Football Manager Job Interview Blues
I decided not to start my Pentagon Challenge project unemployed after all.
Don’t get me wrong — I did give it a try. I had a number of videos ready for YouTube, and was thinking of ways I could describe the arduous and mind-numbing task of applying for vitual jobs within the game.
But, well, the system just stinks. It’s rigid, it’s unrealistic, and it’s not much fun.
I figured we should talk about it.
Too Many Teams
The problem was partially my own fault.
I knew I wanted to start this save off by finding a team in the OFC Champions League. That meant looking at clubs located in Pacific Island nations, places like Vanuatu, Palau, Samoa, and so forth.
There aren’t a ton of these available in the editor data files I’ve been using. Many of those nations elected not to play football this year, meaning that the pool of clubs I have to choose from is smaller than it could be.
Thankfully, the game has a feature that allows you to apply for every single job that meets certain criteria. You can apply for a managerial job for every single team without a manager in Vanuatu, for example, with a single click of the mouse.
But that’s where the problem starts.
Instead of giving you a friendly overview of which jobs are realistic and which jobs aren’t, you wind up getting a message in your virtual inbox about every single job you applied for. Sometimes these messages are accompanied by media speculation, which is hilariously strange if you’re starting with an inexperienced 18-year-old manager like I am.
The messages are overwhelmingly repetitive, are completely meaningless, and serve only to take up space in the inbox. But that’s not the worst of it.
The Interview Process
The interview process itself is where things go from frustrating to downright ugly.
Every single job interview in Football Manager is the same. There’s a simple template. The club asks you a question or two about negative parts of your experience, something along the lines of “how will you manage if you can’t speak the language,” or “you had a problem with such-and-such goal while managing a team in the past.” Afterwards, the club will ask you really generic questions about whether you want to make changes in the staff of the club, whether their proposed transfer budget is high enough, and whether you think you’re capable of leading the club to a certain targeted finish.
It’s mindnumbingly dull and repetitive, especially if you try to do 50 of these in a row. And that’s where I really made a mistake.
Apparently I told a team in one of the Vanuatu leagues that I was willing to give up all of my other job applications for the chance to manage for them. I don’t remember saying this, but it’s absolutely possible that I clicked on the wrong response out of boredom.
This was during the 31st or 32nd interview in a row. I suddenly realized that all of the work I had done beforehand had been completely swept away. I was no longer being considered for any of the other teams that I had completed click-fest interviews for, and there was simply no way to undo this.
And, as a result, I’ve decided not to start the game unemployed.
Fix the Game!
This needs to be fixed.
These interview shouldn’t be so repetitive and cut-and-dry. It’s as much fun as grinding through the original Dragon Warrior on the Famicom. You’re just doing the same thing over and over again, hoping that the end result will make the grind somehow worthwhile.
Most importantly, though, there absolutely should not be an answer within the process that can eliminate all of the work you’ve already done. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of.
Why can’t my virtual assistant give me a short list of jobs that I’m most likely to be suitable for? Why can’t I put out a generic advertisement and wait for teams to come to me? Why can’t I set up answers to basic questions ahead of time to stop the process from being so tedious and repetitive?
Whatever the solution is, we need something. This is simply awful.