Appointing a Football Manager addict

A Guest post from Alexbrfc of Football Manager Blog

The concept is simple: take charge of a non-league club, get good, and win the Champions League. Easy. Although it’s clearly not. It’s got to be every Football Manager players dream to guide a once lowly, cash-strapped team to the dizzy heights of the Premiership, something which I’ve tried, and incidentally never quite succeeded, every year since Football Manager was developed in 2005.

For me, the attraction of lower league management only came to me once I had reluctantly accepted the fact that it was going to be difficult for Blackburn Rovers, who I’ve supported all my life, to win the Premier League again without some serious investment and a lot of effort. Ever since then, my longest Football Manager games have always come with lower league sides, most notably (to the best of my memory) Oxford United, Ilkeston Town and AFC Wimbledon, and currently AFC Telford United.

Ever since I discovered the magical world of LLM, I have never started a game with a top-flight club (with the exception of Blackburn, who I start every new edition of Football Manager with, just to get used to the newly developed, updated version of the game, but never to actually play seriously). To be quite honest, I can’t see myself ever going back to managing Premiership sides, unless of course I have managed that club from non-league or something.

The popularity of FM has undoubtedly grown over the past few years, and it has now firmly established itself as part of our sporting/gaming culture. This got me thinking; as more people are living Football Manager (there’s no such thing as ‘playing’ Football Manager, you live it), surely it can’t be too long before someone gets a real-life managers job, simply based on their FM career. Many people have applied to professional clubs because of their achievements on the game, myself included, but possibly the most famous applicant is John Boileau, who in 2006 applied to become Middlesbrough’s manager, albeit unsuccessfully.

Taking a non-league club into Europe, or even ‘just’ the Premiership is a fantastic feat, and one that in arguably the most difficult Football Manager edition, should be considered even more special. By writing this blog, I’m not taking anything away from real-life football managers. I assume they have an immensely difficult job at times, and there are certainly aspects of real-life management that Football Manager doesn’t cover at all. I’m just saying that tactically, I believe someone should be given a chance at a real club, preferably one in a very, very, very low league. If it all goes wrong and it doesn’t work out, then I’ll take it back.

Can you imagine the publicity the club would get from such an appointment, though? Sky Sports News would be there in a flash to speak to ”football’s first video game manager”. I’m not saying any right-thinking, sane Chairman would even consider such applicant though, and if they value their job and their club then rightly so, but as the realisticity and subsequent popularity of Football Manager increases, surely it can’t be long before we see, and envy, the man or woman who goes on to live out their gaming dreams in the real world. As Dr Pepper once said, ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ Actually, don’t answer that.

Alex Blackburne is a writer that we should all look out for, as the journalism student takes on the world of blogging keeping up to date with the adventures with newly formed AFC Telford. Anyone interested in lower league football management in FM should really take a read of this blog as he may teach us all a thing or two on how to succeed when we have no money and surrounded by a lot of part-timers, and this is only his experience as a student.

Tagged as: AlexBRFC, Guest article, Lower League Management