making of: football manager

THE MAKING OF...

FOOTBALL MANAGER

152 CHRISTMAS 2011

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PCG 4, 70% PUBLISHER

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Sports InteractiveRELEASE

21 October

HOW A PROTOTYPE BUILT IN A BEDROOM BECAME ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PC GAME SERIES EVER. By Dan Griliopoulos

FOOTBALL MANAGER

PCG234.life_making.indd 152 11/7/11 2:04:19 PM

CHRISTMAS 2011 153

I t’s not unusual for a journalist to be stonewalled. Often, I go into an interview and the response to a handful of questions

is, “we’re not talking about that yet”. But never have I gone into an interview to be told that the interviewee simply can’t talk – until, that is, I asked Miles Jacobsen about the origins of Football Manager.

Miles, executive producer on the series and normally mouthier than a logorrhea-afflicted Cheshire Cat, is unable to answer anything about the company before 2005. The company’s origins, its history with Eidos, even the name of the game that made them famous – anything before the Sega buyout of Sports Interactive isn’t just taboo, it’s under an NDA. Every single member of the studio has signed a non-disclosure agreement that prevents them from discussing it.

Only one former Sports Interactive employee knows about this NDA and hasn’t signed it, because he left before he had to. If he had, I wouldn’t even know it existed. And if he had, he wouldn’t be talking to me.

Sports Interactive’s series is, to the educated fan’s eye, a holistic simulation of the football industry. To the uneducated eye, it’s a spreadsheet. But in the eyes of a games publisher, it creates pound signs. It’s one of those games that reliably lays golden eggs, year after year. So to talk about Football Manager’s origins is to talk about how Eidos raised that goose lovingly, then slew it.

Matt Woodley is my Deep Throat. He’s a former employee of Domark, Eidos, Sega and EA, and one of the men who discovered the Football Manager series. He tells me that he actually got his job at Domark by solving a puzzle hidden inside Eidos founder Ian Livingstone’s first game, 1985’s Eureka. What he doesn’t mention is that the prize was £25,000, and that he was 15 at the time.

Of course, Football Manager wasn’t called Football Manager back then; it wasn’t even called Championship Manager. That name was a creation of Domark’s branding team. The prototype was called European Champions, and Domark had another game called European Football Champs. The title was too similar to their own, and not similar enough to the market leader: Premier Manager.

The name of the gameLike many of these early games, European Champions was coded in a bedroom. This time the bedroom was in Liverpool, the year was 1992, and the coders were Oliver (“Ov”) and Paul Collyer. As Matt puts it, they were “self-taught, passionate about football, great big Everton fans. The match engine was done by Paul, and Ov did all the other stuff.”

European Champions arrived in a cheap jiffy bag. It first popped up in the Electronic Arts

offices, and was summarily rejected; “The Collyers still have the rejection letter framed in one of their houses... it’s a wonder [EA] let it get away, really.”

Then it arrived in the Domark offices. As was normal in those days – when a publisher consisted of one office packed with nerdy men – one lucky person opened it and booted it up.

“All the blokes were crowded around it,” says Matt. “We were playing it for the rest of that afternoon, and from then on for the rest of our lives, pretty much.”

“You know, in a games company, we get sent stuff all the time. But everyone was playing it.” In a break to get coffee, Matt popped his head around the bosses’ doors and told them about the game. “A gem has landed on our laps,” he said; they told the publishing director to sign it up immediately. Matt kept the original submission disc for nostalgia; he still has it around the house.

I ask Matt how he thought the game differentiated itself from Premier Manager and the other titles around at the time – after all, football management games had been around since at least 1982. “It’s just pure quality... the most important thing was the match engine. You make a change, it’s like you’re making a difference. People saw that you could have an effect, that it wasn’t all

random, which is what we felt a lot of the competition did. These games are very easy to make, but very hard to make well.” Having played Premier Manager 92, I remember well that sense of weightlessness and randomness; you ended up having more fun upgrading your stadium, because you couldn’t see any sign of cause and effect in your team changes.

