Part 1: Make me a Superstar

Can I take an extraordinary 17 year-old, and make him into a household name?
Kazuya Sato, a youth with no previous first-team experience and attributes that were adequate at best is my subject in this extensive (and highly scientific) case study. I aim to play him at right-back for every game he is eligible for, from the age of 16 until he bows out from the beautiful game. He takes all my free-kicks, throw-ins and corners, as these are the only areas in which his attributes suggest he excels. (Set-pieces corners, free kicks and long throws are all around 19 out of 20). Every two weeks I will take a snap shot of his progression ( a page on each players profile that charts how players attributes have risen or fallen over their career) and of his senior performance stats to see how he has developed. By specialising my managerial skills in set pieces, I hope to create a dead ball maestro on a par with Sinisa Mihajlovic or Zico.

So, allow me to introduce Kazuya ‘the Future’ Sato:

Part II coming soon!

Here at SEGA online HQ, a considerable number of the staff are involved with the Football Manager Live beta test. Of those that play, nearly all are avidly into the game and fiercely competitive when it comes to their carefully crafted team. As you can imagine, bragging rights are a valuable commodity where ‘inter-office derbys’ are concerned. Any win or loss is magnified hugely when your opponent is right next to you, or on your instant messenger contacts list. In my case, my ‘neighbouring club’ was one Dynamo Dave FC, with ‘Sega Mega Dave’ Kempshall at the managerial helm. Dynamo Dave were the kind of team that considered a couple of draws ‘a bad run’ and saw each victory as an opportunity to let the world know things were going well (thanks for the good news, Dave).

This is what it must be like to be a Tranmere fan on Merseyside, or a Brentford fan in South West London: permanently in the shadow of my wealthier, more successful neighbouring clubs. The Periodic updates on the successes of Dynamo Dave FC were already a familiar daily familiar event, and were getting more and more frequent. “Dynamo Dave are going from strength to strength”… “Sergio Ramos is really suring up my defence”… “I’m back up to 3rd in the rankings”, etc etc. Thank for the great news, Dave!

In the transfer market, where ever increasingly large sums of money were being splashed out by Dynamo on suitably glamorous superstars, they dwarfed my modest purchases. In the rankings, where his team hovered around the top ten mark out of 300-odd teams, there was also no doubting that Hearts were the minnows to Dynamos giants. For the record, Electronic Hearts stand at 177th, and have yet to win any trophies. I’d get into the office and have the dubious pleasure of hearing how Dave had won another multi-million pound competition, and consequently splurged the riches on a world class wonder kid or established household name that had long been on my wish list.

So, imagine my horror when I was drawn to play Dynamo Dave FC in a tournament called The 50 Champions Cup for a spot in the last 16 of this world cup style competition with the winners picking up a cool £1.16m in prize money. After all, my head to head record against Dynamo was less than impresive:

My thoughts turned to the giant-killing heroics of Barnsley as I saw it as an opportunity to upset the odds, and the form of my not so quiet neighbouring team.

I made sure my best XI was available for the match and tinkered with my tactics to accommodate for the inevitability of being under pressure for most of the game. My defensive line was deeper and more aggressive with both marking and pressing, and I instructed Hearts to play counter attacking football with a powerful target man that would hold up the direct passes that I channelled through him. As the game kicked off, I knew I was actually in with a shout. My smash ‘n’ grab Sam Allardyce-inspired game plan had Dynamo on the back foot early on, harassing him when he did have possession, and hitting him hard on the break when I won the ball.

The rolled-up-sleeves approach paid off as an early headed goal by my Italian target man Allesandro Tulli meant I had a 1-0 lead as the whistle blew for half time.
The conundrum was whether to protect this slender advantage and try to stick it out until the final whistle, or chase that crucial second goal. I decided to keep things as they were, and if I got to 70 minutes with the score the same, then it would be corner flag tactics and time wasting ‘til the finish. To my horror, within moments of the kick off I conceded. Theo Walcott skipped through my defence as my tight-marking instructions drew them out to chase decoy runs from the opposition’s two strikers.

 At this point, I felt deflated and could sense an impending collapse in my performance. With the whoops of delight being most audible from my neighbouring address, the match began to attract the attention of the rest of the office, adding to the genuine ‘cup match atmosphere’ that had been palpable from the off. I’d like to think it was the gathering crowd that spurned me to push for a winner, but the reality was as simple as just wanting to put one over a mate!

