Knights of the Cardboard Castle

As your stereotypical nerd, I never play sports games with the notable exception of racing games. Even then, I only play the mainstream racers and only with automatic transmission instead of the enthusiast-class racing sims. Still, I’ve always been curious about the Football Manager series and how it’s really a turn-based strategy game and not a twitchy action sports game, so I picked it up the 2013 version during the last Steam sale. Keep in mind that I know almost nothing about soccer. I still don’t quite understand how the offside rule works, for example.

• This game is truly massive in scope. I know that most players will probably choose to play in a European league of some kind. But since I have no emotional connection to any particular league or any team, I opted to mostly play in my native Malaysia and actually chose the team of the state I’m currently residing in, Negeri Sembilan. I’m still somewhat flabbergasted that the game not only allows this, but seems to implement every little detail correctly, down to the history of the club, its current roster of players and staff. The works. And that goes for every football club in Malaysia, even the itty-bitty ones organized by local universities and companies. And I can find all this detail represented regardless of which of the many countries I am able to choose. I know that they built up this massive database over the many years that the series has already existed already but it’s still very impressive to a neophyte like me.

• The learning curve is also predictably steep if you know nothing about soccer and have never played previous games in the series. The included tutorials are useful only for introducing the UI but don’t actually explain how things work. You’ll need to learn about different roles players have on the pitch and their acronyms, the dozens of skills represented in the game and which skills are needed for which role and so forth. Each league also has its own rules, and some of these can be quite obtuse. I briefly experimented with playing a US team but got quickly confused by their rules over salary caps for players. Then you have all the levels of advice offered by your staff, including assistant coaches, staff doctors etc., the quality of which depends on the skills of the staff themselves, and it all gets very overwhelming.

• The game covers all imaginable aspects of managing a soccer team. This includes hiring and firing staff and players, setting up the team’s tactics and their training schedule, reading and replying to e-mails, deciding who plays what position in each match, talking to the press and the players, the works. Consequently, it feels a lot like doing office work. You don’t even get any sound. I thought I had a bug when I noticed no sound at all from the game and went googling but no, this is the way it’s supposed to be. You do get sound during the actual matches and managing matches is probably the only work you can’t delegate to your staff. But your control during matches is limited to shouting instructions at players and deciding when to switch out substitute players. Otherwise, it’s pretty much watching the matches and keeping your fingers crossed.
• That said, the matches are surprisingly entertaining to watch and I am once again shocked by the variety and the level of detail that can be depicted by the engine. I have seen own goals where the ball struck the post but the goalkeeper accidentally redirected it with his hands into his own match. I have seen instances when a player passing a ball accidentally hit a fellow inattentive team member on the head with it. I have seen players who can kick only with their right foot visibly struggle when they are on the left edge of the field and need to keep the ball in play. It’s astounding. I can only imagine how rich a combat RPG could be if it could implement even a fraction of this level of detail. Let’s see, that guy is armed only with a longsword which he wields in his right hand. That means it’s much easier for him to do right to left swings than to do left to right swings. Consequently, if you always circle to approach him from an oblique angle slightly to his right, you’ll have a marked advantage.
• There’s a lot of randomness. It makes sense of course. In other games, an RPG say, randomness is mitigated by the large number of events in a fight and the final consequence is the sum of the effects of those events. Here, having a goal makes a tremendous difference, an event of overpoweringly significance. Similarly being unlucky and having your star player get an injury that takes three months to recover from can ruin your entire season. To test this, I’ve saved before a match and watched it play out many times. The results can be dramatically different each time. This is not usually the case in RPG fights. Of course, over the long run, having better skilled players and a superior strategy wins out, but this is a game in which you need to be psychologically prepared for some very tough breaks and huge upsets.

• This game is a huge timesink. Seriously. Of course, it depends on how much you want to micromanage and how much of each match you want to watch. For matches, you can choose to watch the entire 90+ minutes per match or to have the game skip to the key highlights of each match. Even so, simply playing out an entire soccer season is a serious investment of time. I can’t imagine how long it would take to play out an entire coaching career, from managing a small town soccer team to managing your nation’s World Cup team. You can optimize your strategy down to a ridiculous level of detail (such as for example giving instructions to players on how to handle corner kicks according to their individual heights and skills, altering these instructions for each match according to which players are actually playing and also by taking into account the heights and skills of each of the opposing team’s players in each match and so forth) so the potential amount work involved is just staggering.
• So is this game fun? Actually yes. It’s very satisfying to see a team that have worked hard on gel together and work well. But this also works very differently than other video games. For example, the feedback loop is very slow. It may take a very long time to see if a chosen strategy is working out well or whether or not hiring a certain player was a good decision. Often you have a bad situation but there is simply nothing you can do about it. For example, you may desperately need someone who can play on your right wing but your transfer budget is zero and your salary budget is all tapped out. There is literally nothing you can so but mitigate a bad situation as well as you can. It may be realistic but it’s very frustrating especially when you’re used to other games. And of course, as mentioned earlier, you need to be able to live with the fickleness of lady luck especially since in this game, winning teams tend to go on winning (because of the morale boosts) and losing teams tend to go on losing.
• That said, I have too little interest in soccer and too much attachment to the pacing and feedback cycles of more traditional video game designs to really give this title the time and attention it needs. To me, one of the most fun parts is in buying and selling players because that is where you make the most impact in reshaping the club but I believe that in most leagues this is only possible during narrow transfer windows and in any cases most of the clubs I’ve looked at have very little free money to make transfers with. I can totally see how this would be the most awesome game in the world for soccer fans however.

I’m glad I took the time out to get to know this game even though it’s a bit too esoteric for me to be really involved in. It’s always good to expand your horizons about what games are out there. I’m also very amused that there is almost no overlap between fans of this game and players of more mainstream video games. There is almost no discussion about this title on any of the regular gaming forums I frequent for example and while the community for this title turned out to be larger than I expected once I went looking for it, they also seem to talk about little other than this game. It’s a strange, strange insular world.