Football Manager is the most realistic sports simulation video game out there. We all know that. But it’s not perfect.
A couple of months ago, I discussed some of the flawed logic that FM uses when it comes to transferring and developing players. For example, I talked about proven lower-league goal machines being ignored by AI clubs for years before retiring unemployed. I also discussed a born-and-bred Swedish player being transferred to a club in Guinea just because he also happened to have Guinean nationality.
This second installment is all about one of the most criticised aspects of FM – the media. Whether it’s over-investigative reporters, unimportant questions, or social media posts that even Grimes’ ex-boyfriend would find too inflammatory, there is a lot of weird ‘FM Logic’ to be found here.
THE HOST WITH THE MOST?
Let me set the scene. After working your socks off for a decade, you’ve taken a tiny Swedish clubs all the way up the leagues and into the qualifying rounds of the UEFA Conference League. You travel all the way to UEFA’s headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland for the draw, where you’re greeted by the dulcet tones of the Master of Ceremonies…
…er, John McGinn?
Since Football Manager 2023, some of the major tournaments use a ‘live draw’, which is presented as if you were watching it live on TV or in person. While this is intended to add some immersion to proceedings, the outcome actually takes away from it.
FM’s logic for choosing the ‘Ceremony Host’ for each draw is pretty transparent. It will always choose an unemployed manager with a high reputation – and ideally several international caps – and they will have some connection with at least one of the teams still involved in the competition.
In this case, McGinn was picked because he previously spent three years as a player at Hibernian, who would enter the competition at the League Phase.
In reality, tournament draws are usually not hosted by ex-professionals or washed-up managers (their job at UEFA and FIFA draws is to pick out the balls). Instead, the host is typically a television presenter or journalist – think Mark Chapman or Reshmin Chowdhury. While FM can’t include real journos for licencing reasons, it would be more realistic if the FA Cup draw was conducted by a fictional BBC Sport journalist rather than (for example) Russell Martin.
SOCIAL MEDIA MADNESS
The ‘Social Media’ page is finally being removed for Football Manager [Insert Year Here]… or at least it is being massively stripped back. Thank heavens for that.
Fans’ social media comments have never made any sense on FM. Most transfers, results and other news articles usually receive three comments – one positive, one negative, and one neutral. Even if you manage to sign Lamine Yamal for Doncaster on a free transfer, there’ll always be someone saying, “What a waste of money.”
Yes, this is the Internet. There will always be contrarians and very online guys who love to say something controversial and provoke a reaction. But why are these opinions being shared by your club’s Supporter Spokesperson? Are they actively trying to taunt you?
These comments rarely consider context either. Look at how some of Nacka’s fans responded to Bar Benitah scoring five goals in a cup game. It’s like, “Yeah, he was okay, but he should have scored six.”
I have another example to share. On Football Manager 2023, I played a short-term offline save with Millwall, in which we got promoted to the Premier League after beating Burnley in the Championship Play-Off Final. One of the comments after the match was, “Decent result, onto the next one.”
Things like that really devalue your achievements. Winning promotion at Wembley should not feel like grinding out a 1-1 draw on a drab Tuesday night in Stoke.
Even the likes on in-game social media posts are broken. A club post about our second-choice goalkeeper returning from a pulled calf muscle got nearly 100,000 likes!
It doesn’t help that your club’s in-game social media account gains followers at an obscenely unrealistic rate. At the end of the 2034 season, after spending three years in the Allsvenskan and qualifying for the Conference League knockout rounds once, Nacka FC had over 200,000 followers on ‘social media’.
To make a real-life comparison, Malmö FF – who are Sweden’s biggest and most successful club – have around 98,000 followers on Twitter. (And to be fair, 97,000 of those are probably porn bots.)
IN THE NEWS
Those match reports and news articles you get in your inbox are a bit messy as well. They’re often incoherent, poorly constructed, and contain irrelevant statistics. Wow, Wolves beat an Everton team that was 3 centimetres taller than them on average – big whoop.
For the longest time, the Swedish press would ALWAYS bring up that time my Nacka beat IFK Värnamo in the second round of the Svenska Cupen in 2028.
When we were on a five-game winning streak, our fans were “reminiscing” about beating Värnamo.
When we were six games without a win, memories of beating Värnamo were “buried in the past”.
Every time I ate my cornflakes in the morning, the weather lady on TV would always say, “Hey, remember when Nacka beat Värnamo?”
The thing is… it wasn’t even that impressive. We were a Superettan club at the time, and Värnamo were playing a league below us in the Ettan Södra. It was only considered a shock because Nacka’s reputation was lower than Värnamo’s at the time – and as we all know, reputation trumps EVERYTHING when it comes to Football Manager.
In fact, the media only stopped talking about us beating Värnamo in the Svenska Cupen when we actually WON the Svenska Cupen. So now they’ll just bang on about Nacka lifting the Svenska Cupen in 2034 forever more… until either Nacka win the Champions League or President Trump nukes Sweden. I know which is most likely.
PRESS CONFERENCES & MEDIA INTERVIEWS
Press conferences – you either hate them or you tolerate them. Many FMers think that they’re boring and journalists keep asking the same tired questions… but then again, that’s exactly what press conferences are like in real-life.
