Why clubs are using Football Manager as a real-life scouting tool

It’s an unusual case of life imitating art – or more accurately, sport imitating video games. As reported on Monday, the long-running simulation Football Manager will soon be employed by clubs all over the world to help them scout for new players. That’s actual real-life players. Scouted from a game.

Developer Sports Interactive has signed a deal with sports performance analyst Prozone to supply data for a new online application, Prozone Recruiter. The service will allow clubs to search an international database of players, with each entry providing detailed performance, contract and biographical stats. It’s apparently designed to allow managers at all levels of the professional game to assess potential buys, not only in terms of talent but also their ability to play in different leagues and team set-ups.

“Prozone Recruiter has been built to supplement the intuition of scouts and coaches by delivering detailed performance information on over 80,000 players worldwide,” says Prozone’s CEO, Thomas Schmider. “The Sports Interactive database is a highly accurate and valuable resource that will further enhance the recruitment services that we provide”

The big question of course, is how browsing a computer game can compete with having experienced staff sniffing out new talent? And the answer is, well, this is no ordinary computer game.

The football simulation of champions

Originally named Championship Manager and first launched in 1992, the Football Manager series provides a painstakingly detailed simulation of club management. Every aspect of the manager’s role from scouting new players, to training, tactics and even providing emotional support to players, is part of the experience. 20m copies have been sold so far on PC, Mac, and smartphones, and most of the ardent fans are football obsessives who demand accuracy. Just as flight sim fanatics want the virtual Cessna 172 to fly exactly like the real Cessna 172, FM managers want their version of Yeovil Town to look and play like Yeovil Town. But better, obviously.

To ensure authenticity, Sports Interactive has spent the last 22 years building its own network of “scouts”, dedicated Football Manager fans who attend real-life matches and training sessions, and then file detailed reports on players so that the game’s database is authentic. Some scouts watch a single team, others a whole league, and all remain in regular contact with the development studio while swapping tips and experiences on the company’s buzzing forums.

“We have a huge network of 1,300 scouts in 51 countries around the world,” said Sports Interactive director, Miles Jacobson. “We used to look for fanzine writers, but now they tend to be bloggers. They’re extremely knowledgeable and objective; they’re frank about the positives and the shortcomings of the teams they’re covering. Because of this, they tend to get the respect of the clubs themselves, both the coaches and the scouts, so they’re often able to find out more information that way.”

Ecuador has got talent

One major benefit of Football Manager is that it provides easy access to lower league football in less romantic or harder to access corners of the football world – places where not every club can afford to send their own staff or develop local contacts. “It’s going to make it easier for managers to find players from further afield,” said Jacobson. “Think about the Ecuadorian players who no one knew about at the World Cup. I’d hope that match commentators were looking at our data, because we had them all covered.”

Indeed, it has long been rumoured that professional clubs have used the Football Manager titles to check out possible new signings. The game provides data on 300,000 players, each represented by a table of stats from striking and heading to positional sense and aggression. It’s a sizable resource. Indeed, in 2008, Everton signed an official deal to use the Football Manager database to search for players and staff. Last year, Manchester United legend Ole Gunnar Solskjaer credited the game with helping him to prepare for life as a manager. Joey Barton has mentioned that he’s using the game, alongside taking his coaching badges, to prepare for a career as a manager.

There are plenty of other committed FM fans in the sport. Players like Yohan Cabaye, Antoine Griezmann and Gael Clichy are all known to dabble – many of them give informal tips to the Sports Interactive team, both on promising youth players and slightly awry stats. In fact, the FM interface is so familiar to professionals that Prozone Recruiter has partially designed its Recruiter tool around it. “It’s very similar to Football Manager,” says Jacobson. “Managers can search for specific positions, for key stats, and the information is based on both historical data from Prozone and the data that we provide.”

Of course, discovering fresh talent has always been part of the professional game. However, in the modern football industry, where well-known players attract ludicrously inflated transfer fees even as fairly formative talents, being able to look further afield and track down bargains is about more than bolstering a side’s back four; it’s about making money. “Scouting is an integral part of a lot of club’s business model today,” says Jacobson. “Udinese, for example, built itself up from a tiny club in the Italian second tier by signing players like Alexis Sánchez for e250,000 and then selling them for e32m to Barcelona.”

It could be that modern managers are now at a sort of disadvantage if they don’t take Football Manager seriously. Journalist Lee Hall used to edit the Official Football Manager magazine and now writes for the Professional Footballers Association Magazine, for which he recently dug up a story about Alex McLeish. “When he was manager of Rangers, he was tipped off by his son, a keen FM fan, about a young kid he’d spotted playing for Barcelona B. Alex’s son said he should sign the player, but McLeish ignored the advice, saying he’d never hear of him. The player was Lionel Messi.”

In an era of pervasive digital technology, where social media applications, games and news sources are beginning to merge imperceptibly, it’s perhaps only natural that the machinery of football digitises too. The next step is probably a speed-scouting phone app for harassed managers on transfer deadline day. Prozone Recruiter meets Tinder, anyone?

Football Manager 2015 is due out on PC and Mac in October.