How Football Manager Took Over My Life
It’s October the 31st, 2018, and on a rainy Halloween night at the Emirates Stadium in North London, the Gunners of Arsenal football club are in the 3rd minute of 2nd half stoppage time out of an allotted 4 against Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool side in a Carabao Cup match. On paper, neither side has any reason to care about this match, the Football Association Cup, European continental competition, and the Premier League all take precedence over a mostly meaningless tournament sponsored by an energy drink company. But pride is on the line here tonight. The Reds smashed Arsenal 3–1 in a match at Anfield just over a month ago, and currently sit atop the league table, but with Liverpool’s star right winger Sadio Mane injured, the Gunners are looking to get even.
Arsenal would do just that in the 2nd minute, as star striker Pierre-Emerick Aubemayang would open the scoring with a header off the corner from Henrikh Miktaryan. This was no surprise, Aubemayang had been a goal machine for Arsenal all season, firing off a hat trick in a 4–1 demolition of Tottenham Hotspur in the North London Derby and never looking back.
Virgil Van Dijk, Liverpool’s physically dominant defensive superstar, would equalize with a header of his own in the 57th minute, but since then both of these hi-octane attacks have fallen silent. The chances have been there but no one has been able to bury the deciding goal. Now, with less than a minute to play, it seems this classic will get a sequel in the form of a replay.
Arsenal’s midfield wunderkind Matteo Guendouzi, the teenaged French phenom, handles the ball on the right flank, and dumps it off to Ainsely Maitland-Niles, a 21 year old substitute brought on in the 61st minute in relief of the underperforming Welsh national team captain Aaron Ramsey. The few meaningful minutes Maitland-Niles has played this season have been as a kind of jack of all trades sub, a natural playmaking midfielder who can also slot in on defense and on the wings, but right here, with space to make a play and just seconds left on the clock, destiny is calling young Ainsley Maitland-Niles.
He hits a beautiful arcing ball forward, expertly placed for Aubemayang to get on his horse and chase it down, outrunning 3 Liverpool defenders in his mad pursuit. He’s got a chance to end all chances, a totally unobstructed shot at a goal. Every single person in the Emirates believes he’s about to put his foot through the ball and fire off a fierce attempt on goal, but instead he does what all great scorers do, he does something unexpected. He coaxes the Liverpool keeper to his left before, without ever breaking stride, he flicks a beautiful curling shot just out of reach of his desperate dive. Arsenal 2- Liverpool 1. Aubemayang keeps running, he pumps his fists in the air, he does a cartwheel, he spreads his arms out wide to welcome the cheers of an adoring public as sixty thousand people simultaneously lose their fucking minds.
This game never happened, but God, I love Football Manager.
Allow me to back up, a lot. I was studying abroad and it was a drizzly night in Edinburgh, Scotland. I had gotten fed up with my Crusader Kings II save as my various failsons and failnephews fought endless civil wars for the throne of Scotland and let the English and Norwegians pick us apart while we were vulnerable. Needing a change, I jumped onto the Steam store and found Football Manager 2019 on sale. I had been aware of the venerable management sim since high school thanks to a handful of articles in Vice Sports (RIP) I skimmed while bored in the computer lab. Despite wanting to pull my teeth out whenever I gaze too long at an Excel spreadsheet, I’m one of those freaks who enjoys games that are mostly just big spreadsheets to begin with. You already knew that as at the opening of this paragraph I was discussing Crusader Kings II.
I downloaded FM 19 on impulse and after fumbling through my first few hours with the game I had the good sense to go online and find a handful of tutorial videos explaining what exactly I was meant to do. For any newcomers to the series I highly recommend seeking out Aussie Villain’s channel on YouTube, his videos are long but his in depth tutorials on everything from match strategy to the transfer market are without equal in my mind. Armed with new knowledge I was prepared to begin my first proper campaign with Major League Soccer’s Philadelphia Union. This, I would later learn, was a mistake.
MLS Rules are obscenely, stupidly, complicated, but this is what you get when you try to graft American style rules onto a sport that’s never operated with them. Salary cap? Check. Draft? Check. Trades? Check. But these pale in comparison to the international player limit which allots you a paltry 8 men on your roster without the fortune to be born as red blooded Americans, and the designated player rule which allows you to spray non-salary cap applicable liquid cash out of a Super Soaker at aging European stars to be, as the incomparable Zlatan Ibrahimović put it “A Ferrari among Fiats” (he actually said that, in real life).
The designated player rule really sticks in my craw as it highlights the stark inequality of the league. The third highest scoring player on my squad (a Polish import, natch) was making the senior minimum salary of $60K a year. No wonder talented American prospects like Christian Pulisic, Josh Sargent, and Zack Steffen are fleeing to Europe in droves, you could make more per year as an entry level computer programmer than you currently can as a rookie in MLS.
