Finding the Next Messi

How Clubs Are Using Football Manager to Help Them Find Their Next Star Player
 

- Paul Walker-Emig

The touchline pretenders among us aren’t the only ones scouring Football Manager 2017’s database for the perfect signing. From the big dogs in the Champions League, to the relative pups of the USA’s Major League Soccer, soccer clubs across the planet tap into the same database to help them make crucial decisions about the players that could take them to the next level.

“We have some clubs that will take every single aspect of data,” Sports Interactive’s head of business development, Tom Markham, tells me. “One of the Champions League clubs we are working with will evaluate the composition of teams. They’ll look back at older data and see what is the actual makeup—I’m talking nationalities, I’m talking characters—and they will use the attributes in terms of their evaluation. There’s another team in the Premier League that uses our data, and all they wanted was height and weight data. We’ve got clubs that will come to us, and they’re looking for player earnings and contract expiry dates. We’ve had Ray Houghton come in when he was working for the FAI, trying to find anyone who had an Irish passport who could potentially play for Ireland.”