Accuracy of Football Manager

The accuracy of Football Manager must be at the forefront of your minds when you buy the game itself, I hope to put some sort of aspect to how realistic football manager can be considered. Could it be seen as the oracle? Or is more like a randomized football simulator? Although the question itself is one of the same bracket as ‘how long is a piece of string?’ From searching through various threads and articles I have come to conclude:

Finance wise:

The amount of public information that football clubs have to release publicly is quite a fair bit. For example here is Chelsea and a few snippets of information released on their website for the year 2009:

- Group turnover was down from £213.1m to £206.4m

- Turnover was generally flat. The small year-on-year reduction reflects the front-loaded nature of certain sponsorship revenues

- Loss for the financial year reduced from £65.7m to £44.4m

- Remainder of shareholder debt of £340m was capitalised

- Net capital expenditure reduced from £85.1m to £4.2m following the completion of major capital projects such as the training centre at Cobham

- Cash outflow reduced from £107.4m to £16.9m

This is generally the same with each club, and therefore can be requested by the public and found out fairly easily, in regards to wages I think they release enough information for the information to be correct, or a good guess-timate, to the extent of it being 95% right-ish. But obviously the lower down you get the less accurate the details will be which is the same for the next section, due to less organization / corporate facilities on the clubs part.

Footballing wise:

Ok well it is difficult enough to judge people in real life, I suppose that’s why playing football manager the game is easier than actually having it in front of you as you don’t have all the values e.t.c.

Football manager has its own scout network that is huge, so essentially it has a huge database that is fairly accurate because of the scouts, which are good enough of an international network to rival the high end of the football spectrum. Even so that in 2008 Everton signed a deal with football manager that enabled them early access to their database so they could add/cross reference players before other clubs could view football manager when it was released.

Football manager is said to have a realty that is the best available at this current time, and it is hard to argue that point when the data they use accurately identified the exceptional talent of future football stars, including 15 year old Wayne Rooney. Naturally the information is not always perfect but the game has also predicted players like Tevez, Beckham and Vela. Many lower league managers have also revealed that they use it to look at certain players to look at them in a pre-scouting sense, as it is a cheap way of scouting a player to an extent.

An interesting story to come from the data of FM is Dinamo Moscow’s sports director Konstantin Sarsania who admitted that it was his son’s love of Football Manager that first brought midfielder Mariusz Lewandowski to his attention. Sarsania claimed that his son had spoken to him of the Polish international, having been one of the highest rated forwards in Europe in his computer game over the last two years. Upon closer, less virtual, inspection, Sarsania the elder was pleasantly surprised to find out that the real-life version of the striker was just as talented, thus initiating the transfer enquiries. Unfortunately, they did not ever manage to sign the Polish midfielder, not quite a fairytale ending again for the game.

Jose Mourinho’s chief scout when at Chelsea, Andre Villas Boas, is a self-confessed reformed addict of the game. It’s hard to believe the Andre didn’t make his life easier by listening to the recommendations of the game.

So make your own judgements, but it is accurate in most cases, maybe in my mind I see it as Wikipedia, In studying we are told not to use it because the information isn’t always right, and yes sometimes it isn’t, but for the majority of information it is accurate to an extent. Again same with real-life scouting system, they can overrate players and underrate players but essentially can anyone ever get 100% rating in accuracy?

Rasterbator

Thought I’d recommend this free download of Rasterbator , this is a download where you can get the smallest of image and blow it up using multiple sheets of paper because it uses dots to create it. Apparently according to my flatmate at university it works, I will try to do it during my holiday and show you guys the result. I explained it really badly but check out the link below to see all the information:

http://arje.net/rasterbator