Football Manager History ... the Game

[seabas3]

FM is an amazing game. The ability that you have as a manager to take an unknown club from the lowest of tiers to the pinnacle of the continent, the ability to control the destiny of a club and country to amazing heights and glory. It makes us feel like footballing God's. FM has the ability for us fans of the beautiful game to play our club fantasies, to become legends of clubs and forge new frontiers and leave a legacy of insurmountable proportions. See FM allows you to build and unravel your career in the future; whether it’s taking Forest Green to the Premier League, Aruba to the World Cup, or making Liverpool the most dominant force again in England and Europe. The possibilities are endless. 

FM is not only an amazing game, but it is a database and a simulator of insane proportions. You can simulate 15, 50, 100 even 1000 years into the future if you wanted to, to see how FM shapes the footballing future for our humor. You can suddenly join in the managerial race for a club in the middle of 2024 even though you have never managed before. The possibilities are endless with FM, especially with how many leagues you can play in. This simulation process had got me thinking though, if we can simulate to infinity and beyond into the future, what about the past?

What if, we can take the simulation process that FM delivers now, but start not in 2016 or sometime in the future, but start in the past then play through history? Think about it for a moment, imagine taking your club through our football history and not only reliving it all, but also rewriting our very understanding of it. Let me introduce to you Football Manager History, the Game.

 

 

The Concept

• The concept is simple, but the game is a challenge. You can start at any point in the history of football and play as manager of that club as you would in any modern FM save. You watch as the greatest players, managers, and teams in our short footballing history challenge for glory as they did in the past but you are in management as well. You challenge for glory as a changing and growing globalizing world deals with political issues and turmoil which has shaped our planet to what it is today. Honestly think of the past and what they had to go through then, and I do not mean the 70's or 80's, imagine forming a team or taking a club that has had all their players killed due to the second world war. The possibilities are endless with this idea.

 

 

Where Would You Start?

• At any time in the past of organized football. See football has been played for thousands of years as archaeological finds have shown us, but not an organized official league with a head association. The first national football league was created in England on the autumn of 1888. Therefore, if you wanted you can start all the way back then as you play in the inaugural season of the football league. Now there were already many clubs around in the United Kingdom and Ireland then, but no real proper associations and leagues, therefore the first season had teams elected into the league. Therefore, if your club that you want was created by 1888 you can play friendlies with other clubs from then until your team is elected into the football league in later seasons when more divisions are added on. Or you can just wait until your club was elected into the league or joined in the national league when they did in real life. So, you may not actually take over your side until the mid-1950's or 60's, maybe even earlier or later, depending on what club you wanted to manage.

 

 

Club Selection

• Now there were other leagues then the football league at the time, there was also the Football Alliance. This was the case not only in England but in all other countries in the early days of their association football. Therefore, you will watch as other clubs from these leagues fight and join the main leagues, or fade away along with the other leagues and become dissolved. The great idea about this, is the possibility of taking teams that have been dissolved for 100 plus years and bring them into the modern game;
  • Have you heard of Bootle F.C.? They were an English Club based in Bootle, Lancashire. They were part founders of the Football Alliance League to rival the Football League, eventually in 1892 when the two leagues merged and the Football Alliance League became the second division for the Football League, Bootle F.C. were a part of that as well. Yet the club despite having 4 Welsh international players, finished 8th that seasoned and resigned the next season. They were replaced by Liverpool, then completely dissolved due to financial difficulties and were never heard of again.

  • So how about managing Bootle F.C., and you can keep them from resigning from the league and rather than be dissolved, they become a historical giant of the English game. Or, you reform the club under a similar name and take them from scratch and manage them in the ever-involving growing leagues - like creating your own club as in the modern FM games.

• As we know, the history of football shows hundreds, maybe thousands of clubs fighting for being re-elected into leagues and forming other leagues to compete with similar national leagues. Imagine having to deal with that as a manager of a club? With one bad season, your club dropping out of a football league all together and facing being washed away in history. 

• You start whenever you want, and you rewrite history.

