GamesSimFootball Manager 2024Football Manager 2024 is the best-selling entry in series history with 7 million gum-chewing devotees, studio pays tribute to ‘incredible community of players’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesSimFootball Manager 2024Football Manager 2024 is the best-selling entry in series history with 7 million gum-chewing devotees, studio pays tribute to ‘incredible community of players’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Sports Interactive)
Football Manager is one of those games that now feels like an institution. I playthe newest entryand, even though it’s a much-improved and more sophisticated experience, I am still in some sense a teenage boy at a beige PC with my treasured copy of Championship Manager 97/98. I’ve been playing some version of this game on-and-off for a quarter of a century.
Sports Interactive was founded in 1994 and has specialised in this one game ever since (with a few short-lived forays into hockey and baseball management). It has built a huge and loyal fanbase devoted to the Football Manager series, and has established the game as such an accurate simulation of the real world that it is now used in aspects of the sport (hell, there are even pro managerswho credit the game with their careers).
The studio’s statementcites various factors that helped in reaching this figure, including its first official release in Japan alongside console, mobile and Netflix releases. SI’s studio director Miles Jacobson says hitting seven million players “in barely three months gives me and everyone at the studio enormous pride.”
Over recent years Jacobson and SI have been going full-bore on making the game as accessible as possible, and its current major focus is a multi-year projectto add women’s football. Jacobson points out that language support for places like China, Japan and South Korea have resulted in Asia now making up “20% of our audience”, and SI has embraced every platform possible including subscription services “in a way that no other studio has.”
Jacobson is rightly proud of Football Manager’s growth over the last four years, “from celebrating two million players in 2020 to seven million in 2024” and pays tribute to SI’s “amazing team” and the “incredible community of players that we first started talking to directly in the internet’s infancy in the early ’90s.”
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Jacobson’s nicest moment, however, is when we forget about all the big numbers and the scale of the global game for a moment, and get back to what Football Manager means for the individual player.
“A lot of things haven’t changed [throughout SI’s history],” says Jacobson. “One is the reason we make games. People work very hard to earn the money to buy our games, often in jobs they don’t like and we provide their escape. We, as we did when I first got involved 30 years ago back in 1994, want to make the best value-for-money games on the planet, and provide people with a world where they can create football stories and live out their dreams.”
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