Football Manager Stole My Life Read online

  I can’t even begin to tell you how disappointed I was when I actually saw him play for Dundee United!

  Stuart Milne was the Dundee United Researcher from 1998, before heading up the Scottish data two years later. He’s still searching for that elusive East Fife fan willing to help him out… You’ll find him on Twitter @SGMilne

  SACK THE

  BOARD

  When Football Manager goes wrong

  SI Towers is a big, slick operation. It still looks a lot of fun, but 20 years after the game was first released, the kids that created it are all growed up, and the BB gun fights, penalty shoot-outs and Duke Nukem marathons that were once part of office culture are no more. Every year, this studio reinvents the game and takes over the media and the market. Usually, it all runs as smoothly as Theo Walcott, but when it goes wrong, it falls apart like Owen Hargreaves.

  CM3: WHO WATCHES THE WATCHDOG?

  Let’s begin in 1999, at an earlier incarnation of SI Towers. A phone rings and all the weight of the BBC and its consumer champion, Anne Robinson, comes down on the young men within.

  Ov: Oh, did we end up on Watchdog?

  Miles: Oh the Watchdog thing was brilliant!

  Paul: Actually, sales took a rise after that.

  Miles: We’re the only people in the world that got slagged off on Watchdog and our sales went up.

  Ov: I mean, I would say we were panicking then.

  Paul: Was that CM3?

  Miles: I think so.

  Ov: There some nasty questions in there.

  Miles: Well there was one. The reason it ended up on Watchdog, if I remember correctly because this was before I was full-time, so I don’t have to take responsibility for this one… wasn’t something changed at the last minute and it wasn’t checked by our publisher at the time? So the discs went out and literally would not work on certain specs?

  Ov: I don’t think it was that bad, I think it was a sort of combination of people complaining about general crashes. I mean, there might have been something like that, it was pretty nasty.

  Paul: It was pretty bad.

  FMSML: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GO ON WATCHDOG?

  Ov: Yeah, well we didn’t actually appear on the programme, like, in person. It was like they got in touch with us – I think it was a fax, not even an email – saying, ‘Here you go, we’re going to put you on. We’ve had a few complaints about you. Would you like to make a statement?’ I think we had a chance to say something, and it was really strange. I think we all ended up watching thinking, ‘This is us, this is terrible’. You know, looking at the TV thinking, ‘How bad is this going to be? Is this the end? Is this the sort of, you know, the final nail in the coffin for us?’ But it turned out the majority of the feature was a build-up, like talking about the game, trying almost to promote it. There was a little bit at the end saying, ‘Oh, a few people have had problems’ and then that we’d already had a statement, or we’d fixed it, we’d put a patch out.

  Miles: Yeah, the patch was out already.

  Ov: We had a bit on the feature saying, you know, we’d responded quickly, we’d sorted it out, download from here. So it actually turned out quite well for us.

  Miles: Not only did we do ‘download from here’, also there was a number given out to phone up, and you’d be sent it on a disc. It worked out all right in the end.

  CM4: CRASHED OUT

  With each game bigger and more successful than the previous one, SI aimed CM4 at a launch in the autumn of 2002. However, they were now producing a global bestseller with the same team and using the same practices as they had when they started out.

  As the scheduled release date passed and then disappeared in the rear-view mirror, and with staff asleep at the wheel from overwork, the game was released six months late and with more bugs than the Watergate Hotel.

  Miles: CM4 definitely came out with too many bugs; it was six months late when it came out.

  Paul: Actually I think CM4 was one of the best lessons we had, because we realised when the game is just that big, we can’t be this disorganised. We’ve just got to organise ourselves as a company.

  Miles: And that’s when I moved across full-time. I shut down the other things I was working on to come in and try and sort it out. But we were completely blinded on CM4, we’d been working on it for so long, and were so disorganised that we were doing 16-hour days.

  Ov: But we massively underestimated what we had to do on it, and how long it was going to take. That’s probably the biggest thing we’ve managed to improve on, being able to estimate how long something will take.

  Paul: We rewrote CM to CM2, we rewrote CM3, so we thought, you know, another big update, we can rewrite. But the game had got so big by then. I can tell you, we haven’t rewritten a thing since then and we’re not going to. It’s in a situation where we can do bits and pieces.

  Ov: We rewrite modules each year.

  Miles: We rewrite modules, and that’s the biggest lesson we learned. But at the time with CM4, when it came out we did actually think it was good. We didn’t realise how many bugs there were because we were a bit blinded to it, and as well as changing the production practices after that point, we changed the QA [quality assurance] practices as well.

  Paul: We were just deluding ourselves through tiredness and exhaustion and hope.

  Ov: We were six or nine months late with it weren’t we?

  Miles: Yeah six months late as well.

  Ov: There was a lot of pressure from the publisher and rightly so. We’d said we were going to do this game a lot sooner and we just hadn’t.