At any point during a match in Football Manager Live, a manager can call a 1-minute time out during which they can regroup and adjust tactics and make subs without the clock continuing to tick. This minute was my lifeline with which to shift the balance of the clash back in Hearts’ favour. Whilst all-out-attack is usually a pretty foolhardy approach, this was just the kind of Hearts-on-sleeves occasion that merited a rush of cold blood to the head. The effects were almost instant, as the unexpected switch in strategy saw Dynamo pinned back, and not one but TWO goals in quick succession fire in from my star striker Mateo Jaramillo.

The last 20 minutes were even tenser, as the game was brought back to 3-2 after a second from Theo left the match poised on a knife’s edge. But, with some hoof ball time wasting tactics, I held on and pulled off a giant killing feat taking Electronic Hearts through to the last 16.

It’s moments like this that set the Football Manager Live experience apart from previous games. The sense of heated competition that shines through when you have this many people chasing the same goal can only come from mass multiplayer competition. Likewise, the rewarding feeling that comes from negotiating with other manager for a mutually beneficial deal could only come from an MMO.

Meanwhile, the desk next door hasn’t been quite so boisterous…

Youth or experience? It’s always a bone of contention. Does a manager go with a policy of recruiting veteran war-horses, or gamble on the potential of hungry youngsters?

As Electronic Hearts manager I was greedy for success after a less than stellar start to my career. For every win, I was losing two; and even if my exotic strike force put three in the back of the net, I’d ship in four whilst my defence took a second-half siesta.

 I’d painstakingly saved my transfer budget for when a gem was placed on auction, having resisted the urge to splash out on anything but the most modestly priced players when putting together my initial squad. My miserly approach to the transfer market had left me with a squad of mediocre also-rans, and it had impacted on my results. The 20-somethings that made up my defence were leaking goals, and if they were at their ‘peak’, then I needed to bring in a commanding presence to organise my defensive line- a player John Motson would describe as ‘a seasoned campaigner’.

My patience was to pay off, as none other than Argentine rock Walter Samuel was placed on a transfer auction by Cavemen, a team managed by Richard Usher. Surely a centre-back who had Inter Milan and Real Madrid on his CV would give me the experience, stability and star-power I needed to shore up my defensive line, and create some much-needed consistency.

The gameworld I was in had reached it’s 5th year at this point, so Samuel was in the twilight of his career at 32 years of age. Still, once the news was out that he was on auction, there was considerable interest and a number of early bids. The minimum bid was a meagre £1, a common practise in the FML world. Just like Ebay, a low starting price attracts attention, and once bidders are chasing a player, they tend to want to snare him. The manner in which market forces dictate the value a player commands is genuinely effective and is very much indicative of how organic the gameworld feels as a direct result of the mass human interaction. It doesn’t matter if a player is worth £1m in theory, if in practise no manager is willing to invest that much in securing his signature. The player’s actual value is entirely dictated by what we, the user base, collectively deem appropriate. So, in the case of a promising young striker who has been scoring regularly, an auction can end with a final figure hundreds of times higher than what his acquisition fee is.  At the other end of the spectrum, a washed-up, under-performing defender with one eye on his pension book can sell for the price of a bus ticket.

In the case of Walter Samuel, the frenzy of activity meant that the leading bid had reached £20,000 within minutes. This was some way short of his £400,000 acquisition fee (his ‘true value’ as calculated by the game), but the trend in the transfer market was resolutely towards long term investment. £25-30,000 was a reasonable price for a player who should have 2 solid seasons of play ahead of him, so I placed a max bid of £25K, and sat back. Well, I tried to sit back, but I found myself shifting to the edge of my seat as a bidding scramble ensued. Anyone who’s used eBay to buy a much-wanted item and ended up frantically refreshing their screen to guarantee they aren’t outbid will have a good idea of how heated the chase for a key signing can be. Determined to not lose out, I contacted the manager who was bidding back-and-forth against me to see if a sneaky compromise could be reached. He replied to my enquiry as to how much he would be willing to pay by saying his upper limit was £27k, and if he was worth more than that to me I could take him. Minutes later, my Final bid of £27,500 was enough to bring Samuel to the Electric Empire.

In my mind’s eye I could picture the scene: a world-renowned galactico pledges the final days of his career to a plucky, up-and-coming club hungry for success. He arrives at the ground to a clamour of press and paparazzi, there’s a photo shoot of him proudly holding his new Electronic Hearts jersey, whilst the die-hard fans chant his name.

