Why is football manager so popular

It’s video game week here at SB Nation, and if you’re not a gamer but intrigued by soccer-related video games, there may be a central dilemma: FIFA or Football Manager?

Those are the two biggest video games related to soccer out there (yes, I know there’s Pro Evolution Soccer, but I think I know all of one person who plays it), but if you haven’t been playing either for awhile, you may not know which one would be right for you.

Of course, you can play both if you want — it’s your life! Do what makes you feel happy! — but if you only have the bandwidth for one and you need help picking, here’s a guide to help you decide.

Summary

The FIFA series is a soccer simulation game. You play as a team in game situations, with abilities to play long-term “career mode,” basically play the plot of the Goal! movies through “The Journey,” and collect players in a league and play in a dynamic tournament through FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT).

FIFA is definitely the most popular soccer video game. Players themselves play it, people who aren’t really into soccer play it, it’s a real phenomenon.

Football Manager is also a soccer simulation game, but instead of focusing on playing as the players in a real sim, you play the manager and do the work. In a way, the point of the game is not the games, where you don’t control the players, but in managing, hence the title.

Football Manager is the game of choice for tactics nerds, obsessive fans and wannabe coaches. While it’s more niche than FIFA, Football Manager’s exhaustive database of players is strong enough that more than a few teams have literally used it to find real-life players to sign over the years.

FIFA20 is on PlayStation 4, XBOX One, Nintendo Switch, on PC via Windows, and the new Google Stadia platform. Since FIFA is commonly played online and the community aspect is so popular, PS4 is by far the most popular platform.

Football Manager 2020 is available on PC via Windows, on all computers through the Steam store, Android and Apple platforms, Nintendo Switch and Stadia. If you want the full experience, you need to play on a PC gaming rig (or any computer with enough gaming power), otherwise the Switch and Android and Apple mobile versions offer two different, less robust versions that don’t require as much RAM to play. Since every FM game is individual, you don’t interact directly with other players on your saves.

Skills

If you have patience, frankly both games are good for you. Football Manager is a game that requires patience — you can’t fly through a season in a setting, and depending on how involved you want to be in scouting and transfers as well as training, the day-to-day grind can be almost literal.

But FIFA has built out the components to go beyond simply playing the game engine in individual games, or playing other people through online play, with FUT and elaborate programs like Weekend League, where players are basically incentivized to grind Friday-Sunday to pick up rewards and bonuses.

On a very basic level, FIFA is played with a controller, usually. If you are comfortable with the sticks, you’ll take to FIFA faster. If you aren’t much of a console gamer, you’ll struggle to master the moves to actually play unless you put in the work.

In contrast, Football Manager is more of a world-building game. If you like games like Minecraft, it’s obviously more structured than that open world, but you can go at your own pace and within the confines of soccer, you can build or destroy your world to your own ends.

Hands down, FIFA is what the cool kids play. The age range of players is vast, but the demographic skews younger and again, it’s diverse: In addition to diehard fans and real-life players, there’s a generation of FIFA players who got into the sport through the game, or who aren’t really soccer fans in real life at all.

The Football Manager player skews to the nerds who embrace that mantle. This game embraces minutiae so much that every player is a huge fan of the sport already. But while many who don’t play Football Manager hear how it works and probably think it sounds like doing homework, if you get into it you can really enhance your understanding of the sport. Yes, there are weirdos who play Football Manager for a few years and arrogantly think they can actually coach pro teams in real life, but as an admitted nerd who plays the game almost daily, I do feel like FM helps me understand and appreciate soccer more in real life, too.

In conclusion...

...If you’re someone who likes building worlds, if you like the process of a soccer club and want to think about it even when the games aren’t going on, and if you have a nerd’s interest and like the long play, Football Manager is the game for you.

...but if you’re an experienced console gamer, you want the freedom to flip between playing random friendlies and doing big quests, and prefer the playing aspect in general over managing a team, while also playing other humans in the game, then FIFA is the game for you.