  Miles: The stage we’d got to as well, it had become a running joke in the office, who could actually stay up the longest. Vaughany collapsed after about 67 hours straight.

  Paul: Yep, and then we put a crash bug into it…

  Miles:… I beat that, but I was hallucinating at the time. I was trying to get to 69 hours because I thought it’d be funny. At 68 I started to hallucinate.

  Ov: At some point we’d twigged that you actually get much less done in that situation.

  Paul: I mean also the fact people start settling down. In the old days, you start work at three in the afternoon and then you work till three in the morning. But that becomes less practical as things become more organised and bigger.

  Ov: When we got more people.

  Miles: To be fair, I’m in the office from noon, but I do work from home in the morning and I do still work till 3am a lot of the time, because there’s so much to do. I like still doing it myself. I’m no good in mornings. Paul’s here at 9am. We’ve all just adapted to how we each need to work as part of the team, and have an understanding of that as a team.

  FM09: RUNNING OUT OF STEAM

  By 2008, FM combined the traditional disc purchase with an online authentication system designed to combat the widespread piracy problem that continues to hold back the game’s year-on-year development.

  Instead of getting ripped off by pirates, they were attacked by a new enemy, the hackers who went over the ball and studs-up on the new system, leaving gamers all over the world with a disc they could not use, and making the director of FM as popular as the chairman that sells Eden Hazard behind your back.

  Miles: We introduced online authentication, and for whatever reason someone decided to do a denial-of-service attack on the authentication system, which was the third party company, the night before release. We’d had some dark days on CM3 and CM4, but that was the worst 72 hours of my life. I didn’t go to bed for 72 hours, just trying to get people up and running and work out what was going wrong, and it was just a huge denial of service attack.

  Paul: So basically people couldn’t play the game, because you had to go online and register it all. Then they couldn’t get online to the servers to do it, so they’d bought this box that they couldn’t play. It doesn’t get any worse than that.

  Miles: It was just devastating, absolutely devastating, because we’d all worked so hard, it was the best game we’d ever made
at that stage. I think FM12 beats it now, but death threats, everything under the sun. I think that’s the only time I’ve had serious death threats.

  Ov: You got death threats?

  Miles: I get death threats most years, but that’s the only time it was just about the game.

  But I could completely understand why people were angry. Maybe death threats were a little bit too far, but I could understand everyone’s anger. I was just as angry, for a start.

  Ov: I think if you’ve bought the game and you can’t play it, you can’t start it, that’s awful, but in a way it’s worse in the past where, say, your game would crash, and you couldn’t get it back. Then you’ve invested hours and hours in your team, and, I mean, what do you tell someone in that situation?

  Miles: Well we try and fix them now, when it happens. We’ve been involved in this for quite a long time, but it’s been quite a young industry and the tools at your disposal, in terms of games crashing, we’re a lot stronger now, you have better programming tools. I mean, going back 10 or 15 years there were all sorts of mistakes being made everywhere. I think that hopefully ‘saved game corrupted’ is a thing of the past.

  MORE THAN

  A GAME

  How you have helped raise over £1m

  for good causes by playing FM

  Their logos appear every time you load your game up and they are on the advertising boards around your ground, but how much do you know about the charities that are supported and inspired by Sports Interactive?

  BEN KNOWLES, DIRECTOR OF FUNDRAISING, WAR CHILD

  War Child help children and their families whose lives have been disrupted by conflict. Their partnership with FM has raised over £1m in direct donations and in-kind support. That money goes directly to working with children whose problems extend far beyond which formation to use in that tricky Champions League qualifier.

  We met in the 1990s – I knew Miles in the music days. War Child’s first album was in 1995 and our paths have crossed many times. I think he became involved through Feeder.

  The collaboration between War Child and Championship Manager and now Football Manager happened for three reasons. One, there was a definite appeal for Miles in the work that War Child was doing. It is a powerful and compelling cause and has an amazing impact on children’s lives.

  Two, Miles and the team had an opportunity when they were negotiating the new deal with SEGA and they were keen to write in a charitable objective.

  Thirdly, Julian at War Child and Miles are both big Watford fans. In addition to the strength of the cause, that helped. Personal relationships are important in building the kind of relationship we have. From the beginning it felt like a relationship between two sets of individuals who were passionate about the work they did.

  It was never just about getting a cheque once a year. There was a huge amount of personal involvement in it. Miles, as the figurehead, became involved more than we could have imagined. Since 2005 SI have been the single biggest donator to War Child. We have raised over £600,000 from the donations and I would be astonished if the added value for us has not outstripped that.

  We have a committee of people advising us on everything we do and Miles comes to that meeting once a month – we often host it at SI Towers. He has used his connections to help us in a number of ways, including our partnership with Guitar Hero.

