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The great history of the football manager sim
From dugouts to desktops, we trace the evolution of the football management sim with those involved.
When it comes to football, everyone's an expert. From loud-mouthed fans barking dubious nuggets of wisdom from the terraces, to armchair aficionados screaming at the the television, everyone thinks they know best and can do a better job than their team's manager.
That's been the case ever since the sport began, but it's only in the past 30 years that fans have been able to act on these proud boasts. Just as the medium of video games has enabled us to become a racing driver, top gun pilot, space marine and much more besides, it's also given budding coaches the chance to guide a football team to glory.
Back in the 1980s, British developer Kevin Toms – famous for his grinning, bearded face which would be emblazoned on the covers of his titles – created what is arguably the first truly great game of this type. 1982's Football Manager launched on a wide range of home computers, including the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro and Amstrad CPC, but it wasn't the first time that Toms had experimented with the idea.
When he was 10 years old Toms created a football management board game, and would iterate on the concept throughout his formative years until he eventually got his hands on the EACA Video Genie home computer, a clone of the popular Tandy TRS-80. Using this primitive system he created in BASIC what would become the precursor to his famous Football Manager series, as a text-based game initially.
Given the humble nature of the hardware he was working with, Toms faced a stern challenge when it came to faithfully replicating the whirlwind world of football management. "It was a ZX81 game first, then I added graphics [for match highlights] for the ZX Spectrum," he recalls. "Another important design part was that the match action was affected by your decisions, but it was never predictable. And within the limitations at the time the players were intelligent, deciding their actions during play."
A complete perfectionist, Toms would ruthlessly iterate every subsequent version. "I always rewrite from scratch each game," he explains. "Football Manager 2 broadened the range of what the players could do onto a full pitch. The World Cup edition took that further again. So more control, more range of activities, but still using a simple UI."
Toms' titles were incredibly convincing for the time, providing players with what appeared to be a living, breathing simulation of football management, packed with seemingly unique players, unpredictable action and an almost endless degree of replayability; you had to encourage your tea-sipping players at halftime, and even balance the books each week, something many football teams seem completely incapable of. However, Toms is adamant that his games were never built around endless reams of data and statistics. "How you process the data is important, but also how you design the data," he states. "I have never written statistical simulations – I write games, so making the gameplay enjoyable is all important to me."
Given the incredibly complex nature of modern management games, this revelation might come as a shock. However, Toms insists that he never wanted to make this titles too impenetrable. "My games were never heavy on stats," he says. "They have sufficient stats to give the player things to control, and make it interesting. Whether it is a barrier for other games, I don't know. It was always true that some players liked games with more stats than mine."
The Football Manager series would see two numbered sequels and the World Cup Edition – released to coincide with the Italia 1990 finals – but by the time the disappointing Football Manager 3 appeared in 1991 (the only entry not to benefit from Toms' involvement), the series didn't have the pitch all to itself. Rival franchises – most notably Dino Dini's Player Manager – had started to appear, and in 1992 came the game which would ultimately inherit Football Manager's title as the world's premier coaching simulation release: Championship Manager.
Created by siblings Paul and Oliver Collyer in their bedroom, the first game in the series may have featured crude visuals and fake player names, but by the time Championship Manager 2 rolled around in 1995, it was without a doubt the de facto management title on the market.
The Collyer brothers founded Sports Interactive in 1994 off the back of their success with Championship Manager, and from a very early stage would benefit from the assistance of a young Miles Jacobson – the man who is currently employed as the company's studio director and has the letters OBE (Order of the British Empire) after his name, thanks to his services to the UK video game industry.
Like so many gamers of his age, Jacobson cut his teeth on Toms' famous ZX Spectrum magnum opus. However, his love of music would lead to an initial career in that industry, culminating in a position in the A&R department of Food Records, where he worked with the likes of Fat Boy Slim and Blur. His work in this field ran concurrently with his initial involvement with Sports Interactive.
"I was actually an off-site tester – I didn't join full time until 2001, but had been working on the game since 1994," he explains. It might be surprising to learn that it's possible to start as a humble outside tester and work your way up to the position of the game's gaffer, but fan involvement has always been crucial to the success of the company's games.
"Any of our off-site testers and researchers are able to influence the game directly, as is anyone who posts on the wishlist thread on our forums," Jacobson says. "We've always listened to the people who play the game, whether they be involved in the sport or not, although I'm now lucky enough to get the final say on what does and doesn't go into it. But we do read and consider everything that is suggested."
Championship Manager 2010
© Eidos
Sports Interactive would release several sequels to Championship Manager before splitting with publisher Eidos Interactive in 2004, and joining forces with Sega to re-establish the Football Manager brand that Toms had created back in the '80s.
While the precise reason for the split has never been made public (Jacobson has only ever hinted that breakup was over issues of "control"), what each side took was significant. Eidos kept the user interface and the branding, while SI took the game's database and code.
