Why Football Manager Is So Addicting

Newgens

Why Football Manager Is So Addicting

I realized something yesterday.

I was watching a video of the 1988 FA Cup Final between Liverpool and Wimbledon.

During the match, the commentators spent quite a bit of time talking about Wimbledon goalkeeper and captain Dave Beasant, who had a remarkable game.

Beasant, of course, came up originally with Edgware Town (now there’s a non-league to legend project for you!) and was purchased by Wimbledon of the Third Division in 1979. He stayed with the team through two relegations and their inexorable rise up the ladder and to the final stages of the FA Cup.

And that’s simply something you don’t see in many other places in the world of sport.

As an American, I grew up playing a completely different kind of game. I grew up in the world of APBA and Strat-O-Matic, games designed to mathematically recreate professional American sports. The idea is generally to either replay a season exactly how it happened, or to draft players with your friends and try to obtain the best players possible.

Football Manager is different.

The idea here is to try to find a good deal — to find a player from nowhere that nobody’s ever heard of and build him up.

Rather than being a game about signing big names, Football Manager is much more about developing players like this:

And that, in my mind, is what makes the game so addicting.