Can Football Manager be an esport?

Simulation game Football Manager has been a fan favourite for many football fanatics over the years. As the spiritual successor to Championship Manager in the 90’s, Football Manager has engrossed football fans by providing them with the opportunity to take control of their favourite teams and act out seasons — solo or with friends — as if they were real managers. 

Football Manager’s popularity has only grown throughout the years with the franchise’s latest edition regularly appearing in the top 20 of Steam’s top played games. According to a post by Sports Interactive Studio Manager, Miles Jacobson, in August, Football Manager 2024 has been played by over 12m players, an increase of 97% year on year. 

The game is regularly lauded for having a passionate and loyal fanbase that is willing to put hundreds of hours into the game itself. But, even after decades of development the franchise is still looking at new opportunities to expand its horizons — and, surprisingly, esports could be one of them.

In Football Manager, players make strategic decisions on how a club is managed, meaning they have control over team selection, player transfers and in-game tactics that are applied to simulated matches. The main hurdle with Football Manager esports is that it is an unpredictable simulation game. 

Whether it is a solo or online campaign, each club is run differently and has many variables that make it hard to objectively find the best Football Manager player. As such, finding the correct format is key. 

At the end of August, FIFAe hosted one of the most experimental esports events seen in a long time — taking a game that is traditionally an individual title and turning it into a competitive experience. The FIFAe World Cup featuring Football Manager looked to turn the simulation game into an esport, whilst also ensuring that it remains true to its roots. 

The event, which took place in Liverpool, gathered 40 players (20 managers and 20 assistant managers) from 19 nations to compete for its $100,000 (~£75,000) prize pool. The competition was split into two phases — the Group Stage and Playoffs — to showcase Football Manager’s traditional career mode and its draft feature, respectively. 

The Group Stage saw the 20 managers split into four groups, with each group given a team that represents them. Throughout the group stage, players would have to complete one offline season a day, totalling three seasons. How are winners decided? Well, since everybody in the same group was playing as the same team, points were awarded for how the managers performed in the league, cups and daily challenges.

In the end, the manager who recorded the most points at the end of the third season would be the group victor and move on to the playoffs. Another interesting incentive was that the winning manager of their group would also get the opportunity to visit the club that they represented. In this case, the clubs — decided by FIFAe and Sports Interactive — were Yokohama F Marinos, Brighton, Sporting CP and Dinamo Zagreb.

“It’s quite rare to have a tournament that does kind of test all of the elements of Football Manager gameplay, even within the single-player mode,” highlighted Football Manager YouTuber and FIFEe guest presenter Kevin ‘Lollujo’ Chapman.

“They [FIFAe] disabled the transfer window at the start of it so that’s a big test of your tactical ability, analysing a squad that you’ve got and building something out of that. Then obviously you get into the transfer shenanigans for a couple of seasons which tests another huge part of the game.”

The use of Football Manager’s offline mode for the tournament was seen by many as a test. FIFAe’s Group Stage, for example, ultimately became somewhat of a community and creator-led affair. Aside from a broadcast that followed the final Group Stage season, fans could only watch the action by going through FIFAe’s channels for unlisted streams of each manager, through the manager’s own public streams or on co-streamers’ channels. 

One Football Manager content creator, Zealand, even took the initiative to create an ‘NFL Red Zone’ stream at the event where he provided running commentary of each manager’s streams live, checking in on the action when possible.

“FIFAe has done a tremendous job. I wouldn’t say a bad word about the way they’ve put this together, but I don’t think they necessarily knew what to do with Football Manager in terms of what they should show and what they shouldn’t show,” said Zealand.

“I definitely came in and I went, ‘I think a red zone style broadcast of this tournament is what I would want to watch’ … so I just sat down and did it, it was 11 hours a day, but time flies when you’re having fun.

“I suck at maths, I’m bad at science, but the one gift that I have in life is seemingly understanding what makes Football Manager great and understanding how to show that to other people.”

This doesn’t mean that FIFAe’s official channel was void of content though throughout the Group Stage, with daily press conferences broadcast instead. These streams gave an opportunity for the players to attend a manager-style press conference, answering questions from guests in attendance. The conference was also used to inform audiences of how each manager was progressing with their selected team for every season.