 

 

You Are In Control of History

• Now this does not apply to just England, obviously now every country has a football league and football association, and the concept of FM History is to not only watch the historical development and growth of these associations and clubs, but to rewrite them or re live them. You can manage the historical countries which have now been split or have changed as you join the newly formed FIFA organization as international fixtures and the fight to see who is number one quickly sky rockets. You can rewrite the historical importance of these leagues, and management of these sides. This parallels with the FM17 today;
  • The idea of managing a national team for many of us is to be successful and have a sense of pride as you take your nation and bring the vast glory improving the standard of your footballing nation, or taking a nation that is not that big in today's football standards and watch them grow into a mighty power house as I know many have done in there saves over the past bit. FM History takes that similar approach. See not everyone joined FIFA right away - and like the concept of early club history you have the ability to join or not - you are in control of the nation, so they can join as a nation maybe before they did in real life. It goes well beyond this too.

  • The perfect football of the Dutch. The Indian side that refused to play. The Hungarian giants of the late 50's. You can be in control of those sides, managing the greatest ever players and you can give these sides and many more sides the glory that they never had, or you can rewrite history to cement what we have already known for many years. You can manage a Dutch side with a brilliant Johann Cruyff and finally gain that World Cup glory that never happened. You can cement history as you manage the Uruguayan side that held Brazil in the Maracana back in 1950, or manage that Brazil side as you win that first World Cup for the nation. Think of the Continental competitions as well, repeating Greece's miracle triumph in 2004 against a brilliant Portugal side. Who knows, maybe even win more than one World Cup with England, or finally win a tournament with the recently passed 'Golden Generation'. 

  • Like FM17, the ability of your clubs and national management can affect the overall performance of a nation. I know many that have taken minnows and try to build them as a regular football giant like Gibraltar, Jamaica, etc... Since FM History is the same as FM but just starting at a different time, you still can do that. Maybe if that India side could play in the 1950 World Cup, they would not be labeled as a sleeping giant. Maybe they would have improved their football system and invested in it as other nations did and become a powerhouse competing with the likes of Germany and Brazil. In FM History, you can control that side and lead them to glory and completely transform football not only for India but for the Asian continent. 

• The ability is not just to the World Cup. You can develop the different Continental Associations and maybe change the members of different associations depending on simulators throughout history.

 

 

Simulators

• On FM17 there is a cool new edition...a Brexit simulator. Now in previous FM games like FM16 I have seen the World Cup moved to different countries due to time constraints, I have also seen some nations join some associations like the EU or alliances. This has called for us managers to be quick and adjust to these new challenges, especially with the Brexit simulator in FM17. Now the ideas of simulators in the game can come off in FM History. If you look at human History since the beginning of the Football League in 1888 it has been chaos in all honesty. Two World Wars, the Cold War, mass genocide, human rights, natural disaster, dissolving of countries, and just so much more. The idea is that if you were to manage a team before a war or disaster, these real life scenarios will have the ability to possibly affect you;
  • If you were managing Everton in the 1914/1915 season and you repeated history by winning the title then, - now WW1 ravages the World and your players are shipped off to fight. Many of them may die in the WW1 and when the league continues after WW1 you may need to completely rebuild a team from scratch as all your players may have been amputated or killed. This is where simulators can come in, we have the ability to look up in club histories if this is possible of people who have passed on in the many wars over the past 100 years. Simulators here may not necessarily determine the winners of the war, but it will have the ability to simulate who passes on. This may not effect you if you are managing a nation or club who is not involved...which would be near impossible. Plus if you were managing a club that was dissolved at this time, then you would also be effected by this simulation as well. This concept applies to WW2, the Vietnam war, Bosnian war, and during the genocides and communist regimes of many countries. If you were to manage in North Korea, China, USSR, Vietnam or other countries during wars or during other disasters...then football may be suspended as it was in real life, but the players you manage...they may not be there when things have settled. Plus if you manage in extreme regimes like North Korea or China...your players may get in trouble, or your life as a manager may be threatened if you do poorly with the national teams. Maybe you will face what Zaire had to go through and deal with what happened to Zaire after the 1974 World Cup where pressure from governments and bribery caused the worst campaign to unfold.

