The Sports Desk – How Football Manager Impacts Real-Life Clubs & Discovered Lionel Messi!

We often think of simulation video games aping real-life for inspiration, but in the case of the lauded Football Manager sim-soccer series, it very much goes the other way. From real teams and players basing decisions on data from the video game franchise, to the series helping players crossover and get jobs in the sport, Football Manager has the distinction of being more than just a digital fantasy.

I talked with Miles Jacobson, the studio director at Football Manager developer Sports Interactive, who told me about the many ways the series is used in real-life.

When did you guys become aware that the game was being used by real clubs?
Miles Jacobson: The first time was actually a long, long time ago. It was before we were even Football Manager, when we were still using another brand name that I shall not mention because I'd get told off by lawyers when I do. There was a news article in a newspaper in the U.K. called the Evening Standard, which is a London-based evening newspaper. They did an interview with André Villas-Boas, who at the time was José Mourinho's chief scout. [Villas-Boas] now has become a very successful soccer manager in his own right. He said that he used our database for part of his scouting for Chelsea. We kind of had an inkling that people would be using it, because why wouldn't you? If you've got this great reference guide there. And you have to remember this is about probably 15 years ago, so this is before any of the current scouting systems were there. But if you have the availability of a database that has a load of players around the world, you may as well be using it. So, that was when we first heard that someone was using it, and I guess we worked with Everton probably about 10 year ago now when David Moyes was still their manager. We worked with their scouting network and actually gave them a copy of the full database rather than just what you see in-game, because there's a lot more data that we have in the core database than what we use in the game.

Now we are in a situation where people are paying us for it. We worked directly with a few clubs, and have a deal with a company that were called Prozone but are now part of Stats Inc. – the biggest provider of data for the sports industry (so they claim). [Stats Inc. is] an American firm who worked with loads and loads of different sports, and they are licensing our data to clubs around the world which is great – and a little bit odd – but still great. I even had a case just last week...we have a bunch of soccer players who beta test the game. We have around 1,500 of them around the world, because who better when you're trying to work on a real-life simulation then actually have the subject matters helping you test it? I'm sure the guys who work on Civilization at Firaxis, I'm sure that they wish they could get Genghis Khan beta testing their game. But we're lucky we're doing it in the real world. A soccer player got in touch with us last week and said, "My manager's just been watching over my shoulder me playing the game, and he's asked for a copy to be looking at our opposition next week." So I sorted him one out as well. It's quite strange and incredibly gratifying that the world we're trying to simulate is so heavily into the game as well, and think that it's realistic enough for them to be using it to help aid their work. It's become "life imitating art imitating life imitating art." But it helps us learn about things as well. I'm a supporter of a soccer club called Watford; we're in the Premier League. We're only a small club, but it's where I grew up, and we work quite closely with Watford on a lot of areas. Two of the staff roles that are in the game this year, the support scientist role and the data analyst role, they've been added because I get to spend a load of time in Watford's training ground, which is utterly incredible for somebody who has supported them his whole life.

You mentioned clubs and players who use the game. Can publicly say who?
It's difficult for us on that because we don't have commercial deals with any of them. If you see a soccer player tweeting about the game, they've probably had a free copy from us, because we watch for that kind of thing as well. There are some that talk about it. There's a player who was at Swansea the last couple of seasons, Bafétimbi Gomis, he's on loan at Marseille this season. He said that he decided to join Swansea because he played as them in Football Manager and realized that he was gonna get good service. And you hear that quite a lot. Ousmane Dembélé is another player who has come out and said in an interview, or certainly it was in the interview this week, that he uses the game to decide where he's gonna be playing. It's pretty universal. I think now that we've become part of the sport, and it's great that I'm talking to you guys today because I'm actually a big fan of your site. But it's also quite rare for us to talk to games websites. In Europe, we're in the sports section, not in the games section. Very recently, we've been in the news section because we've simulated the different possible outcomes for Brexit in the game. So just the other week I was on a BBC Two show called Daily Politics sitting there with two members of Parliament debating Brexit and football, so it's strange how these things have happened to us, but it's fantastic that we're recognized in that way and seen more now as a soccer brand than we are a gaming brand.

