How a Video Game You’ve Never Played Changed the Biggest Sport on Earth

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Pablo Torre Finds Out

Episode: “How a Video Game You’ve Never Played Changed the Biggest Sport on Earth”

Date: April 9, 2024
Host: Pablo Torre (Meadowlark Media, Le Batard & Friends)
Correspondents: Kieran Morris
Key Guests:

• Will Still (Manager, Stade de Reims)
• Tobias Hysén (Swedish international and Football Manager devotee)
• Miles Jacobson (Studio Director, Sports Interactive – creators of Football Manager)

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Overview

In this episode, Pablo Torre dives deep into the wild, obsessive, and world-shaping culture of the Football Manager video game series—a game that, unlike most sports simulations, doesn’t put you “on the pitch” but in the admin seat. He explores not only its addictive grip on fans and even professional footballers, but also Football Manager’s real impact on the sport of soccer, influencing scouting, data analytics, and even producing professional managers like Will Still. With field reporting from correspondent Kieran Morris—himself an “FM” addict thrown into a personal (and comic) spiral by the assignment—the episode uncovers how a spreadsheet game blurred the line between virtual and real sport.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Football Manager Is—And How It’s Different

• FM is a simulation of football management, not an action game like FIFA. You never “play” as a footballer.
• The experience is deeply solitary and text-based: “You open this up and it is like suddenly I am just living inside of a spreadsheet.” (Pablo, 04:18)
• The game covers details from contract negotiation to dealing with virtual journalists to adjusting pitch size, running sponsorships, and managing club politics.

2. The Life-Consuming Obsession of FM

• The game is notorious for its addictive qualities, often likened to a narcotic.

  “It’s a dangerous, dangerous, almost narcotic feeling when you’re really in the midst of it. It’s more than a football game. Far more than a football game.” (Kieran, 00:06 & 14:38)

• Kieran describes his own “relapse” after being tasked with reporting, with late-night diary entries full of existential dread and football-induced insomnia.

  “I have never experienced failure like I’ve experienced in this current save. ... I cannot sleep until I win.” (Kieran reading his diary, 42:42) “I resigned before they could sack me. ... Why does this game have such an effect on me?” (43:19)

3. The Depth and Realism of the Simulation

• The appeal of Football Manager is its thorough realism, especially its player database.
• It has built a volunteer scouting network of over 1,300 people watching matches worldwide, compiling data on hundreds of thousands of footballers (22:36).
• Professional clubs use FM’s data to inform actual transfer policies and scouting:

  “Champions League, quarter finalists, semi finalists, top clubs from around the world are using our data as part of their scouting network... because we’ve got more scouts than any of them have.” (Miles Jacobson, 21:57)

4. The Game’s Cultural Impact—From Living Rooms to Boardrooms

• FM is not just for “nerds;” professional footballers and managers play it, and obsess over it, too.
• Football Manager experience is now a relevant resume point for prospective analysts and club staff.
• Miles Jacobson:

  “If a data analyst is applying for a role at this club and doesn’t mention football manager, they’re not getting the job.” (Miles Jacobson, quoting a League One club director, 27:12)

5. Will Still—The Myth and Reality of a Virtual-to-Victory Success Story

• Will Still, currently the youngest manager in France’s Ligue 1, famously credits FM for feeding his obsession with football management (and triggering a story that became legend).

  “I’ve spent hours playing it because... pretty much everyone has, you smash the space bar until about 3 in the morning...” (Will Still, 31:29)

• Still pushes back on the narrative that the game itself replaced real experience:

  “It just blew up into this... massive story that I’d basically learned everything off football manager... which was a load of rubbish.” (Will Still, 32:17) “For as much as I’ve learned on the game, I have a big squad of very athletic, grown big men out there who I need to go and tell to run around... they’re not gonna do that if they just think I’ve got experience from the game.” (Kieran paraphrasing Will Still, 33:29)

• He details the real career steps: video analysis, hard work, brutal self-doubt, and some serendipity—not wizardry from a game.

6. The Game’s Emotional Toll (and Bizarre Afterlife Mechanics)

• Kieran recounts that the objective of the game is akin to managing a club “until you retire”—literally. The game shows you your own digital obituary.

  “That’s kind of the weird aim of the game, is you want to have your long, storied career and you want to go down the way... then you retire... get to read your own obituary.” (Kieran, 44:23)

• Pablo’s take:

  “Here’s the elevator pitch: Football Manager is a game where the goal is to die.” (Pablo, 45:19)

7. Real-World Crossover and an Era of Data-Driven Soccer

• FM’s impact is now so great that clubs have run real hiring processes through the game (Bromley FC’s “tactician” job via FM2024, 27:54).
• The software preceded modern professional scouting and data analytics platforms used in real football.

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Standout Quotes

• Kieran Morris (00:06 & 14:38):
  “It’s a dangerous, dangerous, almost narcotic feeling when you’re really in the midst of it. It’s more than a football game. Far more than a football game.”

• Pablo Torre (04:18):
  “You open this up and it is like suddenly I am just living inside of a spreadsheet.”