The two titles took very different trajectories, with Eidos eventually abandoning the desktop version after Championship Manager 2010 and switching to mobiles. After a hiatus (and a takeover by Japanese publisher Square Enix) the series returned for iPhone and Android smartphones as Champ Man in 2013. The game is certainly a success by some metrics: Champ Man 15 has seen more than a million installs on Android alone, but it is free to play.
SI's Football Manager, on the other hand, has become a juggernaut. It can charge a healthy £7 for its mobile edition, and its PC editions sits firmly in the top five most played on Steam. It's sold more than 15 million copies across platforms to date, and topped the PC charts in the UK for 200 weeks. In other words, the game has come full circle, back to its original title. Is Toms bitter that the franchise is no longer under his control?
"I guess it would be good but it is not a concern," responds the programming veteran. "They bought the name from the company I sold to many years ago. It was not in my control. My focus is writing a game the way I like to design, not creating a brand. It's more personal for me than that."
For Sports Interactive, the name was perfect for its new venture. "Kevin sold his company many decades ago alongside all of his trademarks," explains Jacobson. "We bought the name from the eventual owner of the trademark, having gone through hundreds of other potential names. Football Manager was just the perfect name – it does what it says on the tin."
In the 30 years that have elapsed between the creation of the original Football Manager and Sport Interactive's development of the brand, the process of creating these games has changed almost beyond recognition. Firstly, the sheer volume of data – arguably the reason for Football Manager’s success over Championship Manager – involved is staggering.
"The huge amount of AI that we have to model in a human, rather than robotic way, is the biggest challenge," Jacobson explains. "This is used across the game in different ways, whether it be on the pitch, how players react to the press, you as the manager, training, holiday times and so on. There aren't many other games out there that have to deal with so many different possibilities of personalities of non-playable characters, let alone the level of detail that we go into."
However, one element that arguably hasn't changed is the amount of attention that is paid to the visuals. Toms' version of Football Manager was basic when it came to graphics, instead choosing to allow the on-screen text to do the talking. While Sports Interactive's update has since added in 3D visuals, which show the on-pitch action, it is still somewhat sparse when compared to the likes of dedicated sims like FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer. When you take into account how much importance is placed on appearance by today's gamers, surely Football Manager's lack of aesthetic glitz is off-putting for many prospective players?
"For some, maybe – but then those same people probably don't play mobile games due to their graphics, and only go and see blockbuster films," shrugs Jacobson. "The biggest barrier for us is that our games really do require a lot more brain power than button dexterity, and also require patience and a lot more time to play than many other games."
Indeed, Football Manager has become famous for attracting a worrying level of devotion and dedication from those who play it – it's been cited in dozens of divorce cases in the UK – with some going as far as to suggest that it borders on addiction. While many developers would see such behaviour as a sign of success, Jacobson is reluctant to back to this claim.
"I have a problem with that word, as it indicates a chemical imbalance caused by other chemicals, natural or not," he says. "We try to make our games compelling and good value for money. So if people spend a long time playing them and get good value for money out of them, then that's a very good thing as far as we're concerned."
Football Manager
© Sega / Sports Interactive
Addiction is one thing, but a more convincing advert for Football Manager's depth and brilliance are the reports that actual, real-life managers have used the game to scout for talent. Do they really? "Yes – some on record, like Alex McLeish, and dozens more off the record," confirms Jacobson. "Our data is now used by ProZone, who license it to clubs, and many top division clubs in Europe have taken up that option – we have the largest scouting network in football, with over 1,300 scouts around the world, so if people aren't using it as another reference tool then they're missing out."
Football Manager is one of the most popular PC gaming brands in the UK and each version manages to improve on the last in some meaningful way, which suggests that Sports Interactive has a long and prosperous future ahead of it. You might assume that the dominance of the series would dissuade veterans like Toms from trying their hand once again, but that isn't the case.
"There is a stack of scope for innovation," he says. "It's said that I invented the genre. Well, every game I write is different, and I am on my sixth football management game now with Football Team Coach for iOS [Which focuses on extremely simplistic graphics, and includes legendary players from previous decades], so I keep innovating. It's different again, designed specifically for mobile and the UI is easy to handle. I think people will find some things innovative in it. They will also find it very easy to learn and get into, but it is also built with a deliberately retro feel. The engine underneath is very subtle and I built it over a few years. It will be my style of design and I am counting on people finding it as gripping as previous games I have done."
As for Sports Interactive, staying ahead of the pack is of paramount importance, and Jacobson isn't about to reveal the tricks he and his studio have up their sleeves. "There are lots of other people out there making these kinds of games, so we're not about to start giving them our ideas early," he says.
"I wouldn't say we feel any more pressure than what we put on ourselves – we want to be able to continue making sports management games for as long as we can, partly because we want to play them ourselves and partly because it beats having to get a proper job!"
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