You've talked about clubs using the game in different ways. Can you talk a little more about how they use specific features? Are they using it to sim game results or predict the performance of specific players?
There's two ways the clubs tend to use it. The first and probably the main one is the data and the database itself, because we have them largest scouting network in soccer. We've got 1,300 scouts around the world in 51 countries and regions. So there was a very big deal made the other week when Man United decided to recruit 50 more scouts. I'm just sitting there going, "Oh what, are they adding a new league into their game?" We have the scouts that are on the ground and they are watching the first team, reserve team, and youth team players. That side of things is very important because when you're using things like Stats Inc. or Scout7 or Wyscout, they are only looking at teams already playing first-team soccer. Whereas we're always looking for those new young talents coming through. So, the bigger clubs are utilizing the database partly to look at those younger players and getting them on their radars so that they are sending scouts to come watch them at early stages, but they also use it for doing due diligence on signings.

It's very difficult to get information for a lot of clubs in Europe from South America, from Eastern Europe, from Central America as well. People don't have the networks there, so looking for the next Alexis Sánchez is an important thing for people to be doing. So again, agents are sending videos to clubs constantly. Every day you're getting hundreds, if not thousands, of videos being sent to you by agents. If you've got a quick reference guide to see whether that agent has actually only sent you a video of the five best touches that player has done in 25 years, or whether they really are consistent like that, go and have a look in our game database. And if you think you've seen something in the video and you think that in the game database it looks like they are good enough, then clubs will go and watch those players. So, it's part of the due diligence process that it gets used.

On the other side of things, you mentioned yourself about the predictions side of things, and that is something that people are doing more and more now, but it tends to be the data analysts of football clubs who are doing it. They will play the game, play the match that they have coming up that weekend, play it with loads of different formations, loads of different team selections and see which one comes out the best. And then that becomes part of the report that they are giving to the manager. The data analysts tend to love it because it means they get to sit there and play Football Manager for a few hours. Whether the manager takes notice of that, who knows? Only the manager can decide that, but I know that some of them do take it more seriously than others when people are doing those predictions.

On the other end of things, for your scouts, what kind of feedback are they getting from the clubs in terms of information that the clubs think are right or wrong?
Well, having 1,500 soccer players who beta tests us helps, because if we get one of their dates of birth wrong, we know about it pretty damn quickly. Although they seemed more obsessed about their height then they are their date of birth. And some of them are obsessed about their pace and will send you videos of them having races against other people in their squads, which are always very useful.

But we tend to keep the scouts separate, in most cases, to the clubs. So the clubs won't often know who our scouts are, who are watching the players. And we get lots of feedback from players and from clubs directly that the scouts themselves have very strict guidelines to work to. It's a book; it's about 200 A4 pages of guidelines. Then we have various checks and balances in-house as well that we do before things go out. But we have to be careful when we're getting feedback from the actual soccer clubs themselves, because they tend to be biased. The players tend to be biased toward their own skills. The agents are super biased, because all of their clients are the best clients in the world. So we tend to be very, very careful when we get that information back, and it really needs to be proven to us for us to change something in the database.

Have you ever thought about making a club-only or professional-only product that might have different tools or gives clubs access to features different than the public game?
Essentially, it's kind of there already, because that's the thing that we're doing with Stats Inc at the moment. That's a bit of recruitment software, called Recruiter, and gives people access to the information that they need. Some of the clubs that we work with, they utilize our database in a way that works for them. So they're keeping notes on lots of players, and our data and links to our data will be part of those notes. At the moment, our database is an offline solution; it's a giant, multi-gig Microsoft Access beast of a database, which is horrible. But in the next year, it should be going online. And once it is online, then that makes it a lot easier to actually share with clubs.

Do you guys have any examples of a particular player or a prediction that was surprisingly prescient, or maybe even gotten wrong?
Well, we're very proud of the fact that our strike rate on the data is around 99.5 percent, which is certainly better than most soccer clubs out there get. I think the most famous example of a player we got right was in the days before child protection law was prevalent, and we could have players who were under the age of 16 in the game. When he was 13, we introduced to the world a young kid called Lionel Messi, who as we all know has become the best player in the world – or if you're Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi has become the second-best player in the world. But, Alex McLeish, who is a soccer manager who's managed all over Europe, tells a story of when his son Jon came to him and said that he should be trying to sign this guy called Lionel Messi, and three years later Alex McLeish did try and sign Lionel Messi for Rangers in Scotland just after [Messi] made his first team debut for Barcelona and scored two goals. His son is now a very successful football agent, who probably uses our database to find his clients.

