Your primary motivation for playing Football Manager will be to simply have fun. But did you know that there are some real-world benefits?
Football Manager blog on how to test your FM acumen in real-world
football.
Your primary motivation for playing Football Manager will be to simply have fun. But did you know that there are some real-world benefits that can come from being an expert at the game? After all, there have been players who have gone on to manage real-world professional clubs. You might not be quite at that level, but there are ways to check your skill level. In this blog, we’ll run through some of the best methods for doing just that, including using an introductory betting offer to test your acumen, monitoring your youth player gems, and coaching a Sunday league team, among others.
Monitor Your Star Prospects
Is there anything better than unearthing a young hot-shot prospect and convincing them to join your Football Manager project? Not in our book. Watching their value, stats, and all-around performance develop brings a level of satisfaction that is right up there with winning all those virtual trophies. The fun thing about Football Manager, of course, is that those players also exist in real life! So don’t just monitor their progress in your game.
Of course, there’ll be some players who fail to make the grade. The creators of Football Manager often hype up some players who never really fulfil their potential in real life. However, those players you can just leave out of your “Real World Players I Coached To Greatness” list.
Analysing Tactics
Most people watch football games with a relatively limited understanding of the tactics that both teams are using. Put your knowledge to the test by using a free bet to back the winner of the match, based on your own insights. You might just find that you get things correct more often than not.
And, of course, your knowledge of tactics will come in handy in another way, too. For example, if your team loses a match, you can regale your friends with what the manager should have done. The fun part about doing that is that you can never be proved wrong.
Coaching a Club
If you’re a dedicated Football Manager player, then you’ll clearly have a passion for the tactical side of the game. While you can just keep on playing virtually, it could be interesting to bring things into the real world. Your job will be to set up the team in a way that you think will lead to victory, just as you do in Football Manager.
And if you want some motivation, remember that some people have successfully made the transition from Football Manager player to real football manager. Shadab Iftikhar has coached a handful of teams and is the current manager of Fort William in Scotland.
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| FM player, now real-life manager, Shadab Ifthikar. |
When you give instructions in Football Manager, you can be reasonably
confident that the players will follow the orders. You might lose the match,
but the players will have done as they were told.
Final Thoughts
As we said at the beginning of the article: you can just play FM for fun if you like. But it’s worth thinking about what skills you may be developing while you play without even realising it. Researchers are beginning to understand that playing video games can give the player a whole host of unintended skills, and that seems to be the case with Football Manager, too.
