Football Manager: Just One More Game…

Football Manager has been a global phenomenon for almost thirty years. Capturing the imagination of millions as they live out their coaching dreams from behind a computer screen. My first interaction with the series was the 97/98 edition back in the Championship Manager days, and I can still remember taking my Juventus side to the Serie A title with players such as Filippo Inzaghi and Alessandro Del Piero banging in the goals.

There’s no shortage of wonderful and quirky stories from this much beloved game, tales of people putting on a suit for their digital cup final or coaching a regen to surpass the records of Cristiano Ronaldo. My story is one of obsession and dare I say it, addiction, it’s how a simulation nearly took over my life and how I barely escaped with my job and my girlfriend still intact.

I have a bit of what you might call an addictive personality, ever since I was a kid, I couldn’t just follow the latest trend, I became obsessed. It was a trend that followed me into adulthood as I went through obsessive phases of whatever hobby I adopted at that time. Hit with pangs of nostalgia I decided to pick up Football Manager 2011. I’ve always been a fan of in-game editing and I ended up adding my childhood five-a-side team onto the game, creating my old school friends and I as fresh faced 17-year-olds with heavily elevated stats and potential. The aim was to take us on a journey from non-league minnows to Champions League glory.

What started as harmless fun quickly escalated and the drive to play became more and more prominent. A few hours at the weekend was no longer enough, I couldn’t get the game out of my head and often daydreamed about my team throughout the day. The warning signs were there, I was not paying attention in staff meetings at work and instead of notes about the topic at hand, my diary was filled with tactics, line ups and potential signings. I thought about it when I went to sleep at night and would plan my next steps in advance, I was twenty-seven years old.

Could I plan my everyday life like that, and apply that dedication to household chores and organising my life in general? Absolutely not, but with FM it was all meticulous.

As my obsession started to get worse my partner started voicing her concerns. I ignored them, partly angry that she suggested I had a problem that I couldn’t handle…a problem with video games of all things. I wasn’t even playing that often and who was she to judge what I did in my spare time? I didn’t moan at her binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy for hours on end, so what was wrong with FM? My defensiveness was a tell-tale sign.

To avoid further confrontation, I started playing on the sly, waking up early for a few cheeky games before work whilst my other half was still asleep in bed. Quickly saving them game and shoving the laptop under the sofa as soon as I heard movement upstairs, terrified of being caught in the act as if I had some kind of sordid hobby. The more I played, the further down the rabbit hole I descended. When my partner arrived home from work I’d lie and pretend that I’d only just arrived home myself, the truth was that I had finished early and rushed home to squeeze more games in, shutting everything down as I heard the car pull up. It was like I was having an affair, but instead of another woman it was with a glorified spreadsheet.

I’d book days off work and just spend six or seven hours straight on the game, cheering on the digital versions of my friends as we progressed through the leagues. The more I got into the game the more the lines of reality started to blur. When I bumped into old friends, they’d often ask who out of the old gang I’d kept in touch with, I could swear I’d seen them just the other day…only to realise it was on the game and not in real life. I even remember telling them stories of their careers and questioning them on some of their dubious performances, like they actually were somehow responsible.

I was addicted, uttering to myself those fateful words “just one more game”. I needed to see how the story would play out and how my career (and those of my friends) would develop. I played until my fictional counterpart not only retired as a footballer, but then retired as a manager. In game, I started in August 2010, by the time I removed myself from that world it was 2042 with next to no ‘real’ players remaining in the game (but then again real fans will tell you that re-gens* are the true highlight of Football Manager).

*For the uninitiated, when a ‘real’ player retires a new regenerated (re-gen) player is born to replace them, with a randomised name and completely unique to your game.

I won everything there is to be won on that game, but I kept on playing. I took my team so far that the club built a new stadium and named it in my honour, which meant more to me that I’d like to admit and is arguably my greatest gaming achievement. I also unlocked the little known Easter egg and had an in-game ‘son’ named Roger and of course I used nepotism to call him up for the England squad.

My total game time was just over one thousand hours, that’s over 42 days of my actual life that I spent playing this game. I was having fun and I enjoyed every minute of it, so there’s nothing to be ashamed of there, but it was the way I hid it like an addiction and how it became my priority over my job and even spending time with my friends and family. When I found myself with free time, Football Manager was the very top of my priority list. It goes to show how a game can really get its teeth into you.

I never saw my addiction as a problem, I was just enjoying playing a game like most of the nation and I got angry when people suggested otherwise. Football Manager is a simulation and it’s very easy to see how people get sucked into that world. I know I’m not alone; I’ve read multiple stories that mirror my own and reading the book Football Manager Stole My Life by Iain Macintosh made me realise that it wasn’t just me.

There are people who get so into the game that they actually believe they could do the job for real, I’ve heard reports of youth team players being messaged on Twitter, with people offering them advice on their playing styles, simply because they applied them successfully to their digital counterparts. I was once watching a documentary on the BBC about a man with a porn addiction, the last few paragraphs I have written describe exactly how he was. Rushing home from work, taking days off and hiding his laptop, albeit for very different reasons. As I watched it, I couldn’t believe that I followed the same pattern. I had an addiction, to a fictional club and fictional representations of friends I no longer see. To this day I’m not sure whether my addiction was actually more embarrassing than his.

Watching that documentary gave me a much-needed kick up the arse, to re-evaluate my hobby. There’s nothing wrong with getting immersed in a great game and to use it as a form of escapism but when it starts to negatively affect your day-to-day life, then it’s time to take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror.

So, I went cold turkey and took a full year sabbatical. I knew that was the only way I could move on as simply cutting down my hours wouldn’t be enough. I missed my little fictional world and eventually did return, but this time I severely limited my game time to just a couple of hours a month and successfully managed to enjoy the game in a responsible manner. I still loved the game, but that internal urge to play at any given moment was gone.

What happened to my beloved team, I hear you ask? Unfortunately, after about six months of ‘responsible’ gaming my laptop died and I lost my epic save and those 42 days of my life. I did have backups, but those were five in-game years out of date, and I just didn’t have the time nor effort to redo it all again. There was a time when I’d have been inconsolable, but my sabbatical allowed me to step away with just happy memories.

I’d be lying if I said don’t still reminisce about those players, those trophies and those regens I coached into world beaters. I can still reel off a list of names that you’ll never have heard of, and just how much they meant to me, almost six years later.

Millions of people manage to enjoy Football Manager without letting it take over their life. Was it my addictive personality? Or due my long-term belief I have undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder? Maybe, I simply just enjoyed the game a little too much. Whatever the reason, I think I need to step away from the in-game editor in future.

This piece is dedicated to Mario Torres, the greatest re-gen striker I ever had the privilege of managing, RIP ‘La Leyenda’…oh and also my long suffering wife (if she read this and realised just how bad I really was, would probably never speak to me again).