Day 20

Samba Kanouté put in a man of the match performance for Mali Under 20s in their final warm-up match before the Under 20 World Cup. I find this very encouraging.

The board announced that 1000 season tickets have been sold for the upcoming season. That's around one-tenth of the club's stadium capacity.

And that's pretty much all that happened today. I saw a cat climb a tree, and I nearly fell asleep at my desk. There, that's everything.

Living the dream. I'm living the dream. Gotta keep reminding myself.

A note from your editor

The thing about a video game simulating the life of a football manager is that it's rather a lot like the life of a football manager, only with the actual human interaction abstracted away. I don't know what a real football manager does on a slow day—he probably oversees training, even if this is not his usual style, and deals with the nitty gritty aspects of the business.

These things are simplified for the sake of a game, since most people don't want to engage in such tedium as reading and writing detailed financial reports or filling out routine paperwork. It's a game—they want to have fun. Football Manager 2012, more than any football management game before it, suffers from the challenge of increasing realism and detail for the hardcore fans (and to differentiate it from previous releases) while maintaining a fun, engaging, accessible game for those who want the wish fulfilment of leading a club to glory without the baggage that comes from an actual job. More on this later.