Well, my day-dreaming of a new era was short lived, as Samuel’s lack of match fitness meant that, if anything, defending became more erratic. The leadership I was looking for was probably not going to materialise from a player who’s nick-name as a youth was ‘El Silencio’ (the silence) due to a lack of on-pitch communication. The teams at the top of the totem pole were using attacking formations with two pacey strikers being supported with attacking midfielders tucked in just behind. My defensive line was clearly getting short-changed for speed, and ageing legs was just not going to solve the problem.

Like all world-class managers, I knew when to cut my losses. After a week of getting trounced, I knew it was time to take a leaf out of my good friend Arsene Wenger’s book and establish a youth policy dedicated to nurturing the world’s finest young talent. And so, Sparks  was founded, an academy promoting excellence through a combination of high-protein, low-glycemic-index dietary supplements and intensive one-on-one coaching from the world’s finest coaches. Well, this is what I told the starry-eyed youngsters I was roping into long-term, low-paid contracts. So, surely it would just be a case of playing these youths for a few games and then cashing in once their value had rocketed. Simple. Meanwhile, Samuel made a quiet exit, leaving at a knock-down price of only £1 in an auction won, ironically, by a team called ‘Boca Genius’.

This is where the skills feature of the game really grabbed my attention. At any time in Football Manager Live, a manager can be training in one skill. There are around a hundred different skills, ranging from physiotherapy skills like ‘leg injuries’ that reduce the time it takes for a player to recover from such a problem, to coaching skills like ‘set piece training’ that improve your squads dead-ball abilities. There are 5 stars for any given skill to complete, and whilst ‘goalkeeper training’ may be a 40 minutes job to gain a single star, getting a 5th star in ‘Scouting’ takes 27 days!  Not all skills are available immediately, making for a very interesting series of decisions as to just what kind of manager you want to be, and making your decision accordingly. By selecting to train in ‘judging potential’, I was investing time I could have spent improving marking and defensive organisation chasing the promise of capturing a superstar. After achieving three stars later that day, I noticed something changed: when looking at the profile of a young player, there were stars there, where previously there had been none, telling me how much potential the player had.

Of course, by this time my quest for young stars had spiralled into a shopping spree that was more like capturing pokemon- I was out to catch ‘em all, and had already signed about 30 kids from across the globe. At wages of £200 a day, I could get 130 for the price of Walter Samuel!  However, my new-found power to judge potential made it apparent that whilst two of my players were “potential superstars”, I had signed a 16 year old Danish striker who was “unlikely to improve”, and a couple of defenders who had only 1 solitary star. Maybe Sparks Academy will succeed in the long run, but that’s a story for another time. A world class manager is big enough to admit when he’s made a rare mistake. I’m off to beg Walter to come back.

SEGA caught up with Marc Duffy, product manager at Sports Interactive, to quiz him about the much anticipated Football Manager Live.

So Marc, what everyone wants to know is when the playing public will finally get to join the action in FML.

I’m afraid at this stage I’m not really able to say except for the fact that it won’t be out in March. Everyone is working pretty hard now implementing new features and fixing bugs. We’re into the final straight now that’s for sure.

Things must be getting pretty frantic, making sure everything is fine-tuned for launch?

It’s everything you might expect with such a big and innovative project and such a small and focused development team. There are never enough hours in the day to do everything that we really want to do. We decided very early on to adopt a constant development module and we’re being as reactive as we can to feedback from the current batch of beta testers. This means that even though we might not fit everything into the launch version we’ll be able to get code updates out hopefully every 4-6 weeks and pack in lots of new features.

 The beta phase of FML started 9 months ago. How have things changed since then?

I think in reality for some of us it started a lot longer. The game that Oliver (Ov Collyer, co-founder of Sports Interactive) arrived back from Australia wanting to make has evolved so much. When we first got the game up and running it was a frantic race to join the game world as quickly as possible and snap up the best talent within the 100k a day wage budget. This led to problems and imbalance, it felt like it was all about the strikers you signed (Henry was a popular choice).

With this in mind, we added in acquisition fees along with wages meaning when you start the game you have 500k to spend on acquisition fees and 100k a day in wages. There is a balance to be struck and no one can afford any of the superstars in the first season at least.