The league is also functionally unfinished. None of the American semi-pro clubs included in the game even play a regular schedule so there’s no real point in loaning out prospects for any reason other than dodging the international player limit. You just have to pray your wonderkid will be ready for the big stage as a fresh-faced 16 year old. There are likely mods to fix this but I haven’t found them yet.
Football Manager is about more than just the on-field action, the social aspect of building and leading a team figures in heavily as well. At a glance you can see the pyramid of influence in your club, who’s a locker room leader, who has clout, who’s losing it. There’s even a feature to view the social groups of your team and look at which players hang out with which other players and get depressed when you see the guys at the bottom of the chart who sit alone at lunch.
The social aspect is really what gives life to the game, a player can become unhappy at any given time for a myriad of reasons. Maybe they’re on a run of bad form and you threw them under the bus in front of the media, maybe they’re alienated from this strange land and want to go home, maybe they just want more playing time, maybe they don’t want to be traded or sold and you disagree. Your team is more than just an overall rating, it’s a collection of personalities with ambitions, dreams and goals. They all want to achieve things in their careers, and if you can’t get them there then they’ll take their talents elsewhere. An unhappy player does not play up to his potential.
For example, take my current save where I’m managing Arsenal. At the beginning of the year I was blessed with a wealth of depth and talent in my defensive backfield, including my aging captain who was due back in a few weeks from an injury. As the captain became healthy and I began to rotate him back in to get him match sharp for the remainder of the season, one by one my other defenders came to me to voice similar complaints: they all wanted more playing time. Suddenly an asset to my team had become a problem to manage.
Like most grand strategy games, Football Manager doesn’t have a difficulty setting per se, it’s all about where you choose to start. Take command of a storied club with liquid gobs of cash and a youth academy churning out first-team ready prospects and you can likely cruise to a league title and beyond with the right system and a bit of luck. Manage a lower-tier club and your road to the top will likely be much longer. The ultimate test is to begin as an unsigned manager, working a journeyman career at any club that will have you. Setting your own goals is paramount to enjoying the game, and there’s always a bigger prize to capture. Won the league? Aim for the champions league or go back to back in domestic competition. Stay hungry, build a dynasty, there’s always more space in the trophy cabinet.
You’ll notice I haven’t discussed gameplay. There isn’t any, unless you consider navigating menus “gameplay.” You prepare for matches and then your AI team plays them out according to your gameplan. You’ll develop grudges against some players purely on the basis of their AI decision-making, lose some matches you should win, and pull off absurd upsets based on nothing but luck, it’s exhilarating. There’s no feeling I’ve experienced in gaming quite like watching the prospect you’ve nursed through the academy to the first team make an absurd play to score a late equalizer and thinking “this kid’s gonna be a star.” Having a really fun team in Football Manager is like having an intricately crafted model train set, the joy of it is in setting it up and watching it run.
Allow me to back up, again. I love sports, all of em. I consume the alphabet soup of American sports in proportions that would make Henry VIII blush, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, NCAA, UFC, you name it. I love the niche things most people miss as well, every time the Olympics rolls around you can find me in front of the television, riveted to anything and everything that isn’t the US National Basketball team blowing out a former Warsaw Pact member by forty. Despite this, like many Americans, I’ve never gotten into the most popular sport on the planet; soccer/football.
Yet again, I like the World Cup, and the pageantry and celebration of international brotherhood that comes with it. (Pay no attention to the various European countries fighting proxy wars in the form of 22 men with exquisite haircuts kicking a ball around, international brotherhood, go watch that Shakira video and feel good about yourself.) However, when league play rolls around for various topflight leagues in Europe I’ve never really tuned in. Maybe it’s having college football to watch at the same time, maybe it’s not knowing where exactly to watch but really the most likely explanation is that I simply don’t understand the game. I get the basics, kick the ball, put it in the net, you have 90 minutes and change to do so. But when the actual terminology of the sport crops up I’m completely lost. What exactly qualifies as offsides? What is gegenpressing? What is a ramdeuter? What the hell does tiki-taka mean and why are Barcelona so good at it?
Thanks to Football Manager I now know the answers to at least a few of these questions. I know what the positions are and what players are meant to do in those positions. I can understand what certain formations are and how the game is meant to flow through them. I won’t go so far as to say I understand the sport as a whole but I’ve certainly grown in my appreciation for it since I became addicted to Football Manager.
It’s an absurdly vast, absurdly moddable game, I’ve played 178 hours and barely scratched the surface. There’s a billion mods on FMScout and I want to try them all, it’s that good. Now if you excuse me I have to prep for playing Man United, Man City, and Liverpool within a week and a half, and there’s that North American Champions League Split with Atlanta to get ready for as well.