• Kieran Morris (09:48):
  “Think of the women who stay, you know, the 35 who call it done [in divorce proceedings]. Think of the millions out there listening to just this nonsense come out of their partner.”

• Miles Jacobson (21:57):
  “Champions League, quarter finalists, semi finalists, top clubs from around the world are using our data as part of their scouting network... because we’ve got more scouts than any of them have.”

• Will Still (32:17):
  “It just blew up into this... massive story that I’d basically learned everything off football manager... which was a load of rubbish.”

• Kieran Morris (42:42 / 43:19):
  “I have never experienced failure like I’ve experienced in this current save. ... I cannot sleep until I win. ... I resigned before they could sack me. ... This is misery.”

• Pablo Torre (45:19):
  “Football Manager is a game where the goal is to die.”

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Notable Moments & Timestamps

| Time | Segment | |----------|-----------------------------------------------------| | 00:06 | Kieran describes the narcotic pull of FM | | 01:18 | Pablo introduces Kieran’s FM “sickness” | | 04:18 | Pablo’s “spreadsheet” impression | | 11:23 | Interview: Footballer Tobias Hysén talks obsession | | 16:53 | Kieran meets Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive | | 21:57 | Jacobson on FM’s real-world scouting impact | | 27:12 | Data analysts must know FM, per club director | | 28:52 | Tobias Hysén on the Will Still “fairy tale” | | 29:45 | Will Still details standing out as a young manager | | 31:29 | Will Still admits to unhealthy obsession with FM | | 32:17 | Still corrects the myth about “learning everything” | | 33:29 | Real-world experience vs. FM experience | | 39:04 | Still: “Management is actually all about people” | | 42:42+ | Kieran’s diary: addiction and loss | | 44:23 | On FM’s “retirement” and afterlife | | 45:19 | Pablo’s elevator pitch: “FM is a game where you die”|

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Episode Tone

The episode is playful, self-aware, and blends journalistic seriousness with self-deprecating humor. Pablo is perennially “in over his head” on soccer culture, while Kieran’s personal spiral provides comic relief and authenticity. The interviews are warm, candid, and at times emotional, revealing the surprising depth of the game’s reach.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Heard the Episode:

This episode is as much about sport obsession, the seductive power of simulation, and the blending of reality and play as it is about a video game. Whether you’re a “football (soccer) person” or not, the world of Football Manager is painted as a living, breathing, digitized ecosystem—one that now shapes the real world it was designed to mimic. It’s a love letter, cautionary tale, and cultural history rolled into one.

Transcript

[Pablo Torre]

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out I am Pablo Torre. And today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

[Kieran Morris]

It's a dangerous, dangerous, almost like narcotic feeling when you're really in the midst of it. It's more than a football game. Far more than a football game.

[Pablo Torre]

Right after this ad.

[Kieran Morris]

You'Re listening to Giraffe, Kraken, Foreign.

[Pablo Torre]

Morris. My favorite sorts of episodes on this show are passion projects. Until today, I've never been concerned that someone I'm about to talk to has too much enthusiasm for a subject. So thank you for joining us and I guess preemptively, I'm a little worried about you.

[Kieran Morris]

I can't say thank you, whatever the opposite of that is, is what I'm saying to you. You brought a sickness back into my life. You brought years and years of hard won sobriety crashing down as soon as it was the last thing you said to me in this studio months ago. Hey, do you like Football Manager? I just thought, here we go.

[Pablo Torre]

Okay? So I didn't know how much I'd be ruining the life of Kieran Morris, our 27 year old correspondent, when I assigned him this story. The story about his particular sickness known as Football manager. And Football Manager, if you did not know, is this globally popular and uniquely important and extraordinarily strange video game that I knew jack about because, look, I'm not a soccer expert, guys. I love FIFA. That is my video game of choice. And Football Manager apparently, by contrast, is not for me. It is not for casuals. It is in fact so good at simulating what it's really like to run a soccer team in real life that it has changed what it's like to run a soccer team in real life, as in the simulation of a multibillion dollar industry, has changed the multibillion dollar industry, which is not a thing that Madden or 2K or these other video games have ever done. It is also the sort of cultural institution that dudes in England will do stand up comedy about.

[Comedian at Manchester City gig]

I went and did a gig at Manchester City, right? And I met a load of the players and it was, well, exciting. It was last year, Robinho and Richard done all this. I met Michael Richards as the defender. I was a bit rude to him, okay? I was like, yeah, not bothered. Afterwards my dad was with me, went, you're a bit rude there to Michael Richards. I said, yeah. I don't know why. It was only when I got home I realized on Football Manager he turned up late for training a couple of times.

[Pablo Torre]

But the whole reason I even started thinking about football manager in the first place was because I started seeing these videos last year. These memes about a real life flesh and blood, actual football manager who was a cult hero. A cult hero because of what the video game had done for him. A cult hero named Will Still.

[Kieran Morris]

Will still is one of us.