• So simulators can be applied to Wars and Genocide however unfortunate. I believe in FM History there should be the ability for you to choose to add or remove these simulators, the goal is to tailor the game to you individually rewriting history but that is a discussion for another time. Simulators can also be applied to real life tragic events.
  • This simulation concept is applied to something like The Munich Air Disaster suffered in 1958 with Manchester United. This is a touchy subject, but can you imagine being in control of that team, and what if...what if they all survived...or only one player passed rather than the majority of the team...or how about guiding Manchester United after that disaster. Simulations can be added into these moments making the game more realistic. 

  • This concept is not just team disasters such as this one but also to fan disasters. There is the Heysel Disaster in 1985 which saw a ban from European Competitions for English Clubs, disasters like this should not be made fun of or fooled about with. The idea of this is to simulate the possibility of the fines that your club or nation will face and the influence of the associations on your club and managing your way through it. As with English clubs being banned from European competition after the Heysel Disaster. So replicating these real life examples into your save, but the ban may be short or longer, or it may just be a fine instead of a ban. That is where the simulation comes in.

  • Simulations can be applied to something that many suffered from in the early part of the 20th century...health and disease. This falls under the Simulation category for sure and will probably affect your club or team, depending on where your career is. We all know about the Spanish Flu after WW1, the development of AIDS and SARS, also famines and other diseases. In the early 1900 health was not the greatest priority and as such many players passed away or were unable to play. Things got better later on but transfers from foreign countries can also be affected by these things that have happened. Simulation in this instance can really instill fir and a crazy save if you are managing in the early 1900's.

  • One final idea I had was to simulate natural disasters. This does effect sporting teams but not as much as we would expect such as death of players, maybe more so when technology was nowhere near as advanced but this is just an idea. Where it could come in is something like what we see with the current FM games. This would be storms and other natural events that would cause delays or cancellations, obviously, technology and so on was not as advanced and travel was not as easy for many clubs and nations so this could be an excellent challenge for managing in the past. Who knows, maybe this could tie into the Munich Air Disaster in that if the association refuses to move your games you may be facing a situation where you may need to cancel or find a different way home when some players are left behind. THIS WILL NOT SIMULATE DEATH...if so it would be minimal as in next to nothing but it would be a realistic simulation in the limitations clubs and nations faced years ago. 

 

 

Corruption

• Unfortunately, corruption is in our beautiful game, and no matter how much we try it will be there because of horrible people. Yet it is not as prevalent today as it was many years ago, especially when politicians got involved all the time and death threats was just the common thing to do to get things going your way. As a manager in troubling times and when the police was not so great and easily turned away compared to today, you will need to guide your team whether it be through individual players or even yourself through the bribery and scandals. You may need to re-live some the scandals from football's dark past, or even go through something new. It is up to you as a manager, your life may be in danger as you ignore your owners or politicians and try to play an honest way, your life threatened and you must flee the country. You may need to deal with players boycotting your team or purposely putting in poor performances as other teams or people bribe them. You may not be affected at all by this. Corruption in the game is not meant to drive you insane and be the main thing in FM History. It is unfortunately going to be a part of the game, think of it as that little annoying thorn in your back side that comes and goes, sometimes worse, or never experienced. This time, that thorn may literally be a gun and your managerial career is over with that club, country or in a nation.

 

 

Currency

• Now of course with players comes money. In the real early days, it was not too much yet it is still very key. Of course, we will need to deal with the rising prices that we have witnessed since 1888, and also deal with insane marketing deals and watch football become a main feast for money dwellers. Eventually you must deal with not making 30 million pound transfers and understand the shrewd spending managers have done. Another challenge FM History offers.

 

 

