I don’t think I realised quite what I was getting myself into, and I certainly never thought I’d last a full season. Yet here I am, nearly 11 months after I started, signing off at last.
My greatest appreciation: Simulation is not the goal, but merely a by-product. The goal seems so obvious when you say it, yet you’d be forgiven for never having thought of it. You see, Football Manager—and every other game of its kind—exists to approximate the glories, successes, and failures of controlling a professional or semi-professional football team.
It’s not about simulating the life of a football manager, or the lives of his players, or even the beautiful game. These things all happen to some extent, in that all are imitated and modelled by the program, but they are neither the focus nor the core appeal.
Football Manager does not seek realism insofar as it strives for authenticity. Its internal logic and the drama that unfolds must be perceived to be occuring naturally, by way of the ideology within and the interplay of millions of variables. The inauthentic seems contrived, projected according to some external value system—whereby outside expectations determine behaviour.
The real is not always authentic, just as the authentic is not always real. But Football Manager depends upon you believing it to be so, for without authenticity it’s just a really sophisticated spreadsheet that purports to represent the complex interactions between real-world players, clubs, and leagues. With authenticity, however, it’s the best thing on the market for pretending you’re an insider of the world of professional football.
It resembles football in such a way that you feel like it could represent its approximated slice of reality. That’s all most of us need to buy in to the fantasy that we just signed Sergio Aguero for Weymouth FC. There’s no way Weymouth will be playing in the Champions League ten years from now, but Football Manager affords us this reality by mimicking just enough real-world economics that a crafty manager can guide his unknown team up through the leagues in record time with complete plausibility.
That is why we play—because the impossible becomes the plausible. That obscure Slovenian club you picked at random, just for kicks, can grow into the best team in the world. Mega-giants like Barcelona and Manchester United can inexplicably go from champions to relegation fodder in two seasons without a financial crisis. And a club other than Celtic or Rangers can actually win the Scottish Premier League.
The remainder of my closing remarks (yeah, I still have more to talk about) will be published in the ebook edition,
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