[Pablo Torre]

A football manager addict who just happens to also be the manager of Stud Durant's in Liguen. You've seen that about their manager. Nuts learned about the game through football manager doesn't actually have his pro coaching license so they get fined 22€000 every game. William still, dude, he's 30. 30. The perfectly poetically named Will still was the guy that I'd wanted Kieran Morris to locate and interview and fact check for us. What I did not realize was how much bigger this story would be when you open up this game. And I tried to just to dip a toe in to get a sense of this. I am just staggered by how much text there is. So much like you open this up and it is like suddenly I am just living inside of a spreadsheet.

[Kieran Morris]

Oh yeah, A spreadsheet that you come to love and to prune and to admire all of its little contours. Like that spreadsheet. Your squad is your pride and your joy. But at the end of the day, it is functionally a spreadsheet.

[Pablo Torre]

Well, it's also actually emails. I should say that too, right?

[Kieran Morris]

Yep. It's responding to press requests.

[Pablo Torre]

Take me through responding to a press request. How does that work? So give me, give me an example scenario.

[Kieran Morris]

So you are leading two one, 85 minutes gone. Opposition. You just kind of feel in the game that something's gonna happen. One of the opposite side hits it from 40 yards, 2, 2, sudden draw. You immediately go after the game to a press conference. And not just one question, but like eight or nine questions, all of slight variations of, oh, well, how did that happen? What did you do there that was wrong and all of that. And if you get them wrong, the journalists in the game build a negative opinion of you. And if you start to sort of piss them off in some way, they'll come back to you more. The club itself and the players can react badly to what you say in that. So you are in this spotlight of like fake media spotlight from the off you get tweets come up on the side of these fictional fans calling out your decisions, wondering why you didn't do this, didn't do that. And there was a funny detail that I think I read about A complaint about how similar all the journalists questions were and how boring they were. And the response from Sports Interactive was no, that's what press conferences are like. Like no one is asking interesting questions. Like, they are. Like an interesting question is a once in a million thing.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah. Journalist Manager is an even more boring game, unfortunately. My favorite game, I love video games. My favorite sports video game of all time, my favorite video game period, is FIFA, right? And so I refer to FIFA as. As almost this beautiful constant flow of. Of motion. I control these players. It's super social. There's almost like a meditative aspect when I hear that, like there's an upbeat song when I open the game and I'm already like, transported e a sports.

[Will Still]

It's in.

[Pablo Torre]

But when you open football manager, by contrast, what is that?

[Kieran Morris]

Like silence. Silence. And you feel the creak of your laptop. You hear the whir of the fan as it gets into gear, as it. All of the systems are going off, being. You're about to go into a very solitary space. And the concept of the game is that you have a job that millions dream of. You are going day by day through the life of a football manager. And that means everything from negotiating contracts to tactics to the size of the pitch for the season ahead, whether it's this many meters or that many meters. You can do sponsorship deals, you can argue with your board. You can grow weird parasocial attachments to players that you've never met. You can live your dreams. You can take your club, however big or small, to the very top of the game. You can reorient the world of football around your dream. And that is somehow why I keep coming back.

[Pablo Torre]

How much of the game then is spent actually, you know, playing the game, like, controlling players?

[Kieran Morris]

None. Not a second. You are the football manager. The players are the players there. That's a whole of the world. If you want to be a player, you know, FIFA's around the corner, you can go there.

[Pablo Torre]

I just need to tell you that this all, all of it sounds insane, right? So you play sports, video games to play sports. Unless it's football manager, in which case you're trying to be an administrator and only an administrator. And I wonder when you're hearing the whir of your laptop spin up again as you relapse on assignment for me, I know that you're engaged. What does your fiance think about this?

[Kieran Morris]

She heard it. Before she saw it, she heard the sound of the laptop. It hadn't made that sound in years. I remember when I made the decision to Cut football manager out of my life. It was about the start of the pandemic. And I got out and I worked and I read stuff and I watched movies and spoke to friends and, you know, watched the seasons change and all of that. And it was happy. Some of the happiest times of my life. And then this assignment came back and I just knew Sarah as soon as she saw it. Years of work, Years of work unraveling and all. I said, oh, Pablo said, he insisted. So I'm staying up till 2, 3 o' clock in the morning. You've seen, I've told you, you've kept.

[Pablo Torre]

Diaries for us, Kieran.

[Kieran Morris]

It's a work thing.

[Pablo Torre]

And I just want to point out that, like, you and I, I feel like this is something that they say in therapy, too. You're not alone. It's not just you. I mean, there's one book called Football Managers Stole My Life, and it cites a 2012 statistic that football manager was cited as a significant factor in 35 divorce cases that year. And that's just, it seems, the tip of the iceberg in terms of how obsessive lots and lots and lots of people are about this enterprise.

[Kieran Morris]

Think of the women who stay, you know, the 35 who call it done. Think of the millions out there listening to just this nonsense come out of their partner. And it is practically every football fan I know.

[Pablo Torre]

So this is one of those episodes where my ignorance is perpetually revealed. And yes, by the way, we are going to get to Kieran sitting down with Will, still the football manager. Football manager in a bit here. But first, what I needed Kieran to do was go on what turned out to be and a truly global quest, a quest to just help me personally understand how the whole virtual world of this very specific video game actually interacts with the most popular professional sport on the planet and in the process, influences it. And one of the more surprising things I learned almost immediately talking to Kieran was that the players love this game. It's not just the nerds and the Dungeons and Dragons types. No offense to Kieran or me, I guess it's also the jocks. The jocks love it. And so I just needed Kieran to bring us one.