So he's probably the most famous. But every year, you know Anthony Martial...Manchester United could have saved a hell of a lot of money if they bought him when we first had him in the game, rather than spending the money they have on him. We told them they were crazy to let Paul Pogba go, but they still did back in the day. But there are some that we get wrong as well. I think the most famous one that we've got wrong was a guy called Tó Madeira, and the reason that we got that one wrong is because he didn't exist. One of our scouts had added one of his friends into the database for a laugh. That scout doesn't work with us anymore.

There are also players like Freddy Adu, Cherno Samba, Tonton Zola Moukoko who we predicted to be great players, as did a lot of other people, but for various reasons it didn't happen. In Tonton Zola Moukoko's case, it's actually quite sad, in that his mentor passed away when he was 19, and he couldn't cope mentally any more.

There certainly are hard-to-quantify aspects of players, but do you see with computing power and algorithms that maybe in a few years you guys nail down some of those?
I think we do part of the work, and the data and the pro-sports data providers do part of the work. There's a Holy Grail at the moment for a thing called "expected goals." So, a few data providers and a few bookmakers started looking at algorithms for expected goals, which is basically from any position on the field, and with any player, what is the likelihood that they're going to score when they have the ball in that zone. And the problem with that at the moment is there are about half a dozen different algorithms being used, and they are all utter nonsense. So the race is on to try and find one for that, because that will certainly help, tactically.

The other hard aspects are always the mental side of things, and whilst we can simulate that to a large degree, without having an actual, real mind in there, without having artificial intelligence squared, or whatever they decide to call it, because what we have at the moment inside the game is incredible artificial intelligence based on a bunch of numbers.

Going back to the clubs themselves. I was curious if they had any recommendations to you about features or things they wanted in to help them professionally?
Not necessarily to help them professionally apart from the expected goals thing, which they do keep cracking on about. Some of the clubs have asked for a specific predictions engine to make it easier for them which players are injured, and we have a tool like that internally in the studio because newspapers come to us and ask us to predict the games the next week. So things like that will happen. It's normally clubs wanting us to add things in the game to help, 1.) Their enjoyment of the game and 2.) So that they're in the game. Kit men at clubs – people who carry the kits around – they all want to be in the game. So, maybe they'll get into it at some point, but we'll only add them if we can see a positive or negative toward them being in there. We don't want NPCs being in the game unless they actually do have an effect. We already have a personal assistant who has no effect at all and you can't fire. From talking to a lot of soccer players, if you've got a good kit man, it tends to boost morale, believe it or not. So maybe we will add them at some point in the future.

We've been talking about how clubs use the product, but can you give us some examples of gamers using the game to get hired by the clubs themselves?
We've got people who have ended up as commercial director of a small team in Spain. One of our scouts has recently become a data analyst at Plymouth Argyle in the U.K. There are lots of public stories, but also lots of stories that aren't. One of our chief scouts through his work with us ended up also being a chief scout of a team in the Champions League, and does both roles. We have footballers at clubs who are scouts for us, and have had scouts for us who have become footballers. Most of the football journalists that are under the age of 35 in the U.K. have ended up having our game on their C.V. in some form, which is probably another reason why we end up getting so much coverage in the sports press because they're all fans of the game anyway. Any club that has a data analyst – if that data analyst hasn't been playing Football Manager for the last 15 years, there's something wrong with that. It has definitely been a game that has helped influence people's careers, and that's something we're incredibly proud of.

I spoke at a conference called Soccerex just the other week and had people coming up throughout the whole thing saying, "Thank you for making the game." Really powerful people in the football who became a lot more interested in the sport off the back of playing the game. It's those kinds of compliments that are really incredible, and keep you going a lot of the time. Because, it's not that easy working 14 hours a day, six days a week during a year, every year working on a series of games. To then have people critique it or to be active on Twitter and have people having a go at you there. It's not always easy, so having people that you admire, that you look up to, coming up to you and admitting that they got some of their knowledge from our work is quite incredible.

For another angle on the game, I highly suggest you read Anthony Kyne's (from HB Studios) guest Sports Desk column on his obsession with Football Manager.

Missed some of the previous Sports Desk entries? Take a look at the past installments via our Hub page by clicking on the banner below.

Have a suggestion or comment? Put it in the comments section below, send me an email, or reach me on twitter at @mattkato.

RELEASE LIST

Motorsport Manager (PC, Mac) November 10 (check out more about the game in this previous Sports Desk)
Steep (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC) December 2

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