an article on FM and the fact that my team, Plymouth Argyle, were rubbish at the time. I thought, ‘what would happen if a kid who was good at Football Manager ended up managing his local team?’
I worked on ideas about how it would start. The team is doing badly at the bottom of their league, getting thumped, and the chairman is looking around for new investment. The team is in effect, Plymouth – that is where they were at that poi
nt in the 1990s. Then I thought about things like the kid having to go to school and him discovering that it’s hard to deal with adults one-to-one when you are young.
I went from never having finished anything to a completed screenplay in four weeks. I entered it in a competition and I was invited to a producers’ course run by Screen South where a famous script consultant Christopher Vogler was positive about it. After that, I sold the script to a South African producer based in the United States – not for very much money. They renewed after a year but with so many options couldn’t get the finance together.
The company I worked for went in to administration, so I ended up starting my own publishing company for games and iPhone apps. I kept on writing in the background and I posted on Ink Tip (an online screenwriters’ forum) and responded to a lead looking for a script about football. I thought it was a shot to nothing, so I sent my script. A month later I got a call, from Wayne Godfrey, who runs a production company called The Fyzz: “You sent me your script and I love it!”. He was a reasonably successful producer, and had worked with Mackenzie Crook on Three and Out.
He was working with an American guy who had been looking for sports movies so we struck a deal but again, despite much interest initially – we even had it read by the likes of Dreamworks – nothing concrete has emerged.
Wayne and I are continuing to look for funding for it. It’s a story that everyone I have pitched it to understands in a moment. I am convinced one day it will get picked up and made. It’s “Bend it Like Beckham for gamers”, a classic story that a lot of people would want to watch.
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