[Kieran Morris]

Tobias Hiesdon. So he is a former Swedish international legend in Sweden, played in England, and he is one of the hardest playing football manager obsessives I've ever encountered of any form. Good morning. Sorry, good morning to you.

[Tobias Heisen]

Good morning. Good morning.

[Kieran Morris]

Is it every bit as freezing in Sweden as it is in London?

[Tobias Heisen]

Right Now I think we've got somewhere in between 7 and 15 minus.

[Kieran Morris]

Anyway, from the world of real football to the wonderful world of virtual football. Football manager, the reason we're talking today.

[Tobias Heisen]

Yeah, I'd say I'd put it the other way around.

[Kieran Morris]

The football manager world is the one.

[Tobias Heisen]

You want to be living in.

[Kieran Morris]

So he has been playing every step of the way from the earliest version of the game 25 years ago on.

[Tobias Heisen]

One of the games in 2000. Yeah, one of the. One of the games when I was between 20, 25, 26, I think I had the same paces theory, Henri and. And I was like, yeah, I'll take that. I'll take that. I could buy myself, which I always did, which my friends always teased me for, but I could buy myself to. To pretty much any of the big teams. So that was. Yeah, that was fun.

[Kieran Morris]

It's an obsession machine. You get the obsession you put into it all the way back. You know, these guys have got time. Like there's buses to catch and planes and times when your muscles are sore and you don't want to talk to anyone but you're still up from the game. What do you do?

[Tobias Heisen]

I've always enjoyed playing the game, which is coaching, basically. But you also do a lot of other stuff. It could be everything from scouting players to being assistant manager. Manager. You could be the sports director. If in. In Swedish it's a chief of sports, the ones who sign players and negotiate contracts. And on football manager, you do. You do it all like you're all in everything in one. In one person.

[Kieran Morris]

It's about.

[Pablo Torre]

It's about bureaucracy. It's about.

[Kieran Morris]

It's about bureaucracy.

[Pablo Torre]

An office manager.

[Kieran Morris]

The best office manager. Have you met many people in coaching or in the back office side of football who have had no direct pro experience but have come into the game, come into the sport, rather, having had experience with the game and a love of the game.

[Tobias Heisen]

Yeah, definitely, because they've been playing football and enjoying football manager. And then they. They've noticed pretty, pretty early that I won't become the player I want to be. So they go in, they get into coaching instead. But I think that some of it, that they've chosen to get into coaching instead of maybe just setting football aside completely is definitely because of football manager.

[Pablo Torre]

It sounds like a cult, Kieran.

[Kieran Morris]

You know, it's. It is to it. It's like a certain extent. It really is. It's a dangerous, dangerous, almost like narcotic feeling when you're really in the midst of it. It's More than a football game. Far more than a football game.

[Pablo Torre]

It is not a feeling I've ever gotten from Madden. Okay? And by the way, people love Madden. NFL players love Madden. They obsess over all that stuff too. NBA players love NBA 2K. But this is different. Also on the level of. I just, I just haven't heard of a sports video game that is more respected than Football Manager by the sport that it seeks to emulate to the point where it seems like the relationship between the two is just two way.

[Kieran Morris]

It's extraordinary. The team itself behind the game, Sports Interactive. Have you ever interacted with them as a tester or a scout?

[Tobias Heisen]

There was this one time when I got a text or an email from Miles Jacobson asking if we wanted to try the game out and see from like from a pro footballer's point of view to find different things that maybe this, yeah, this needs to get taken out. Maybe this can be added. But I remember the first time when, when I actually got that email, I was like, whoa, that was. That was cool.

[Pablo Torre]

So the name that our jock friend Tobias just mentioned there, almost starstruck, Miles Jacobson is significant here because Miles Jacobson is the big boss over at Sports Interactive. And you should know that Miles Jacobson's proper name is technically miles Jacobson OBE, because in 2011 at the Royal Palace, Prince Charles himself appointed Miles an officer of the most excellent order of the British Empire. That's the OBE part. For his services to the gaming industry, or in other words, for Football Manager. Which is exactly why Miles was the next guy that Kieran needed and was dying to meet.

[Kieran Morris]

Miles Jacobson is the king of the universe when it comes to football manager. He was a player. He started off in the 90s when it was Championship Manager, its original name. And he went from being a guy who just volunteered, you know, a bit of advice on how to make it a bit better to, oh, I can come in and do a bit for here and there and build the business and, you know, the distribution. Before you know it, turn of the millennium, he's in charge of the whole operation and he is the very center of all of it. It is his sort of obsessive desire for perfection, for complete verisimilitude from real life that drives Football Manager. We are rolling. Pablo Torre finds out. Correspondent Kieran Morris speaking to Miles Jacobson, game director of Football Manager. And your title.

[Miles Jacobson]

Let's Sports Interactive Studio director.