Hope this helps! Which game do you prefer? Let’s chat about it in the comments below.

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Football Manager, a game published by Sega, is the most underrated soccer video game that exists. In a world dominated by EA Sports' FIFA and Konami’s PES (soon to be eFootball), Football Manager is out there, offering a more complete soccer experience than these two games mentioned. Each year, the big soccer simulator adds extra features that are actually a great improvement from the previous editions.

The fact that it’s possible to be the manager of a great variety of teams in more than 117 leagues, speaks for itself. Football Manager doesn’t have a great number of licenses, with 29 leagues (and the Team Netherlands) being the total, but this is a game where licenses don’t really matter. They add logos and faces of players, but for the leagues that don’t have these features, for the most part, every information remains the same, including the most important feature: the names of the players. 

Football Manager, as the name suggests, is a game that is purely focused on being a manager of a team. Having this sole focus makes this “manager mode” the best, compared to FIFA and PES, which have been more focused on the field experience, controlling a player or a team. FIFA manager mode has had some improvements as time passed, but it’s still a very basic manager mode. PES has its famous “Master League”, which has a bit more depth than FIFA’s mode, but it’s very far off from offering a manager experience close to the one of Football Manager.

In this video game, in simple words, you can take control of a thousand things. There's a lot of small details in a soccer manager's life that you could take charge about, from choosing your medical staff to yelling at a player in the middle of a match that he needs to calm down. The amount of single options you can do or change is just amazing.

Football Manager also has an online mode, which is not what they are known for and not the best option to play. The online mode consists in drafting a team and playing matches with other people that did the same, choosing players and tactics from a wide list. The online experience is not as great as the offline mode, but is something to consider and maybe try.

Football Manager will soon be adding Women's teams, something that was expected to happen at some point.

In summary, this game is the best manager mode so far and each year has been improving greatly. Football Manager is available on PC, tablet, mobile, Nintendo Switch and XBOX. Unfortunately, it's not available for Playstation users yet, but at some point it may happen in the future. If you are a manager mode player in FIFA or PES, believe me, Football Manager will improve your manager simulation experience, a lot.

Until earlier this year, I worked in the media department at a top-tier professional football club. During a team flight to a European match a few years back, one of the squad's best players at the time was sitting in the row in front of me, playing Football Manager on his Nintendo Switch. The fact that a man in his 20s, a professional footballer who lives and breathes the sport, might be interested in Sports Interactive's hugely popular football management sim didn't surprise me. What did, however, was the fact that he was two seasons deep into a save file with a team he'd been heavily linked with during the most recent summer transfer window. 

It could have been a coincidence. He might simply have liked the team in question. He might even have had the save file running prior to the transfer speculation. Or, months earlier, perhaps he was reconsidering his future. Maybe he was keen to learn a little bit more about a potential prospective employer, and wanted to dig a little deeper into the club's players and staff than stats sites and social media would allow. 

I can't say either way, and neither can Nic Madden and CJ Ramson, the match producer and QA lead for match AI at Sports Interactive respectively. But real world players playing and investing in Football Manager? That's something both agree is commonplace. "We know that football players play Football Manager," says Madden.

It's cold in Newcastle

Perhaps the most exciting proof of this occurred earlier this year, when Barcelona forward Antoine Griezmann shared a clip (opens in new tab) aboard a France national team flight, announcing he'd led faltering English Premier League side Newcastle United to untold success. While showing off his laptop screen, Griezmann is seen shouting across the aisle to inform countryman and teammate Kylian Mbappe – one of the best, and thus most expensive, players in world football today – that he'd signed him for €134 million (£114 million / $155 million) from his current club, Paris-Saint Germain. A seemingly unphased Mbappe comments that, to his mind, the city of Newcastle has unfavourable weather. 

