Credit: Publicity/SEGA
In 2020, Scots Celtic Football Club are looking for a young player in Croatia to reinforce their first team. THE BetGold reinforces the fan’s passion for the sport. Striker Ivica Strok, an 18-year-old bet for Celtic’s attacking sector, was signed in exchange for £5m after starting his career in the Croatian second tier. After dominating Scottish football by winning the league for two years in a row, the mission to seek glory within the continent was launched and Strok ended up becoming one of the biggest signings in the entire history of the traditional Celtic.
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The story, as beautiful and successful as it is (Ivica scored 855 goals in 939 wearing the shirt of NK Zagreb and CFC), was only written by an alternate reality present in a simulation game: Football Manager. At the time, young Jonny Sharples, who lived in Salford, England, had to deal with reality in a real and tragic way.
Four days before Christmas 2014, Jonny’s brother took his own life. « During the time my brother was gone, I played a lot of Football Manager to keep myself busy and played a campaign where Ivica Strok was the star of my team. In the period between my brother’s death and until my return to work, I focused a lot on the game and that helped. During Simon’s funeral, we found the Calm Zone, an organization that focused on mental health and male suicide prevention, which was close to where I lived. We decided to hold a collective crowdfunding and that’s when I decided to combine the two things and use Football Manager to collect donations for the entity », Jonny told the English press.
The first edition of Football Manager was released in 2004, but the football simulation game’s past really began in 1992. Dissatisfied with the style options available in the late 80’s and early 90’s, brothers Paul and Oliver Collyer decided to create their own simulation game at home in the county of Shropshire, near the city of Birmingham. After years of working on development and giving birth to ambition, the first Championship Manager was released in the year 1992 for the Amiga and Atari ST computers and soon after for the PCs.
In the search for publishers, the game’s limitations due to the lack of real-time action were the reasons why companies like Electronics Arts refused to partner with CM. However, the current Square Enik, called Domark and Eidos Interactive at the time, embraced the challenge and the ’93 edition of Championship Manager was published. After nearly 10 years of partnership and evolution, Eidos split from Sports Interactive, the developer created by the brothers in 1994, and entered into a partnership with Japan-based industry giant Sega. With the split, SI kept the source code, the database and game programming, while Eidos got the rights to the Championship Manager brand.
If CM’s success wasn’t the same after the breakup, the new Football Manager, released in November 2004, soon became the fifth fastest-selling game at the time. Breaking sales records and adding new features with the development of technologies and the gaming industry, Football Manager has taken a worldwide reach. According to Miles Jacobson, Director of Sports Interactive, Football Manager 19 and its variations surpassed the two million editions mark in July 2019 (the game was released in November 2018).
Football Manager’s impact on the gaming world was so unique that cases like Jonny Sharples and the star that never existed, Ivica Strok, came to life. In Brazil, the game has been facing a dilemma regarding its rights for some editions. Since 2016, the original version of FM has been legally prohibited from being marketed within the country due to the bureaucracy of image usage rights for Brazilian players and clubs. Currently, the game makes all Brazilian teams available with generic names and colors to avoid problems since Flamengo was one of the first to manifest and thus forced Sega and Sports Interactive to adopt a stance that does not involve risks by deciding to cancel the games. sales nationwide.
Despite the limitations, the Football Manager database remains one of the most complete when it comes to finding promising players, for example. If in the past, stars like Tó Madeira existed, currently the game is able to anticipate itself in relation to several clubs to bring the names that will be the agenda of world football in the near future. With more than 25 years of frequent updates and with more than 800,000 individuals present, the database is made up of volunteers and members of the studio, who work to make a Brazilian Serie C player as realistic as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
The support and passion of fans around the world is well represented in a specific case involving a Norwegian player. In the year 2014, a promise of 15 years appeared in Norwegian football. Despite having already made his professional debut with the Stromgodset shirt, Martin Odegaard could not be part of the FM virtual world for legal reasons, until the player’s father appeared on social media with written permission, releasing his son to integrate the database in an official way, which forced the game to release a special update to include Odegaard in the database and, in a way, became an action to give more popularity to the player inside and outside the virtual world.
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