[Kieran Morris]

Studio director. We went to the Sports Interactive headquarters and all you see there are examples of football players, coaches, chairmen and Executives, the people at the very top of football, coming in and telling everyone, oh, my God, I love this game. Oh, my God, I do this on this game. I have been playing this for so long, it's crazy. The level of detail they go to. They have access like absolutely nothing else.

[Miles Jacobson]

We interview loads and loads and loads of different people from football and they could be managers, they could be youth coaches, they could be data analysts. We've got one coming up with the people who basically put the fixture lists together. We've got one coming up for people who work for the FA and putting rules together. And all of them are set up as things that are, how can we get knowledge from these people that is going to help make the game better. Better. It's also possibly the best lunch and learn session any company's ever had because the people that we get involved are pretty ridiculous. And, you know, managers at the top level, international managers, directors of football, analysts from Premier League clubs. Nothing ever leaks. If you ask a manager about.

[Kieran Morris]

Their.

[Miles Jacobson]

Team lineup for the weekend, they're not going to tell you because they don't want the opposition to know. Whereas we'll go one further and we'll say, okay, can you give us the exact tactical team talk that you gave your team for the game this weekend? And they go, yeah, okay, and get a tactics board out and start showing us exactly what they're going to be doing at the weekend, because it's not going to leak. I'm really lucky to get to do it and really lucky to get to speak, to speak to these people and call it a job.

[Kieran Morris]

Yeah.

[Miles Jacobson]

But it's also really important for the game.

[Pablo Torre]

I imagine at some point someone somewhere had to wonder, like, okay, so all these other games, they're getting off on CGI and they have all of these graphics and the player controlling the player as if they're an avatar for you, a fan pretending to be the athlete. Like, that's clearly where the rest of this business is headed in video games and sports, video games in specific. But what they decide to do, what Miles decides to do, is actually we're going to seemingly double, triple, quadruple, quintuple down on the fact that we're a database game. We're a game in which information is currency. And so how does, like, the most powerful, valuable currency here work? How does player scouting, how does player ranking actually work?

[Kieran Morris]

It's this huge data bank of hundreds of thousands of footballers all over the world. Before you even play a single game, you have access to everyone from the ages of 15 to 45 who have kicked a ball in any sort of spirited way from here to Colombia and back again.

[Miles Jacobson]

The first awareness that we had of the football industry taking games seriously was Andre Velas Boas, who's always been a bit of a trailblazer. When he was chief scout at Chelsea, he was asked in an interview how he'd found a couple of players. And at that time we were making championship manager before we moved to football manager. And he went, well, championship manager, I've been playing it for years. And then we did a data deal with Everton in 2008, which was probably more of a PR thing than anything else. But other clubs then started going, oh, if they're doing that, we can. So we now work with a bunch of football clubs on the data side of things. I'm under non disclosure agreements because I can't say who they are, but Champions League, quarter finalists, semi finalists, top clubs from around the world are using our data as part of their scouting network because to be frank, any football club that isn't is pretty stupid because we've got more scouts around the world than any of them have.

[Kieran Morris]

It goes all the way back to the same methods that the sport uses. You know, it's people on touchlines, it's people at training grounds, it's actual observation of matches. It's extraordinary. It's half the job of a whole front office of a professional athletic team. And to get people doing that legwork, I think you hit something with a cult like that is free labor, enthusiastic labor.

[Pablo Torre]

I didn't know this is a volunteer network of how many people where doing.

[Kieran Morris]

All of this all over the world? Like thousands, thousands of people.

[Miles Jacobson]

We have 1300, 1400 scouts around the world watching players week in, week out. No one else has that kind of coverage. So it's good to be there as a reference tool.

[Pablo Torre]

Well, it's also on its face something that seems deeply untrustworthy. The idea that, okay, we're going to get all these random people seemingly all around the world to just like send in their scouting reports, even though they're doing it in person, even though they're local and they're seeing it with their own two eyes, it just seems deeply untrustworthy. Except for the fact that seemingly actual.

[Kieran Morris]

Football clubs trust it completely. The extent to which the databases have been used and moved into the sport is wholesale. You know, there is software in football scouting that is directly modeled on that database, on the format of it, on the like, the way that it plays on a PC is the gold standard for Scouting software. Scouting software came afterwards. That's the incredible thing. In its real sense now, it's been fused into how transfers are made, how the game is analyzed for a decade at least.

[Pablo Torre]

So just a very basic logistical question then is like, these clubs have money, right? Like, why is it that they don't have their own thing? Why are they relying on the publicly accessible Kieran Morris's favorite database version of this whole scouting network?

[Kieran Morris]

Because, you know, you've got to fly a scout somewhere. You've got to. You've got to pay them, you've got to think of their logistics. You know, they're a living, breathing person.

[Miles Jacobson]

No club should ever sign a player based on their football manager data. But it's a good reference tool to be able to get some information when deciding whether to fly to Chile to go and watch a player whose agent sent you a YouTube video.

[Pablo Torre]

In Madden. Right. Like, I know NFL players always obsess. They complain all the time about what they're rated. It's become a whole thing for reasons I understand, because Madden matters a whole lot in America. But what you're saying is that in football manager, it's actually levels beyond that, because the way that these guys are rated actually is at times a proxy for an actual scouting report that is relied upon by an actual scout and executive inside of the football industrial complex.

