The ingredient that turned Football Manager into a massive hit

“We thought if you leave it to the imagination you can do a much better job of creating a football match in your head than watching some little dots moving around which almost destroys the illusion,” adds Oliver. “Putting the one line commentary bars up, sort of radio style: ‘cross comes in’; ‘he rises at the back post’ – little pause – ‘just wide’. It’s just like listening to the radio; it’s all in your head.”

- Football Manager creator Paul Collyer, on why the series took off with soccer fans. 

The Football Manager series isn’t very well known in the United States, but in the UK and other football-friendly nations, the league management simulator is a massive hit. For developers who understand sports games as games where you virtually simulate playing a sport, it might be a confusing phenomenon, but it turns out there’s a few unique ingredients worth studying. 

In an interview with Factor Magazine, Football Manager creators Paul and Oliver Collyer explain the origins for their huge series and revisit the series’ early days when it was known as Championship Manager, where the design principles that drove the series' success took root. 

When trying to release the first game, they were rejected by the likes of EA and other publishers who didn’t understand the appeal of a soccer game that didn’t feature any soccer visuals. But the Collyers knew that in soccer fandom, that wasn’t an inherent problem. 

“At the time there was very little football on TV, most of our [soccer] was on the radio, and I think that’s maybe where the lack of prioritizing the graphics came from, because that was our culture,” says Paul Collyer. 

Paul goes on to describe early gameplay that mimicked the radio broadcasts of soccer games in the 1980s, which helped drive Championship Manager to early success. After the first game sold 20 thousand copies, Paul and Oliver had to mail British soccer fanzines in order to crowdsource data on player ratings, and dive into Italian soccer stat sheets in a local shop. 

“It was a superb response, and when that came back we started putting it into the computer and that became the first database. We had all sorts of issues about people overrating their players,” Oliver says. Paul briefly recalls that the Norwalk fans rated their (underperforming) team at all 20s. 

If you’re curious about more insights into the Football Manager games, and what drove the Collyers to finally include animated gameplay footage, you can read the full interview here.