It's a silly exchange that has retrospectively sent the rumour mill wild, following the lucrative takeover of Newcastle United by a Saudi Arabian-financed consortium in October, in a deal said to have been worth around £300 million ($408 million). At the time of writing, the Tyneside outfit have not yet won a game in the 2021/22 English Premier League campaign, and yet are now the richest club in world football. In theory, the club could afford to buy Kylian Mbappe, Antoine Griezmann, and Frenchman Ousmane Dembele, who also features in Griezmann's in-flight video, in a single transfer window. It's possible, but it would cost Newcastle United a lot of money. 

"We've worked closely with a huge number of football clubs. We have had access to the managers themselves, and they've been able to look at our data which is something we've seen reported in the press," continues Madden. "This can influence their transfer targets and it's no fluke that some players who are really good Wonder Kids in Football Manager always seem to make a good big transfer a couple of years down the line. We're fortunate enough that we've got scouts all over the world that help make the game as realistic as it can be."

"In terms of players, Antoine Griezmann was on social media playing his Newcastle save – which is quite interesting now, given the takeover of Newcastle, and he's talking about having bought Mbappe. He's asking him if he wants to go to Newcastle and Mbappe is asking if it's cold there. So it's clear that players do play our games; we don't know fully how many do, but it wouldn't surprise me that there are professional players in the professional game that will look up particular clubs in the game. This is a good way for them to do it – who's in the team, how are they compared? If you're playing professional,you can easily see your own data. You can say: how am I rated versus how is someone else rated?"

"It's definitely something amongst the younger players as well, the ones that grew up playing Football Manager, or had access to it," adds Ramson. "Even if it's not looking at the players or teammates themselves, most people know about the Best Wonderkids in real world football through Football Manager. I remember being at a Barcelona game a few years ago, and Artur, the central midfielder who's now at Juventus, I'd found him in the game two years before that. I remember watching him thinking: This is mad! I signed him randomly for my Portsmouth team on FM18. And now he's here, at the Nou Camp, starting with Lionel Messi. Like Nick says, we get so many of the Wonderkids accurate, and that's down to the research team around the world. There's probably 20-30, maybe more, players who I've known through Football Manager." 

"Even Mbappe, that's a great example of the game reflecting reality. The season before he broke through at Monaco, that year when he had a run in the Champions League, our French researcher told me to look out for this player. I said, 'Who, Thomas Lemar? I know about him already.' And he said, 'No, in the youth team below him, a player named Kylian Mbappe.' This was the year before his real breakout year. So, Mbappe, one of the best players in the world now, is one I put down as a Football Manager Wonderkid success story – I knew about him in Football Manager before I'd seen him play in real life."

Dynamics and deadlines 

"Antoine Griezmann was on social media playing his Newcastle save – which is quite interesting now, given the takeover of Newcastle, and he's talking about having bought Mbappe. He's asking him if he wants to go to Newcastle and Mbappe is asking if it's cold there."

Nic Madden, Sports Interactive

For me, Football Manager's Dynamics System is the feature which mirrors real world football closest. Introduced in FM 2018, Dynamics is an RPG-like story-generator which forces virtual managers to consider the wellbeing of their squad both on and off the pitch. This means success is no longer solely hinged on winning football matches, but is also tied to keeping your team happy behind the scenes. In practice, a ‘Hierarchy’ structure ranks your players' influence within the dressing room – wherein social groupings are determined by things like nationality, time served at the club, seniority and age, among other factors. 

In real world football, it's probably no surprise that players from similar backgrounds form friendships; in the same way players settling into a new country, where, perhaps, English isn't their first language do so too. Social media offers voyeuristic insights into celebrity’s lives from afar, but even the players who choose to get photographed together upon winning silverware is a telling sign of off-pitch friendships; as is who they might sit besides on the team bus or the plane to a European match abroad.

