This article will break down the ways that playing Football Manager can help you improve your understanding of football.
This article will break down the ways that playing Football Manager can help you improve your understanding of and appreciation for everything that happens off the pitch in order to get results on the pitch.
Whether you already consider yourself an absolute expert or you’ve just started to play casually, there’s always something new to learn.
Become a better bettor
If the massive popularity of Fantasy Football in the United States and the very lucrative industry that has developed around it have taught us anything, it’s that knowing your stats matters. If you want to have any chance of betting successfully, knowing your stats is essential.
Football Manager helps you practice tracking player and club statistics. It can be easy to only want to focus on your club, but the game encourages you to monitor your rivals as well.
This is good practice since successful sports betting relies heavily on statistical knowledge. You can use bookmaker’s betting guides to help get you up to scratch when you want to place a bet – its important to make sure you know all of the relevant information before using one of the top UK betting sites.
Of course, increased statistical knowledge doesn’t guarantee that all your bets will be winners. What it does do, however, is help you learn to make better bets. As fun as it can be to place bets simply based off a gut feeling, a betting strategy based on reality is a smarter choice.
Better understand the behind-the-scenes work
Two of the best new features in Football Manager 2022 are an improved Deadline Day experience as well as a new staff meeting component. These features both add to the authenticity and realism of the game, without sacrificing any of the immersive aspect.
For some, having to essentially do administrative work doesn’t sound like a fun video game feature. Fans of the game though understand how essential all of this behind-the-scenes work is to building a successful team.
These features also show how important effective communication is in running a football team. Once you’ve seen how this works in the game, it becomes easier to understand and appreciate how managers, staff and players work together, and you can identify the results of successful communication on the pitch.
Increase tactical understanding
The basics of football are fairly easy to understand. Once you get a bit deeper into the formations, managing styles and tactics, it can be a bit more confusing. In the abstract, it’s hard to visualise the benefits of a 4-4-2 system against a 4-2-3-1 or a 3-5-2.
Of course, you know what these formations look like on the field and how they should work, but beyond that, just watching football matches doesn’t make it much clearer. Not every team will adhere to their formations or play them to an ideal standard.
Football Manager allows you to control your team’s formation and see how it matches up against other formations in an ideal situation. By experimenting with the same players in different formations, you can see how a player’s strengths and weaknesses are highlighted or hampered by certain strategies.
By working through the formations in this manner, you can develop a better understanding of how and why managers make the decisions they do. Being more informed helps you to understand not only what’s happening on the pitch but why various choices have been made.
Develop an awareness of scouting
Another element of the game that Football Manager helps you develop a greater awareness of is scouting. While it would be so much easier if every team’s academy and junior teams produced the perfect crops of young players to replace older players as they retire, this just doesn’t happen in real life.
Scouting has changed a lot over the past decade. Currently, scouts, both professional and amateur, rely heavily on social media and statistical analysis to find the ideal players to fill the gaps on their team. This has largely replaced scouting trips as the initial phase of finding new players.
Obviously, a video game can’t recreate the experience of going on a scouting trip. It can, however, recreate the more modern scouting research and data analysis. Since this work all happens in front of a computer screen, it doesn’t even break the immersive nature of the game.
Seeing just how much work goes into finding new players gives you a better appreciation for the signing decisions that managers make. A player might not always look perfect to the average fan, but they might tick just enough boxes behind the scenes.
Knowing this can make you a more patient fan, giving new players - and the managers that signed them — a bit more time to prove their value to the team before judging them.
