Football Manager’s Impact Is Far-Reaching
Over the last decade, Football Manager has sold over eighteen million copes. In the last year alone, over 1 million people bought the game and of these people, 46 percent were still playing it in September. Even more impressive is the fact that of the people who bought the game in 2018, the average play time is a whopping 285 hours.
It’s safe to say that Football Manager has had a pretty big impact on the world of gaming, but it’s also impacted the world of professional soccer. Some players have scored jobs thanks to their Football Manager skills, and some professional clubs license Football Manager data instead of creating a database of their own.
“[In some situations a club will] see a video from a player and think, ‘Wow, they’re very good,'” said Sports Interactive head Miles Jacobson. “But, they live in Bolivia. They’ll call up and ask us, ‘What does your Bolivian researcher think?’ so they can decide to go and watch them or not. Some of them are doing due diligence on players, such as wanting injury histories. Some of them have the complete database and get it regularly updated and use it as part of their scouting system.”
“There’s certainly some managers who have a problem with the fact that supporters have more knowledge about football now than they did back then–whether that’s from our game, whether it’s from FIFA, or WhoScored, or any of the stat websites out there,” he added. “There was a point where you had a lot of old-school managers meeting new-school fans and the new-school fans were saying, ‘Why aren’t you looking at this player who plays in the Belarusian second division?’ They’d say, ‘How do you know that player?’ ‘Oh, he becomes brilliant in Football Manager.’ There are some people who see that as a negative.”