The Football Manager FIFAe World Cup Playoffs were definitely more akin to a traditional esports broadcast, complete with a studio, analyst desk and crowd. The Playoffs also featured a range of special guests including football legend John Terry and English manager Sam Allardyce who provided analysis during the broadcast.

The shift from PvE to PvP also saw four managers — all representing their nations — clash in a two-legged single bracket using drafted teams to crown a victor. Ultimately it was Indonesia — managed by Ichsan ‘Miracle’ Taufiq and assistant manager Manar ‘wednesday’ Hidayat — who walked out victorious. 

Each member association was left to their own devices as to who would represent their nation, which resulted in well-known Football Manager streamers alongside unknown competitors. Indonesia, for example, opted to host open qualifiers, whereas some other nations decided to select participants through an application process.

When asked about this balance, Football Manager content creator and FIFAe guest host Ben ‘Doctor Benjy’ Carr stated: “I think you need it. I think we’re talking about the future of this. There was a little bit of, ‘what did he qualify for? Was he invited?’ Ultimately, it’s much like the World Cup, it’s a celebration of Football Manager. You need a bit of both.”

According to esports data platform Esports Charts, the event recorded a peak viewership of 25,000, with a total of 142,404 hours across its 52-hour airtime, lower than FIFAe’s previous events last year on FIFA 23. It’s hard to truly judge an event’s performance holistically when this is the franchise’s first major esports event. However, there certainly seems to have been a positive reaction online from the game’s fanbase and community. 

But can Football Manager legitimately be an esport game at its core? Or is it too much of a game of chance?

“I’ve had a lot of conversations this week with a lot of different people. There’s a large segment of people that believe Football Manager shouldn’t be an esport,” said Zealand. “My counterargument all week has been, people compete at Excel spreadsheets. So why not compete at a football Excel? 

“Like I get the point, I’ve always likened high-level Football Manager to playing professional poker, but at the end of the day, there are still professional poker players.”

It was not the first time Football Manager was likened to professional poker, which combines skill and luck.

Lollujo added: “Football Manager is always going to have limitations compared to other esports, in that there is such an uncontrollable element, the random element…  it’s probably closer, I would say, to something like the World Series of Poker.”

Ultimately the long-term possibility of Football Manager as an esport depends on whether FIFAe and Sports Interactive will continue to host events of this nature. Seemingly, per an update by Sports Interactive, the company isn’t willing to fully commit to a yes or no answer straight away. An excerpt reads: “Alongside the FIFAe team, we will digest and evaluate the tournament in the coming weeks to see what learnings we can take and what the future entails for collaboration between us.”

Nevertheless, for Sports Interactive, this event was considered a big shift in its opinion on Football Manager as an esport. Whilst the FIFAe World Cup featuring Football Manager was the largest FM esports event, there have been smaller, streamer-focused competitions such as the Streamer Showdown, created by Doctor Benjy and produced by Nerdphonic from 2020 to 2023.

“I spoke to the people of Football Manager and said, do you see your game as an esport? And at the time, they were like, ‘not really, we don’t think the game is made for that,” said Doctor Benjy. “I was a little bit like, ‘well, I’ll show you’, we’ll do something with creators.”

From the FIFA side, there certainly seems to be an interest in continuing to develop football esports (including Football Manager, eFootball and Rocket League) as a whole with FIFAe. 

FIFA told Esports Insider that it has incorporated football esports competitions into the FIFA Statutes (the basis of FIFA’s legal framework for operations), aligning it with other competitions such as Futsal and Beach Soccer. The football body noted that this aims to provide a strong foundation and framework for its member associations to develop local football esports competitions.

Whether or not this is the start of a new Football Manager esports experience, one thing that the event showcased was its passionate community. Around 100 virtual football managers attended the ACC Liverpool Arena to watch the finals and interact with other members of the fanbase. For many Football Manager players — some of whom have played for over 10 years — simply seeing the game being given the esports treatment in an engaging manner was a pleasure in itself.