Football Manager: Mutual Shaping between Game, Sport, and Community

Abstract

Football Manager is one of the most popular sports management video games. For twenty years now, it has been a best seller in all the countries of the world where football is culturally important. Its purpose is to simulate a manager’s career with an emphasis on data analysis and number crunching, especially the football match scenario and the football players’ quantified characteristics. The claimed realism of the game is therefore based, among other things, on the reliability of a constantly-updated database of hundreds of thousands of real football players. The community of gamers, organized in forums and networks around the world are de facto involved in a co-construction of a database which no organization would be able to set up. Yet, Football Manager is also a piece of commercial software, and a performative computer model in the football world: its database is becoming a key issue in the real life football world and this issue provokes debates and tensions in the gaming community. As Big Data is becoming a techno scientific promise in the football world, Football Manager’s metrics and database are becoming increasingly entangled in an economically growing world of real life football and data.