  War Child prides itself on our relationship with young people in a way that few charities do. Those organisations often view young people as apathetic, but nothing could be further from the truth. They just need access to the information and games have become increasingly influential in that. The number of hours a gamer spends in front of FM is more than the most dedicated music fan would spend listening to their favourite band.

  War Child benefits over and above the donation we receive from every single game. Our presence on the in-match advertising hoardings is given for free and that’s a click-through to the War Child website. In the months after release that is our biggest referrer by a long shot and we designed a landing page for people who come to the site from the game.

  In 2009 we had a big project in Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. It was for street children, with no access to education, to give them the tools to create a future for themselves. This village was built on volcanic flow and these kids were playing football on volcanic rock, which is damaging to walk across. You wouldn’t become a slide-tackling centre-back there, anyway.

  We were raising money to build a pitch and buy equipment to keep them safe so they could learn the better parts of the game. That specific project was the one people saw when they landed from the game and that pitch has been up and running for a couple of years now.

  People come up to me at functions and say, ‘You’re the charity that comes up on the loading screen for Football Manager’. That level of awareness is brilliant for us. People who play FM are people who run big business; they are involved in international policy making; they are high up in the music business; they are artists and celebrities. All these people tell us their awareness of War Child came through FM.

  They have a committed fanbase within reach of their website and they are brilliant at telling these people about the work we do. That is hugely important for a small organisation like us.

  THE CONGO DIARIES

  War Child invited Miles Jacobson to see the work Sports Interactive and the FM community supports in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. He blogged about his trip at http://sportsinteractive.wordpress.com. What follows is a brief extract from that blog.

  Our first stop of the day was to visit a 17-year-old girl who is part of the independent living programme put together by Maison Marguerite to try and get the girls that they can’t reintegrate with their families to become part of the wider society. It’s a new scheme, and there are three girls currently set up in this way from Marguerite. The scheme itself has to be taken slowly, as it’s not culturally acceptable in DRC for a woman to live alone.

  The girl’s story is quite hard to listen to, and she’s only able to talk about it now because of the counselling she’s had at the home. She describes still being alive as a miracle and, well, it is. She was 16 when the incident happened.

  An orphan, she was living with her grandmother and there were a few family issues which she doesn’t go into. One day, she was kidnapped, blindfolded, driven into a forest and thrown into a ditch where she thinks she was for a couple of weeks with no food, or water, just a couple of people guarding the hole. She awoke one day to hear a group of men discussing how they were going to kill her, but one of the guards was against this and when the men went away, he got her out of the hole, still leaving her blindfolded so she didn’t know who he was; he ran away, but so could she.

  She was able to find water to drink and some food in the forest, and walked for days until she found a road, discovering that she was in Rwanda. Determined to get home, she met a smuggler, and he helped her get over the border, where she made her way back to her grandmother’s. When she got there, she was obviously traumatised, so was sent to Ngangi to get some psychological help, and started the cookery lessons there, whilst also attending school, before being moved to Marguerite.

  Her grandmother wasn’t interested in any kind of reintegration into the family, so the decision was made to put her into the independent living program. Initially, this was with another girl as well, but the other one couldn’t cope without the safety net of Maison Marguerite, so went back.

  The girl is still at school, and about to do her final physics exam. She’s an obviously clever girl from talking to her, and speaks a bit of French as well as her native Swahili. She’s also an incredible cook, giving us some delicious donuts, waffles and chapatis, which she sells when she isn’t in school, and hopes to turn into a business (possibly with the help of the micro-credit system which I wrote about in the last blog).

  Long term, she wants to become a nun to be able to teach others, although there was a slight irony that
of the two posters on her wall one was of Jesus, one of a bunch of US rap stars, none of whose lyrics are exactly godly.

  She’s an inspiration.

  DANNY LYNCH, MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS

  OFFICER, KICK IT OUT

  Kick It Out began as a campaign called ‘Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football’, a little after the first Championship Manager game came out. Since then it has pioneered a programme of education on issues around diversity and inclusion, the relevance of which remain undiluted 20 years on.

  It was a fairly dark time for football in this country. The relationship came through Miles wanting to make a statement. Our logo is a statement. It was in their ethos. They are football fans with a social conscience.

  We have found a way of educating the people who play the game on issues of diversity. That logo is a way in. We can use this opportunity within that community to educate about what is happening in our world.

  Kick It Out was meant to be a one-off campaign but it gained so much momentum that we have become part of the football family; we’re supported by the FA, the PFA, across the clubs and in their communities. And our working relationship with SI is an active one. The offices are 10 minutes apart. When we do forums, or when we go to grounds, people say they know us through the game. I don’t think it’s possible to quantify the value of that.

  THERE’S

  ONLY ONE

  TONTON ZOLA

  MOUKOKO

  The best footballers you never saw

  In your greatest teams they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Baggio, Shearer and Zidane. In real life? Not so much. We sent Kenny Millar on a mission to track down some of the legends of the game, to find out what happened to them in the real world and how much they knew about their iconic in-game status