Why Football Manager Is the Best Management Game Out There

I am a huge soccer (or football, as we actually call it here in Europe) fan and ever since I was a kid I wished to be a... head coach. Kids my age usually wanted to become football players and see the glory, but I was attracted more by the other side of the game - the behind the scenes thing where you were allowed to mastermind victories and turn bad results into glorious wins. I wanted to become a football manager!

However, as live usually does with our dreams - I didn't do it. Usually, in order to become a football manager in the first place, you need to have played football at least as a semi-pro, but I totally sucked at playing the actual game. So, for years, I was sad because my dream was never going to become reality

I remember the day clearly now: it was a cold November day in 1998 when I traded CDs with one of my friends: I gave him my FIFA 99 CD and received a strange game, Championship Manager in return. Little did I know back then that it was the game that was going to change my life!

Championship Manager (now known as Football Manager) is that type of a game that few actually understand: it puts you in the shoes of an actual football team manager, in charge of everything related to the team's performance: you sign new players, you train them, you set up the tactics and bring in the best coaches, you grow players and turn them into super stars, you live a virtual life you never had... that of a REAL football manager. At least that was what I felt. And ever since then, every year I bought a new Football Manager game

Every year there are hundreds of changes and new additions a new Football Manager comes with: apparently incredible, having in mind that it's not too much a flawless game can change or improve, but always surprising. This year, for example, Football Manager 2012 has managed to bring in over 800 changes compared to the last year's version! And last year's version was similar in terms of quantity (and quality), and so was the year prior to that...

What started as a completely text-based football management simulation that only allowed you to play with a few teams from England, Scotland or Ireland is now a mammoth: hundreds of thousands of well researched players are in the database, thousands of teams are playable from all over the world, including all the national teams and the game boasts a really great 3D match engine that actually lets you see your players following your instructions and your tactics. It's a feeling like no other, no matter if you too wished to become a football manager or not.

And this also delivers great value to the buyer who simply purchases a new game every year just because all the changes and the improvements manage to turn the same old game (at its core) into a completely new and amazing experience. Football Manager!

But what makes Football Manager to stand out of the crowd is the realism level that always was the best compared to the competition and closest to the real thing than one could actually imagine!

This game really manages to make you feel that you are there, in the shoes of the real manager, feeling the smell of green grass and hearing the sound made by the boot hitting the ball. You get to love your team madly, even if you didn't know anything about it before taking the job. You start caring about your players, having favorite ones that you push forward, while others end on your blacklist and never want to see them again. You start to have rivalries with other managers and their teams, you start noting the results and hope to turn the odds - everything is so real that you risk considering yourself a real manager.

And it's not just me saying that, it's the huge Football Manager community out there, an amazing community dedicated to an amazing game: you can find them everywhere, writing about their stories as virtual managers, talking about their frustrations and joy, managing the same team from the lowest league to the top of Europe. These football manager stories are what can prove to everybody just how good this game actually is and how big of a commitment it can cause.

For example, in the blog below, the author is writing about his managerial career in Football Manager since 2009. Three years in which tears have been spilled, trophies lifted and tons of players were born and got to retire... in the virtual worlds of Football Manager.

With such an intense dedication from the fans and also the developers (Sports Interactive) who strive to bring a brand new game every year, without actually destroying the core elements, it's no surprise to know that Football Manager games are the best in the genre and are years ahead from the competition. And you can only understand that if you give the game a try - and if you do, don't hesitate to let me know what you think about it!