[Will Still]

Yeah.

[Kieran Morris]

And with that, it's not just the way you start out, but how you're going to be after five years, how you're going to be after 10 years. It's will they grow? Are they assets that will grow in the value that they're meant to, which.

[Pablo Torre]

Is a great sales pitch for the game, except that the game sounds less and less like a game as you go on to describe the business of the game.

[Kieran Morris]

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't have an elevator pitch, but fortunately it's simulating the world's most passionately, fervently supported sport and is just able to tap into that groundswell of enthusiasm at any moment.

[Pablo Torre]

When you talked to Miles, how did he talk about the question of what is the business of football manager here?

[Kieran Morris]

He sees it as transitioning kind of out of the game space. I think he knows that its value is obviously as a game, but as an entry point to obsession.

[Miles Jacobson]

I think we are now probably more of a football brand than we are a gaming brand and more of a part of football culture. We need to be seen as a football business more than a games business.

[Kieran Morris]

It would not be out of touch at all for him to be alongside the president of FIFA or the president of UEFA. I'm sure he's met them. You know, he has casual conversations with players coming out of the sport who want to go into football management. And so they ask him, the expert, you know, what's it like being a football manager? Because he has simulated that exact role like nothing else on earth.

[Pablo Torre]

Well, it's, it's now clear to me that it's not just a function of the way that football manager can give information about the world to people, it's the way that football manager teaches football itself to the world. Like, to what extent is football manager experience actually a relevant data point on your resume as somebody who might want to be a coach?

[Kieran Morris]

Well, there was one line that I think is as telling as you can get from Miles in the interview where.

[Miles Jacobson]

He says, a director of a, of a League One club turned around to me a couple of years ago and said if a data analyst is applying for a role at this club and doesn't mention football manager, they're not getting the job.

[Kieran Morris]

To understand data in football the way that data is used, if you have never played football manager, how do you, how do you even know what any of this data means?

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, that is a lot of power to give a video game. But I just want to drive this point home because last November Bromley fc, a fifth tier English football club, posted this extremely real ad online.

[Andy Woodman]

Hi, my name is Andy Woodman, manager of Bromley Football Club. We all know when it comes to football, fans have strong opinions. Today we're looking for Bromley's next tactician and it could be you. We've partnered with Xbox to create an application process in Football Manager 2024. Anyone can apply. We can't wait to see the talent out there. Follow the link to apply.

[Pablo Torre]

And this brings us back all the way around to our last stop on Kieran's world tour. The reason I got tipped off to football manager in the first place, the legend of Will still the youngest manager in top flight European soccer and the guy who used football manager to become one of the hottest coaching prospects ever in the world. And this also brings us back to our Swedish soccer player and football manager, obsessive Tobias Heisen. Because Tobias had told Kieran this about the Will still phenomenon unprompted before they parted ways.

[Tobias Heisen]

I mean, look at the Will still. Will Will still. Yeah, I mean that's, that's a fairy tale story for anyone. If, if he can do it, if he can play football manager his whole life, start coaching and go through that, go through all those steps and end up in the top flight in France. Well, then I can do it.

[Kieran Morris]

Will still. Oh, my. Will still. Will still is, by all intents and purposes, living the dream of any football manager player.

[Pablo Torre]

The elevator pitch on Will still is. It's as if Kieran Morris became an actual football manager and got really good at it.

[Will Still]

I think I always, you know, took it into consideration when, when I started all of this and I knew, you know, that I am, or the story is a bit different in regards to other people without, you know, disrespecting anyone. But, yeah, I am. Or I was Bertie. I'm big Ginger. Talk funny English, talk funny French. So I knew I was going to stand out a bit because I've always sort of stood out in a weird way.

[Kieran Morris]

As a result, despite managing in France, despite being English, but being born out of the country, growing up in Belgium, he's a, like, famous figure here. Now, whenever there is a new management role that comes up, everyone says, oh, is Will still going to come over? Is this Will Still's next step in his career?

[Andy Woodman]

Will still plans to be back at Stadrams next season.

[Miles Jacobson]

Jules.

[Tobias Heisen]

I think there was more than one.

[Andy Woodman]

Premier League club sniffing around the ginger Anglo Belgian enfant prodige.

[Pablo Torre]

That's right, Gabi.

[Kieran Morris]

And they're predicting his future like they would predict anyone on the game.

[Pablo Torre]

No, I mean, he's the football manager. Football manager here is the prodigy who played video games all the way to the top. How would you describe Will Still's experience with football manager specifically? Did he. Did he actually like the game?

[Kieran Morris]

He loved it. He is a type of guy I've met so many times where you get a little bit out of him and then you find out that it wasn't just dabbling with the game. It wasn't just sort of power using with the game. It was like getting in the way of school studies levels. It was insomniac levels. And, yeah, I think he's let that slip in the past. He's told people about that.

[Will Still]

Obviously, I've spent hours playing it because, well, pretty much everyone has, you know, and you smash the space bar until about 3 o' clock in the morning, until you realize it's 3 o' clock and you say, I've got to go to bed.

