Should England go crashing out of Euro 2004, there will be no shortage of critics slating Sven Goran Eriksson’s selections and strategy. Of course, none of these armchair pundits will ever know if their tactical prowess would have led England to greater heights.
Well, not for real, anyway. But a small company from north London has developed a football management game that will give everyone who is better at controlling a computer mouse than a football the chance to lead England to glory.
And unlike the England football team, the company behind this new game has some good form; it designed Championship Manager, another management game that has sold 4.5 million copies globally.
“We wanted to develop a game that would give our users the chance to experience in great detail the trials and tribulations of international management,” Miles Jacobson, the managing director of Sports Interactive, the company behind Football Manager, says.
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“But if they don’t feel up to that, they can choose to manage any one of 3,500 club teams from 120 leagues around the world,” he says.
Sport Interactive decided to develop a new management game after their eight-year involvement with Eidos, the distributor of Championship Manager, came to an end earlier this year.
“When our relationship with Eidos ended, they retained control of the Championship Manager brand, which they had helped to develop, while we retained ownership of the statistics database and code, which we had developed,” Mr Jacobson says.
“We have used that database and code to develop our new game, and it will be bigger and better - not to mention easier to use than Championship Manager.”
The Sports Interactive database contains detailed information and performance attributes on thousands of players and clubs from around the world. A team of 2,500 researchers, all of whom are volunteers, constantly update the database. Mr Jacobson still does all the statistics for his own home club, first division Watford.
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The database is so comprehensive Sports Interactive often gets calls from football scouts and managers asking them if they can help in the search for a player. The company always obliges.
“It can do us no harm to be helpful to people in the game, besides, it gives us quite a buzz when a manager calls to ask for help.
“Sometimes though, we get calls from players who are unhappy with their ratings. They always seem to think their dribbling or passing skills are better than our researchers, who watch them week in a week out, tell us,” Mr Jacobson says.
It was this kind of influence that encouraged Sega to sign a five-year deal with Sports Interactive to distribute Football Manager. Although conceding it will be a challenge moving away from the Championship Manager brand, Mr Jacobson is confident of success.
“As a company we have a very loyal and very large following of fans. Our website gets 350,000 unique users a month. We will also have the marketing clout and global reach of Sega behind us,” he says.
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Sports Interactive’s large following and international success means the company rarely suffers the same problems other small businesses often face.
“We certainly don’t ever have any problem with recruitment and retention. In 11 and a half years, we have only ever had two staff leave. Every time we have a vacancy, we get between 500 and 1,000 applications.”
“We usually just advertise a vacancy on our website - the only time we have ever advertised in a computer magazine, the editor of that magazine applied for the job.”
The company has used its ability to attract talent to diversify into other sports management games. Looking towards the north American market, the company has ice hockey and baseball management games under development and the lead programmers for both were recruited through the website.
“A fan of Championship Manager in Finland was frustrated there was no ice hockey equivalent so he started trying to develop his own version. He kept approaching us for advice through the message boards on our website. We were happy to help, but eventually we thought that we might as well offer him a job and get the game developed in-house,” Mr Jacobson says.
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Although the ice hockey and baseball games are useful additions to Sports Interactive’s games portfolio, the company and Mr Jacobson’s first love is undoubtedly football.
Click here to visit Sport Interactive’s website