Day 44

Bradshaw's second report on Jean-José Cuenca suggests that he's a good player in his prime. It doesn't look like he's quite good enough to win a contract offer, but we'll see how he goes on trial.

Malik Rezgane is not as good as Cuenca or soon-to-be new signing Omar Koroma, but should still be considered as a potential get if we lose someone to injury or transfer. I popped him on my shortlist. My mind could be swayed if he does well on trial, but I doubt it—I think we've got enough strikers of a similar calibre.

Another quiet day, with tomorrow likely to be the same. Next match is in two days, against Wrexham.

A note from your editor

After 44 days, I can safely say that this experiment feels like a job. Every day I need to crank up the game and churn something out. I knew at the outset that there'd be boring days, and times when I'd have to force myself to go through with it, but days like this sap at my spirit. All I want to do is get to the next match; I'm looking forward to masterminding (or not) Lincoln's return to league football.

What's hardest, though, is not the personal issue of having to wait—it's incredibly hard to find something (anything) interesting to say on these quiet days. Football management, like any other job, has routines and important-yet-mundane tasks. Football Manager 2012 is a game, and, like most games, it tries to reduce the amount of "work" you have to do to the bare essentials of wish fulfilment—transfers, matches, and, if you want, basic control over training schedules and press dealings.

But it's also a simulation, and so it uses a realistic time scale—in this case, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, with each day divided into fifteen-minute chunks from 9am to midnight. You don't have to act in each of these chunks, of course, because that would be the height of tedium, but they're simulated.

So the result of playing a game that simulates—as opposed to, say, broadly approximates—the life of a football manager is one that distills each day down to its core component as seen through the lens of an outsider. The inconsequential moments—a funny thing someone says—and the chaotic elements—amazing goal in training, crazy weather forces change in training schedule, slashed tyres on your car—are left out because they are too difficult to simulate effectively in a game that will actually run on people's home computers and because they are, when you break it down, not important empirically to the task of football management.

What I really want, I guess, is a snapshot of the life of a football manager. But what I'm getting—and you are mostly reading, with added colour—is little more than a bunch of numbers and spreadsheets loosely connected by the narrative mechanisms of my in-game news feed and the visual representation of matches. Football Manager has always been mocked as a glorified spreadsheet; I think there's a lot of truth to that.

But I love it, and so do many others. And this experiment has not yet shown me why. Even in this one day at a time form, I'm enjoying myself (apart from the occasional slow day). Why? How am I able to read enough into these numbers and statistics to get a sense, however disjointed and incomplete, of life as a football manager?

I'll get back to you when I figure it out.