For my money, the most sophisticated reality-reflecting feature the series has seen since the Dynamics System comes via this year's Transfer Deadline Day, which aims to capture the "unpredictability and immersion of the transfer window's climax". If ever I'm recommending Football Manager to non-FM players, I double down on its role-playing elements. Having lived and worked through a few Deadline Days on the media side of things at a top club, and having watched players come and go at the eleventh hour, I can attest: FM 2022 nails the mood, feeling, and logistics of the experience, with the perfect amount of RPG storytelling flair.

"We're really trying to heat up the moment of the deadline, have the clock ticking down, make you feel like you're in the experience – that, even if you feel like you've done your business in the summer, there's a chance you could get a player, or maybe agents are in your ear, or you're just trying to make a move on that last day," says Madden. "We're trying to create that panic, but also that immersion and it's really interesting. There's definitely a role-playing aspect about it." 

"We always just try and improve every year with things like the tactics revamp and the training revamp. They're all things that we've just tried to educate fans to help them create tactics, to create training systems, and give them that authentic experience. With Deadline Day, it's making it feel like that day should do – like you're watching it on the telly, or you're the manager just waiting by your phone."

Stats life 

"We've always had the stats in-game, we've just made them more accessible to players, easier to find, to read and to understand. I'm happy to see Football Manager at the forefront of that and keeping up with what the modern fan wants and consumes."

CJ Ramson, Sports Interactive

Another standout feature of Football Manager 2022 is its new Data Hub, which employs the same analytics systems used by top-flight professional teams in the real world. Everything from goals and assists, to key passes, duals and aerial challenges won, xG (expected goals) and a litany of other performance-related stats can now be easily tracked. Having interviewed countless professionals over the last few years, even the most old school of players are interested in their performance stats today, and in my experience, statistics drive the majority of younger stars in their development to becoming better players. 

Stats are of course a huge part of other football games such as FIFA, particularly its FUT offshoot, but while Football Manager strives to gamify the minutiae of modern football, FIFA's interpretation is more superficial, and is more a reflection of the broadcast – a Sky Sports, BT, ESPN, or whichever other network you follow, simulator of sorts.  

Ramson points out that Football Manager has always been driven by numbers, but as wider interest in stats has piqued in football – similar to how American sports fans have taken to stats over the last couple of decades – the onus on Sports Interactive has been to make the stats-tracking process more visible.  

"We've always had the stats in-game, we've just made them more accessible to players, easier to find, to read and to understand. It's something that I've always been into, I'd always go over the analytical data of my previous match and work out what's going wrong with my tactics, and I feel like this year's Data Hub makes it a lot more accessible,” Ramson adds. “I can't speak for all football fans, but I think a lot of modern supporters want to know why things are happening. It's no longer just about players being 'good goal scorers' or 'good penalty box players', but more about how many touches are they making in the opposition's area, or what's their expected goals."

"There are still people reluctant to fully embrace stats, but I think most fans recognise the value of data. Those people might not chase the data themselves, but are happy to be told it and are happy to see it in the likes of Football Manager. I'm happy to see Football Manager at the forefront of it and keeping up with what the modern fan wants and consumes." 

With the numbers side of the game more visible and accessible than ever in Football Manager today, naysayers may now scream 'glorified spreadsheet' louder than before. But if FM is about holding a mirror to real world football management, then its story-generating properties – not least Football Manager 2022's Transfer Deadline Day and Data Hub features – galvanise its place as the most sophisticated interpretation of the beautiful game – in video games, or any other medium for that matter. I say this with confidence, having lived on both sides of the training ground fence. The Nintendo Switch-playing player I mentioned before? He's since moved on to a different club, in a different country entirely. But I do wonder if he scoped them out on FM before he did. And I wonder if Mbappe will ever end up at Newcastle. Football Manager 2023 could be pretty interesting indeed.  

Looking to improve in the digital dugout? Check out the best Football Manager 2022 tactics to win matches and titles on your path to success.