[Kieran Morris]

I think people see that in themselves. As soon as you let that known, you're away. You can see, oh, that could be me. He becomes a totem for every single player.

[Pablo Torre]

And so this totem, this avatar for every nerd out there who wanted to play video games and become a real life star. When you go to him and have him tell you his story, the story of how football manager made him who he is today, what was his response?

[Kieran Morris]

He doesn't want to talk about football manager anymore.

[Will Still]

I actually did an interview with football manager because they were like trying to understand how the game had an impact on my life, on my career, how I saw things. But it just blew up into this, you know, massive story that I'd basically learned everything off football manager. And I'd, you know, come from being this spotty teenager geek that played the game into a. A league air manager, which was a load of rubbish. But it was a story that people.

[Kieran Morris]

Like to say as soon as news got out that there could be one of us in the game itself, a real unreconstituted football manager nerd, the world just set upon him and kind of muddied his story up a little bit.

[Will Still]

Well, it just sounds easy and it sounds different. You know, you go from literally sitting on your, sitting on your ass at home behind your computer when no one watches you and no one sees you and no one even knows you exist to being a football manager. It's like, oh, you know, he's done it. He's gone from the game to the, the real game. It's like, wow. You know, once they saw past it, it was, it was a bit, bit more than that, but it sounds a bit fairy tale, like.

[Kieran Morris]

And I think his view is, hey, yeah, you know, I like football manager, but I'm a football coach. Like, you know, for as much as I've learned on the game, I have a big squad of very athletic, grown big men out there who I need to go and tell to run around in a circle, kick a ball in a certain way. And like, they're not gonna do that if they just think I've got experience from the game. You've never played the game itself. How could you know how to run a professional club? You know, it can't all be football manager. And he's like, no, it's not. It's everything else. Everything else.

[Pablo Torre]

And so what does Will still want everybody to know now that he is trying to fact check his own legend, what does he want people to know about how he got to be the way he is? What's actually the truth behind his rise then?

[Kieran Morris]

Make no mistake, he is a young prodigy excelling way beyond his years. And some of that might be attributable to an obsession fueled by this game. But I think what he wants the world to know is that it's the obsession with the game itself rather than football manager that drives him.

[Will Still]

It was just like football, football, football, football, football. Every day, you know, at home, at school, from the age of about, yeah, not eight, nine, I was training three times a week, had a game at the weekend. So it was just non stop football. After going to college or university in England for two years, I came back to Belgium and played for a year in the reserve team of a first division side. And in that, that sort of period, I realized, you know, other, other players were, were getting shifted up to the first team squad. They were going to train a bit more than I was. I just got frustrated.

[Pablo Torre]

And what a frustrated Will still did next does kind of make sense when you remember that he grew up loving this video game where you could try every conceivable career path inside a virtual backroom bureaucracy, replying to thousands of virtual emails if you so desired. Because what he decided to do next was set his sights again on a screen.

[Will Still]

I knew that video analysis in Belgium back at the time wasn't actually very big and wasn't really a thing yet. Only, you know, a few clubs had got it and no one really saw the, you know, the importance of it yet in Belgium. And my basic reflection was, you know, how. What is the quickest way and the most easiest way to get into professional football? What do clubs need the most?

[Pablo Torre]

And the clubs needed video analysis. This career pivot turned out to be incredibly smart. He was watching lots and lots of games, gleaning meaningful insights that he could relay to a coaching staff. And this all got him hired by this tiny second division team in Belgium. And then one day in 2017, when the manager of that team suddenly got fired, the bureaucracy settled upon Will still at age 24, 24, to become the youngest manager in Belgian soccer history.

[Will Still]

I felt completely stupid, to be totally honest. I felt like a complete, you know, idiot because I was 24 and I should never have been standing on that touchline, you know, giving any form of advice to, you know, the 32 and 36 year olds that were on the pitch. But in some weird way, in some miraculous way, it worked. And we got, you know, good results and I was able to stay on and then, you know, sort of made a name for myself in, in that way when I was 24. But I was just, you know, I was making stuff up as I went along. It was totally, should never have happened, you know, it shouldn't have happened, but.

[Pablo Torre]

It kept happening and he kept winning. In 2021, Will replaced another sacked manager at a bigger Belgian club. And in 2022, it happened again, this time in France in their first division, when will replaced the manager of his current employer, Stadterans. And just a dozen games into getting that job, Will earned a shocking draw against Leo Messi and Kylian Mbappe and Neymar, and the best team in all of France, Paris Saint Germain, into the middle, beating the trap, beating the defense and slamming it home. Maybe the final kick of the match. And Will still still unbeaten. In fact, Will still was unbeaten in his first 17 consecutive matches, a league record. So what are the differences that he articulates between the simulation and reality? What are the limits on the game now that he's actually, you know, done the thing for real people, I think.

[Kieran Morris]

And just the complexities of people, whether that's, you know, injuries or feeling upset and slighted because you've been left out of the squad, or people disagreeing with, you know, your seniority. It's easy to think when you're, you know, in your 16th consecutive hour of playing the game at home that, you know, you could just get up and do this if you wanted to. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have to go through, earn your stripes. You know, feel what it is out here.

