#FOOTBALL MANAGER 2015 MANCHESTER UNITED SERIES#

Having spent weeks of my life playing the game, and a few more days watching and reading about others’ accounts of their wondrous feats in fake football management, I have become extremely tempted to try my hand at the latter. This directly speaks to the notion of control that I touched upon earlier, albeit in language more appropriate for a Game of Thrones setting than the corporate world of football management. Very rarely have the irrational behavioral tendencies brought about by a deep-seated unwavering addiction to the game been so clearly expressed. Me I feel like a god, sat astride a mountain, staring down at the mortals as they scurry like ants, desperate to do my bidding, fearful of my wrath. Before I get back on track with the intended direction of this post, I must suggest you read this article about FM addiction, and how it could well be a medical condition.ĭr When you play the game, how do you feel?

#FOOTBALL MANAGER 2015 MANCHESTER UNITED SERIES#

True story, last week I actually got up on my feet and clapped at my laptop screen at one goal scored by popular Youtuber Spencer Owen in his FIFA 15 Ultimate Team series “The Zarate Kid”. In fact, the only two things I consider nearly as addictive as playing the game are: watching videos of other people playing the game, and talking to others about memorable exploits in my Now I’ve done more than my fair share of the former, whiling away precious hours following Youtube channels on which fellow FM-ers upload videos of their saves, and I have often found myself whooping with joy as those dots in the 2D match screens orchestrate beautiful passing moves to dismantle opposition defenses. For all these reasons, and innumerable others, I have truly never experienced any addiction as strong as that to Football Manager. And the beauty of it all is that we can do all of this while hunched over a computer screen in our bedrooms.

For the hundreds of thousands of devout football fans who dream of the big stage, this is as close to the real deal as it gets, and offers the best chance we’ll ever have of validating our vision of the way the game should be played and a club should be run. You can spend hours poring over years of statistical analysis, right down to variations in players’ performances over a few seasons, and ruthlessly discard those who fail to live up to expectations.

You shape legacies, creating and destroying careers with a few clicks of a mouse. You create detailed footballing philosophies, establishing a blueprint for the style of play you most identify with, and control everything from roles occupied by players within your chosen tactical philosophy, to fine-tuning your training regime to get the best out of your players and team. What really drives home the addiction is the feeling of total control of and responsibility for the fate of your chosen club. Everything about the game, from creating innovative tactics, mastering man-management skills that do away with actual inter-personal interaction, instead opting for the rather more convenient clicking of a mouse, and sorting out the club’s wage bill, to entering the transfer market looking for players who provide perfect combination of technical, physical, and mental attributes never fails to reel you in from the word go. For those of you who have played any version of SEGA’s Football Manager series, the aptly-named and ridiculously immersive simulation of football management, you will know there are very few experiences as addictive as spending hours glued to your computer screen, lost in the hyper-realistic virtual world inhabited by your footballing heroes.

Football manager 2015 manchester united