There was also the commentary. Anyone raised on football commentary would recognise the generated phrasing of the game exactly, from radio and subtitles. “It was incredibly hypnotic and addictive... the text commentary was so pure and precise, but so brilliant from a coding perspective. So brilliantly paced, the way it would pause over certain things: ‘A cross, he heads powerfully into the net... and it’s disallowed!’ I’ve never, ever played another game where I’ve been stood behind the chair, pacing around the room, watching a bit of text on screen to see what the result is.” For the sequel, they even got Clive Tyldesley to do the commentary.

Killing the golden bootSo the newly christened Championship Manager took its place in the Domark stable, which then became the Eidos stable in 1995. And it would probably have stayed there, if some people hadn’t realised it was hugely profitable and tried to make it even more so.

Even Matt is coy about what happened. “From a business perspective, it was brilliant. You know you’ve got banked money coming in; every year you’ve got a gold star Triple A product that you can rely on. I don’t think they were ever even late on delivery. In video games, as a publisher, having something in your release schedule that you can rely on, year on year, is pretty amazing.”

Matt left Eidos just after Tomb Raider and, after more adventures in games publishing, ended up at Sega, just as Sports Interactive’s publishing agreement came up for renewal in 2003. “Eidos had massive ambitions, and I think they took Sports Interactive for granted. Not everyone there... but there were some people who didn’t make the most of it. For the developers, it came down to how much Eidos were backing it. Things got stale. The timing was right.”

So eventually Sports Interactive got out. Sega, having dumped their console ambitions with the Saturn, were trying to get into the PC sector and the Western market. They bought Creative Assembly for its tech, and bought Sports Interactive to balance against a Japanese console football game that they already owned.

“We agreed when we left Eidos that we wouldn’t mention the game that shall not be named,” says Miles, finally back on a topic he can talk about. Eidos retained ownership of the

“All the blokes crowded round it. We were playing it for the rest of that afternoon, and from then on for the rest of our lives”

Miles Jacobsen: keeping schtum.


154 CHRISTMAS 2011

Championship Manager name for future games, but nothing else.

Now Sports Interactive were in a curious competition with their former selves, with the series whose profile they’d carefully built up over ten years. The Championship Manager community consisted of a lot of casual gamers, so Sports Interactive couldn’t rely on them hearing that the team behind it were now continuing it under a new name. Especially not while Eidos themselves were now making their own version of the series and calling it Championship Manager. SI just had to make it the best that they could, and hope that Championship Manager would falter.

The first thing they did was get a new name. Or rather, an old one. The Football Manager series ran from 1982 to 1993, and was one of the first to be killed by the original Championship Manager. Miles acquired the name from the original designer, Kevin Toms. Matt remembers it fondly: “The first game I got for the Spectrum, just a classic. A little match engine. A great inspiration, that, to Oliver and Paul.”

What the new FM team had taken with them, which made it all so much easier, was their database. In most games that wouldn’t be significant, as many series would just rebuild the world from scratch each time. But this database had been iterated on since the first days of the Collyers.

Coding magicMatt’s convinced that the code at the heart of FM is the same as that in the original European Champions. “I swear there’s code in it now that was in the first one... there’s magic. Some things, from a coding perspective, just work. You don’t know how it does, but it does.”

Most game series change engine, once or twice, as it’s easier to rebuild from scratch than to upgrade every single component. Not Football Manager. What you see when you boot the latest iteration up may have changed totally, but the back-end traces its lineage direct from the first game.

It’s also unique in other ways. It has the largest database in football. “We’ve got more scouts around the world than any club does,” says Miles. “We have a deal with Everton whereby they use our database as part of their scouting network; lots of other clubs do it unofficially as well.”

If you’re a football obsessive and you want to simulate the footballing world perfectly, it can be difficult deciding where to stop, as Miles admits. “It’s not just down to players and stats, it’s down to longitude and latitude for every stadium in the world, weather data from every city, what the weather is likely to be in January, February etc. We go into those kinds of sad, anal detail because we are creating a world. As soon as someone hits the ‘continue’ button,

they’re in their own fantasy world; I think there’s a lot more RPG elements in FM than we’re given credit for.”