[Will Still]

You need a certain background. You can't just go from being a geek that gets a few good results, a football manager, to, you know, a proper football manager. But I think as long as you love the game and you try and understand it and you try, and you're actually good with people because, you know, a lot of people forget that football management is actually all about people. It says it in the words as management. So you manage people, you manage emotions, you manage, yeah, a little more than football.

[Kieran Morris]

Where he is now is he's trying to really give this tag the shove and try and put himself forward as. No, I'm not the football manager's football manager. He is the genuine article and all power to him. You know, I think he's becoming that head coach figure that he's always dreamed of being. And, yeah, I think time remains to see whether or not his potential is as bright as we think it will be.

[Pablo Torre]

I guess the next question then is, okay, does Will still ever feel that, that itch that you have felt? Does he ever get twitchy? Does he ever play? Does he ever dare to boot up the game in the present tense?

[Kieran Morris]

I did hear from him that the last time he did was on holiday in Dubai. I Think he was taking a break between one job and another. I can see how it comes about. You know, your partner's asleep. It's hot out there. You don't want to go to the hotel bar. Hey, what's that laptop doing over there?

[Will Still]

Last time I played football, manager. Wow. I think I was on holiday in Dubai. That was three years ago. Yeah. End of season at Beer Scott. Asked the. The Beer Scott season when I was head coach. I was 28, 29. So, yeah, three years ago now, probably that version of it. And I was just on holiday, wasting time playing football, but I haven't touched it since.

[Kieran Morris]

That's not that long ago. See, they made me relapse. Like, this is the thing that the. That Meadowlock made me do for this. I hadn't touched it for three years, and probably at the time that you were last playing it, and they made me get back on it. And the addiction is here than ever. My God. So stay away.

[Will Still]

I will. I consciously try to stay away from it.

[Pablo Torre]

I referenced before that. We've had you just, you know, making a couple of diary entries just for posterity and for the sake of journalistic thoroughness.

[Kieran Morris]

Yeah, the Asylum diaries, as I thought to call them. Yeah, I really. I really went off the deep end there.

[Pablo Torre]

Reading them back yesterday, many paragraphs that you. That you wrote for us.

[Kieran Morris]

I thought it was the right thing to do. And then I. After a while, I wasn't writing them for you. I was writing them for myself.

[Pablo Torre]

It is kind of like that scene in the movie Kieran, where, like, you investigate the. The villain's room, and you only get a sense of how truly deranged he is when you see his own personal writing on the back of, like, a menu that he was keeping or something.

[Kieran Morris]

Yeah, it. It tapped into a side of me that I have not felt in a long time.

[Pablo Torre]

There's one line I want to read from Kieran Morris, relapsed football manager, because it made me worried about whether we would actually get to the end of this episode with you intact. And so here's the line. December 20, 2023, 207:00am Quote, Pablo, I know you're reading this, and I just want you to know that I have never experienced failure like I've experienced in this current save. I suck. I'm the manager of Hoffenheim. We're dreadful. We haven't won in three months. None of my strikers can score a single goal. But look at the time. I cannot sleep until I win. And then 31 minutes later, your entry says, they're going to sack me. This is misery. December 20, 2023. I resigned before they could sack me. I got drunk and listened to the Smashing Pumpkins and decided to do the noble thing for Hoffenheim. Why does this game have such an effect on me, question mark? So, Kieran, how are you feeling, man? How's it going?

[Kieran Morris]

Oh, I'm happy to put this kind of last ride to bed. I can see why I moved on to other things. Like, this is dangerous. I need to. I need to do other stuff. I think I need to not have this be a giant portion of my life.

[Pablo Torre]

God. To quote you from December 31st. God, this is New Year's Eve. To quote you on New Year's Eve, Kieran, Jesus Christ. In response to what you just told me, quote, I'm in hell.

[Kieran Morris]

One trophy per season is not enough. You want to retire. That's kind of the weird aim of the game, is that you want to have your long, storied career and you want to go down the way. And then you've taken your club as far as it can go. You've seen all the real players of real life age out of the game and be replaced by computer generated players. You grow attachments to them. You go all the way into your dotage, you go into your 70s. I think at some point they might even name the stadium after you. And then you retire. There's an option you can select. It says retire, and then it shows you this review of your life and it says the trophies you've won here, your best 11. And it's. It kind of. Yeah, it looks out towards an afterlife in a game that it's all about, you know, building an empire that you get to look back on in your own time. You get to read your own obituary.

[Pablo Torre]

I love that. What you're saying is that the goal of football manager. Actually, here's the elevator pitch. Football manager is a game where the goal is to die. I feel like at the end here, I gotta say thank you, of course, to Kieran for. Yeah, you're reporting for your relapsing, but also thank you to your fiance because I can only imagine what this has been like for her for, I guess, literally years at this point.

[Kieran Morris]

Oh, yeah. I. As soon as she comes home tonight, I'm going to show her the little icon on my laptop and I'll let her take it off. I'll let it delete it for me. And we'll put this to bed until I redownload it.

[Pablo Torre]

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Meadowlark Media production, and I'll talk to you next time.