If you’re over the age of 30, the release of a new Football Manager game can invoke mixed feelings. Excitement, certainly. Who among us doesn’t want to draw the curtains, settle back on the sofa and spend all day rebuilding a virtual football club in our own image?
But there is trepidation, too. Because who among us can afford to spend all day rebuilding a virtual football club in our own image? We’re getting older. We may have a partner, we may have kids, we may have a real-life job as a middle manager in the audio department of an international sports media company. Would it not be wiser to… sigh… grow up and move on?
No, sir. It would not. And here’s why…
You can make your moments count
There’s no getting away from the fact your first day as a Football Manager is going to take… well… almost a day if you do absolutely everything. Sure, you can outsource and delegate and you don’t have to manage the under-18s and the under-21s along with the senior side, but even so, you’ll need at least three hours before you press continue for the first time. Two at a push.
GO DEEPER
FM 24: Your guide to starting a new game
But once you’ve done that, the game moves relatively quickly. You’re not going to finish a season in a night like the old days, but you can still power through a month of games in 60 to 90 minutes. You can grab a quarter of an hour, play a match and then save and exit. Pop in, pop out. There’s no hurry. Because…
You can believe in the project
The ability to transfer saved games between versions is everything to the older player. We are not students, we do not have six-hour gaps between lectures. The chances are that we’ll get five or six seasons out of a single save before August comes around and the whole enterprise starts to feel futile before the new release.
The knowledge that the next version doesn’t mean the end of your old save means there’s no pressure to repeatedly slap the continue button and rush through the season. No more will you mourn the loss of hundreds of hours of effort and frustration.
Somewhere on my hard drive, a squad of Newcastle United players sit silently, frozen in time, their Champions League winners’ medals cold against their chests. I weep for them, for they were my children. There is no reason now for others to share their fate.
It’s your world, after all
One long-standing frustration with Football Manager has been the discrepancy between the release date and the start date. You fire it up to rebuild, say, Southampton after their calamitous relegation, but you find a squad updated to the present day. The rebuild has already started, you’re just taking over someone else’s project. That’s not the same. If that sounds like something only a massive nerd would get upset about, it’s because I am one, so that’s how it comes out.
The new ‘Your World’ mode allows you to start the game in July 2023 with the squads as they were in July 2023. So if you believe — and please indulge me in this wild flight of fancy — that Chelsea could have spent their money better in the summer, you can roll the clock back and do it yourself. Do you think Jordan Henderson would, in retrospect and having had a bit of a think about things, now consider a supporting role at Liverpool? You can make that happen.
A word of warning though: don’t turn transfer budgets off for six months in this mode or you could find a squad that’s not fit for purpose with no option to strengthen.
Summon a set-piece wizard
Only a tiny percentage of Football Manager players ever used to impose a plan for every single variant of a set piece. This was palpable madness given the damage that a well-planned near-post corner could cause in previous versions, but it was understandable.
You could lose a lot of time painstakingly marking out your positions for a free kick with a good chance of a shot, then doing the same for a free kick with a poor chance of a shot, then for one out wide, then for one out wider. And then all of the above, but for your defenders. And that’s before you got to corners and throw-ins.
If you hated all of that, you were not alone. But it’s all gone now. Hire a set-piece coach, answer a handful of basic enquiries (to zonal or not to zonal, that is one of the questions) and that’s the last you’ll hear of it. Less time faffing, more time focusing on new signings.
Technically, this is research
As a football writer, many years ago, I was not above using Football Manager as a research tool. If you have a problem with that, I invite you to travel back in time to prepare for the 2008 European Championship with nothing to hand but a well-worn copy of World Soccer and a small collection of useful blogs.
The enterprising football freelancer clutched their copy of Football Manager 2008 like a drowning man clutches driftwood.
But even if you’re not a third-rate peripatetic scribbler trapped in a temporal loop, there are gains to be made. Football Manager may have held a patchy record when it came to predicting the next big thing (I still love you, Supat Rungratsamee), but it’s pretty good now.
This Warren Zaire-Emery lad that everyone’s suddenly banging on about? An obvious talent. I promoted him into my Paris Saint-Germain senior squad two years ago. Josko Gvardiol? He’s one of those Champions League winners, locked into eternal stasis on my old laptop.
There might be little financial gain in your advanced knowledge of developing talent, you might not get a commission out of it, but you can at least sound a lot smarter in the pub on transfer deadline day.
Oh, it’s all so awful
It is a universal law, as immutable as death and taxes, that everyone, no matter how old they are, thinks football was at its peak when they were 14 years old. Life was simple then, the sun always shone and we were all happy. It is the role, nay the duty, of every older person to claim the game is gone now.
But it’s true, the game is gone now. Football is dreadful, isn’t it? There’s too much money, the governing bodies are so rapacious that their solution to everything is just to make more competitions, your heroes will always let you down, the internet is on fire, everyone is furious and the VAR system, that awful toxic sludge that chokes our game, is punishment for us being so pathetic about referees for years.
But Football Manager is our safe space. We can freeze time in here. Sure, we’ll still have to put up with that new Champions League, but footballers don’t do terrible things here, you can switch off social media and VARs only cause a momentary delay in our world, it doesn’t ruin an evening’s entertainment. It’s just us, a fresh squad planner and a growing sense of serenity. Until such time that your opponents score a last-minute winner and you hurl your MacBook through a window.
Be mindful
If someone says they do Sudoku, we all think, “Ah, brain training, mindfulness, that’s very good.” If someone has a bonsai tree, we all think, “Very interesting, very calming, that’s nice.” But if you tell people you play Football Manager, they look at you as if you also collect locks of human hair.
It’s all a little unfair. Football Manager is simply our preferred relaxation technique. We tend our team like a tiny tree and it gently stretches our brain. It’s our happy place. It’s a respite from the swelling shouts of a world that’s going increasingly mad.
If you feel in the depth of your heart that it’s time to move on, then move on, my friend. This life is brief and full of hidden treasures, go forth and uncover them.
But if you’re moving on simply because of what other people think, then I implore you to defy your detractors. Stand proud. What is it to them what we do in the shadows? This is our way. This is what we are. We are Football Managers. Sort of. And that’s all we’ve ever wanted. You’re never too old for games.
2023-11-09 07:51:22
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