The database draws its input from all walks of life, from volunteer scouts in each country (Miles won’t be drawn on if they’re paid or not) to professional coaches, agents and managers. The scouts include football fans, but they have to go and watch live football. “Our scouts aren’t just looking at first teams, they’re looking at reserve, youth, low levels... one of our head researchers, off the back of his work in the game, is now chief scout at a Premier League club in his own country. We have players, footballers, who help... we have real life scouts who help, real life coaches.”

“Agents don’t help on the data, because otherwise they make their own players too good, but we do have them helping with the transfer and contracts system. Managers and

coaches help with the training system. Even the new team reports for 2012 came about from getting hold of a few clubs’ next opposition reports and turning them into an in-game feature. Much in the same way as Battlefield will have ex-soldiers working with them to try to make that as realistic as possible, but we’ve been doing it for 15 years.”

2005: A football odysseyMiles says the first release of Football Manager was essentially a new game. “While working on Football Manager 2005, we’d done CM 03/04 for Eidos, so it was really about sitting back and working out what our dream game was going to be.” So, it was their dream game? “No, it was the starting point for what will hopefully, eventually, be our dream game. The day we make that is the day I retire. With the pressure we put on ourselves as a dev team and our longer-term plans, I think a heart attack is more likely to come before the dream game.”

They must have been close, though. Because despite the marketing drive from Eidos, CM’s sales figures declined year on year, while FM just got stronger. I’ve heard it claimed that FM 2005 was the fifth-fastest selling PC game of all time, whilst Eidos’ competitor CM 5 was put back to the following year.

Matt doesn’t think the series has maxed out its audience yet. “I think there’s a lot of scope in the UK for FM to grow. It’s on the back page of every newspaper, every day. Today, it’s Arsène Wenger. It’s culturally relevant, which is where the iOS and tablet versions of the game come into play – it’s people who haven’t got four or five hours a night to play.” It’s also cited in a growing number of marriage breakdowns, as Matt admits: “I know people who genuinely have got divorced because of it.”

Most recently, CM 2010 was sold under a ‘pay-what-you-want’ promotion, which shifted lots of copies but made little money. Finally, this year, Square Enix (which acquired Eidos in 2009) decided to put the PC version of the Championship Manager series on hiatus, choosing to focus instead on iOS and online gambling versions.

But more than Championship Manager’s decline, it’s Football Manager’s success that’s heartening. It shows the game wasn’t just coasting on its past success: it lost all name recognition, and came back stronger than ever. It shows that gamers are still responding to the quality of the game, not just loyalty to a brand.

The sales figures only tell half the story, too. FM inspires the kind of obsession that few games can, and it shows in the stats. The latest version is consistently among the five most played games on Steam worldwide, and even the previous year’s is rarely out of the top ten. Impressive for any game, but for one with a mainly British audience, it’s a phenomenon.

GAMEOGRAPHY

Championship Manager (1992)Player names were randomly generated, only 80 teams were included and the match engine was extremely primitive.

CM 2 (1995)SVGA graphics, real player names and audio commentary from footie pundit Clive Tyldesley. Also, now with Scots.

FM 2005 (2004)Included a new match engine and a huge number of leagues. Banned in China for listing Tibet and Taiwan separately.

FM Live (2008)Ov Collyer’s dream game that fell apart, this was a persistent subscription MMO version of Football Manager.

FM 2009 (2008)With the leagues as near as complete as possible, including over 350,000 players, the game now included a 3D match engine.

FOOTBALL MANAGERTHE MAKING OF...

The database draws its input from volunteer scouts in each country, professional coaches, agents and managers

Paul and Ov Collyer wrote Championship Manager in their bedroom in 1992, then founded Sports Interactive five years later.


CHRISTMAS 2011 155

Football Manager Live was the sourceof much internal heartbreak for SI.

A 3D match engine was introduced into FM 2009.

In FM 2011, football agents made their first appearance.

Football Manager 2005: “The start point for our dream game.”

Championship Manager came fromhumble beginnings such as this.

With blogs, updated stats and full 3D capability, FM 2012 has come a long way.


making of: football manager

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