The best thing I can say about press conferences on FM is that they’re an easy way to manage your players’ body language before a match, whether that’s by building up their confidence or reducing pressure. You might prefer to leave that to someone else, but I for one don’t want to risk my assistant manager saying something stupid like, “Yes, I would like to sell our top scorer to IFK Göteborg for peanuts!”
So I’m in the ‘tolerate’ camp… but FM journalists ask so many stupid or nonsensical questions at pressers and pre-match interviews that I sometimes wonder why I bother. Here are just some of the worst examples:
LOAN RANGERS
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to talk about what my young players are doing on loan at lower-league clubs. After my team got an impressive derby win over our city rivals Hammarby, the first question I was asked was about a reserve striker whom I had loaned out to Östersund.
Naturally, I was quite annoyed – and not with the fact that Leonel Grine had failed to score in his first seven games. I mean, can you imagine how Ruben Amorim would feel if he won the Manchester derby at the Etihad and the Sky Sports journo decided to ask him, “How do you reckon Antony is getting on at Real Betis?”
Even when I respond, “I just want to talk about the players who are here quite now,” they never get the message and ask you again the next week.
And then there’s the standard follow-up question about a loanee who’s in good form: “Do you think they’ve outgrown Club X and need a new challenge?” I would love to be able to reply, “The transfer window is closed, you dingus, so I couldn’t recall him or send him to another club even if I wanted to.”
A ‘NEW’ POSITION
When I signed Egyptian teenager Hazem Reda in 2031, he was a natural Right Midfielder who was also accomplished in Central Midfield. I don’t use a right-sided midfielder in my tactic, so I retrained Reda to become a natural CM (playing first as a Mezzala, before finding more success as a Central Midfielder on Attack).
Even three years later, I still occasionally have to field questions about Reda playing in a ‘new’ position. The same goes for César Gamarra and Idan Baruchian, who both came in as natural Centre-Backs and were subsequently retrained at Right-Back. If any of them have a bad game in their ‘new’ role, I’ll usually get asked, “Are you just throwing [stuff] at the wall until something sticks?”
It does feel like the average FM journo has the memory span of a goldfish with both dementia and ADHD…
HE’S ON THE PHONE
…which is bizarre, because they also always seem to anticipate every single move you make.
When you’re managing in the lower leagues, you will probably take a load of free agents on trial first before deciding which ones to offer contracts to. And every time a new trialist comes in, you’ll get a phone call – or, rather, a message in your inbox – from a journalist wanting to know if you’re going to sign them permanently.
Why is this a thing? In most cases, a journalist likely wouldn’t even know who this lower-league trialist is, let alone care enough to ask about his long-term prospects. Indeed, for many years, trialists playing in the Scottish Football League were officially referred to only as ‘A Trialist’.
A similar thing happens when you try to sell a player through an intermediary. Every single time you hit the “Hire An Intermediary To Sell Player” button, even if there are NO intermediaries willing to help you find a buyer, you’ll get a new message in your inbox: “This is Pers Morgensson from the Swedish Daily Mail. I hear you’re selling a player through an intermediary now. Please tell me more.”
INTERNATIONAL GOALS
But those hacks aren’t only interested in juicy gossip about trialists and intermediaries. They’ll also be on the blower to you whenever any of your players scores for their country.
It doesn’t matter whether your player scored their 1st international goal or their 47th. They don’t even care if it was in the World Cup Final or some meaningless friendly in Burkina Faso. As soon as the ball hits the back of your net, your phone rings, and the person on the other end asks, “Were you delighted to see Player A score for their country?”
What a silly question. What exactly are they expecting me to say? “No, actually, I’m furious that Emílio Chamboco scored his 3rd goal for Mozambique during the international break. As soon as that motherfricker gets back to Stockholm, I’m gonna fine him a fortnight’s wages and force him to listen to Zealand Shannon’s loans song for 24 hours!”
If anyone from Sports Interactive is reading this, here’s my feature request for the next game – give us managers the option to block journalists’ phone numbers. Or introduce restraining orders. Either one is fine, thanks.
IT’S THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FINAL…
Lastly, it’s time to revisit THE most idiotic question I’ve ever been asked at a pre-match interview.
I was managing Arsenal on Football Manager 2022, and was about to lead the Gunners into the 2023 Champions League Final against Manchester City in İstanbul. 15 minutes before kick-off, some berk from TalkSport asked me the question that was on everybody’s lips:
Media questions should have at least some relation to your team, or the match, or even the competition you are involved in. When Luis Enrique leads PSG into their second Champions League Final at the end of this month, the very last thing he will want to discuss is the transfer dealings of relegated Montpellier!
Many FMers have argued that media interviews are pointless and should be completely scrapped for the next Football Manager. Media relations are becoming increasingly important in professional football – for better or worse – and I feel that it would be short-minded to discard them from the game.
I’ve argued for a while that FM press conferences should have fewer questions (3 to 5 at most), but those questions should be more contextual. Answers should also have a little more impact on your players’ body language.
And sorry, AI bros, but I don’t think generative AI is the answer. It isn’t yet sophisticated enough, it would require a persistent Internet connection and/or a very powerful computer to run properly… and, of course, there’s the risk that things could take a VERY dark turn.
Those are just some of the many issues that Sports Interactive need to fix to make interacting with the media a more enjoyable experience on Football Manager. If you have more examples, then please share them by leaving a comment below.
You can also find me on Threads and Bluesky… but I’m not on Twitter anymore. I’m not on Reddit either. Not even Bebo.
Fuller FM 