Players

• This is the big one, the main reason why this idea can flourish so promisingly and what we all as not only managers and players but fans of the beautiful game dream of. Playing alongside your idols and creating a starting 11 of the best players of all time! With FM History you have that ability, as you do in your FM saves today. The difference is that it is not players of the past and it may be full of regens instead of real life legends. This could be a problem some might think, but it actually may be a tad more fun and creative as well. There are many different ways to play FM now, either have all real life players, a mix of regens and real life, or you have only regens...which will mainly happen. This concept can apply to managers as well. Some may say, well why not download a database with all historical wonder kids? Ya but is that really the same? And ALL the wonder kids at the same time? Really? So here is what you get with FM History;
  • 1) All real life players in real life time. So this idea is as it sounds. You will start your simulation whenever in history, then the corresponding players in that timeline will be put into the game and their age and probability of development will give them a guide to their abilities at that time frame. In this case however, you will not have Messi and Pele playing in the same team. Now there are a few tweaks to this system to keep you on your toes. See I asked someone about this and they said it may be an issue because we already know who the players are. Okay I understand that; it may be trickier in secluded nations and for really early times like 1890 in judging players but it is still a problem. Well there is a solution that FM already has. It is Probability of Development. That lovely bold, italicized and underlined phrase will make sure, that just because you by Pele, DOES NOT GUARANTEE, that he will be the God that we all know him to be. So Pele may have a potential ability of -10 or 200 in the algorithms, equations and what not...but there is a chance, that he will not fully develop into the player we know him as. He may be a really good player, an okay player or very unlikely he may not develop at all. One final consideration for this is if the players have a potential ability of 0…more on that later.

  • 2) All real life players in different time. Okay so this takes idea #1 but with a twist. Rather than having the birth dates of all players as they were, they are randomized in this case. This is great as maybe you will have the opportunity to sign Pele and Messi at the same time. It will also bring a possibility of an insane golden generation or just a poor period of football. This gives a new look and challenge to the players that we know.

  • 3) No real life players - only regens. So this is exactly what you will face when you go far enough into you save. In this case the greatest ever players do not exist, a clean slate if you will. This idea is NOT to replace real life players with other regens as FIFA does when one retires. Sure you may run into a Brazilian regen but he is not put there to replace Pele. This concept can also be applied to managers.

  • 4) A mixture of real life players and regens. Okay this is what you face after several regen days in your save. This time though it has the possibility of both option #1 and option #2. So, players can have the exact birth date but only some have been uploaded from history not all players and the rest are regens. Or it can be a real mix up of real life players at different times plus different regens. The quantity for the ration should either be randomized or pre-determined. Maybe an option to us?

 

 

Managers

·        This is the exact same as the player concepts mentioned above. You can rewrite or alter the history of some of the greatest ever managers. Replace managers or maybe get a manager sacked like Sir Alex Ferguson and Manchester United will not have the glory years that they had.

 

Other Important Things for Players

• I mentioned earlier about Probability of Development. See this is absolutely key in making this game a success. If it were not in the equation, then it would almost be the same simulation time and time again if you are using real life players. So the probability of development will give players the challenge of finding other players and not just buying all these other players.

• Now many may think that the above point is invalid as the best players will have the best potential abilities as we see for players in today’s FM saves. Well my solution to this would be using the negative potential abilities rating. So not only will the player have the possibility of not reaching potential ability (even though it is a low possibility) these players may not be as good as they were in real life, or being better then what they were. Of course it depends on the probability of development, game time, injuries, facilities for the time, etc..
  • A cool idea but one that would need much more programming I believe is bumping up the potential ability from 200 to 300 or more giving more options and realistic options to players. Just a thought on advancing the database that FM holds.

  • Another idea for a lot of players that we would have never heard of through history is to give them the potential of 0, meaning that they will have a potential ability of anything what so ever. Gives the game and players a more exciting approach.

• A good thing to note is that in the past there were way stricter limitations in transfers with foreign players making users unable to buy just a bunch of foreign youngsters. Foreign Imports also come into consideration with location of players when there was a real lack in globalization, communication, and affordability, also political conflicts. Especially in the early years of football.

• Another consideration for players is that for majority of football, the players had little to no power and agents the same. Bosman ruling was not until recent history, so some footballers will not be easy to get.

 

 

Conclusion

·        This game is a brilliant idea. Plus, it is not limited to purchasing a new one every year. With FM improving year on year, these could be updates applied to the game, as you will still start in the past. The only difference will be another yearly database update of new players from in real life, and maybe tweaks and other things. You never know.

 

 

There is so much more to this, 4100 words later and there are still many ideas and possibilities that can be flooded into this game. You out there reading this, first of all thank you for doing so. Second off please leave a comment and give me your thoughts and ideas. Would you play this? What would you add to it or change? Let me know.

 

Enjoy your FM saves!

seabas3

[Cougar2010]

I've only skimmed it and there are a lot of good ideas but ultimately I doubt it will happen for one main reason - Licensing.

There are several items in there that would have to overcome legal issues that would either cost a lot of money or simply would never be allowed.

[CFuller]

1 hour ago, Cougar2010 said:

I've only skimmed it and there are a lot of good ideas but ultimately I doubt it will happen for one main reason - Licensing.

There are several items in there that would have to overcome legal issues that would either cost a lot of money or simply would never be allowed.

There's that, and also, the amount of research that would be needed to go into this would be MASSIVE. You'd be talking at least seven figures in terms of the number of players and staff members required for something like this.

I'll admit that the OP has put forward his ideas reasonably well, although there are some that would make me feel uneasy, such as a war or disaster simulator. Also, for obvious reasons, there is virtually zero chance of Sports Interactive including anything like corruption in any future edition of Football Manager.

[westy8chimp]

21 hours ago, CFuller said:

There's that, and also, the amount of research that would be needed to go into this would be MASSIVE. You'd be talking at least seven figures in terms of the number of players and staff members required for something like this.

I'll admit that the OP has put forward his ideas reasonably well, although there are some that would make me feel uneasy, such as a war or disaster simulator. Also, for obvious reasons, there is virtually zero chance of Sports Interactive including anything like corruption in any future edition of Football Manager.

Exactly. Great idea but in the end impossible to implement with actual real players being generated. The best you could have would be the equivalent of the 'use fake players and staff' setup. Start date of 1818 would be easy for them to construct and they could pre-define wars etc happening with some written in events linked to it (such as they have pre-defined Brexit to happen in the future of FM17).

However, if for legal reasons [as I've been informed for one of my feature requests] they cannot include players being sent off for punching a player, or assaulting a referee, and they cannot include family deaths (such as Willian in real life), and they cannot include failed drug test global bans, or biting bans.... then they definitely won't consider introducing war casualties and genocide into the game haha!!

[blackdog]

Noticed yesterday a football management game on Steam where you can manage any English team in history. I remember a mock up of the first Football League season from SI? Many said they would buy it. I think SI have dropped the ball by not looking into this idea.

[enigmatic]

The other issue is of course that the human interaction with the simulation and divergence of results means that quite apart from Liverpool never join the Football League because Bootle keep their place, the Munich Air disaster never happens because Newton Heath are an ordinary mid-table club playing in front of 5000 fans in the second tier that really shouldn't be getting all these (quickly signed by the mighty Accrington Stanley) quality youngsters coming through and Matt Busby's City side are really quite ordinary etc. etc., so as it's not really paralleling history all that much you might as well start in 2016...

[Neil Brock]

On 11/6/2016 at 08:40, blackdog said:

Noticed yesterday a football management game on Steam where you can manage any English team in history. I remember a mock up of the first Football League season from SI? Many said they would buy it. I think SI have dropped the ball by not looking into this idea.

That was an April fool. For licencing reasons we just aren't able to do 'historic' seasons I'm afraid. 

[Cougar2010]

45 minutes ago, Neil Brock said:

That was an April fool. For licencing reasons we just aren't able to do 'historic' seasons I'm afraid. 

Moving away from the licencing issues how about something like a fictional SI created gameworld database.

Maybe it could be a chargable DLC depending on how much work would be involved. 

[Lucas]

On 07/11/2016 at 15:49, Cougar2010 said:

Moving away from the licencing issues how about something like a fictional SI created gameworld database.

Maybe it could be a chargable DLC depending on how much work would be involved. 

Fictional databases/universes are just not interesting or immersive enough. Not enough people would play it and people would much rather play with a real world database.

[blackdog]

On 07/11/2016 at 15:01, Neil Brock said:

That was an April fool. For licencing reasons we just aren't able to do 'historic' seasons I'm afraid. 

Yes I remember. But some other firm has taken the job on. How good it will be remains to be seen.

[benjabo]

On 09/11/2016 at 21:02, blackdog said:

Yes I remember. But some other firm has taken the job on. How good it will be remains to be seen.

Which game are you talking about, because I'll definitely get it if there is one out there.

[CFuller]

I believe this is the game in question. Bear in mind, though, that it is in Early Access and still being developed.

[Neil Brock]

Reviewed so locked.