How are your team, ‘The Carpet Burners’ doing? Still flying high with their youth policy? Why on earth are they called that, anyway?

The best thing about the game is that you can be whatever type of manager you want to be. I love the fact that I can assemble a squad full of youngsters at the start and nurture them through the ranks and at some point sell them on for a massive profit. For me, I get a lot of enjoyment out of the game this way. I also love the fact that I have total control of MY club. I can set the name (I don’t really know where The Carpet Burners came from), I can set the kit design and I can even set the pitch size which due to my tactic I tend to ensure is quite narrow to allow my fast tempo pressing game to flourish.  

Because of my youth policy, we really struggled in the first couple of seasons and at times it wasn’t much fun. The catalyst for me was when I’d saved enough money up to buy Kaka and he seemed to galvanise my little babies into a team of superstars. It’s little touches like this that make this a special game.

 Has your team been affected by periods where you have had either much more or much less time to play?

 Generally I suffer from a lack of time… When we started the official beta testing phase last summer I joined the Extreme Football Association thinking that I was a hardcore player and would be able to be there every day and play out all my matches. In reality it’s been nothing of the sort so I’ve had to change federation to suit my playing style (we even added a wizard to help a person like me pick one that’s right for us). In a way, that’s the beauty of the game in that you can play as little or as much of the game as you like. We’ve got people online almost 24/7 and we’ve got people that login 2 or 3 times per week.  

With so many human players competing, have there been any controversies that SI have had to resolve? Match fixing scandals or fishy transfers, perhaps?

The beta phase has been a real eye opener in terms of what lengths people will go to in order to win (or do better). We’ve had SI staff working in tandem to take advantages of some code “loopholes”. We’ve had moderators with two accounts in the same game world and transferring players between the teams. In fact, that seems to be the most common trick of all.

We’ve had to remove probably in the region of 30 users either for foul and abusive language or some form of cheating. Every time something is discovered we make sure we sit down and either code the game to remove the problem or discuss other ideas to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

 This game will have a long, long lifespan. Can you share with us any exciting additions FML fans can potentially look forward to as the game evolves?

You’ll hear this a lot over the coming months but constant development or reactive development. A lot of what is going to go into future monthly versions of the game will be driven by the community. All that said, we’re looking into a lot of community based features which put the emphasis on working with other human managers and not always necessarily against each other. Things like charging a fee to scout on behalf of another team are the types of thing we really want to work on.  

When I’m away from my game because of work or school or something, is there going to be a way I can make sure I don’t lose out on that key player and know the scores?

Yes, this is going to be the icing on the cake for the game. I’m imagining that there will be a large number of people who can’t play when at work due to various policies in their IT department. The brand new FML website will allow you to view important information about not only your team and gameworld but every gameworld in existence. I can’t promise that it will update in real time but it should update fairly frequently for you to never miss a single result or piece of transfer news!

Does that mean I’ll be able to access game data from my phone, or get sms updates?

 Eventually yes. We’ve had SMS enabled during beta and it meant I was able to get auction updates when I was in Tesco’s. We’ve looked at and have the code in place to allow you to reply to messages and have the servers process the messages so if I were shopping and I was outbid in an auction or had to negotiate a transfer deal I could very quickly and very simply.  

Some of the team are very excited with some of the new phone technology coming out as well so maybe one day we’ll have a cut down version for things like the iPhone.

Well, it looks like we’ll have a fascinating summer getting to grips with FML whilst watching the Euros! Which of the two will capture football fans’ attentions more?

 It’s got to be FML. Without any home nation participating it’s going to make for some lonely summer nights. No better way to drown your sorrows than playing FML and chatting with other like minded footie fans.  

The prospect of going from a tax-dodging layabout, or ‘student’ to use the official terminology, to full-time employment is a daunting prospect for any avid gamer.

Days spent merrily devoted to the simple pleasures of games, football and various tasty treats were standard fare for me and many friends, stretching from the days of SEGA’s Master System through to heated duels on Virtua Fighter 5 and the fantastically enjoyable Mario & Sonic at the Olympics. So, it was with trepidation that I approached the prospect of going out into the big bad world to collect my gold rings and make my fortune once the time came.

The idea of going to work in a bank or an accountancy firm, as many of my friends had done, struck me as somewhat akin of ‘The Condemned’. So it was somewhat ironic that when browsing the SEGA Europe website for Condemned 2 updates that I chanced upon the ‘jobs’ section. Community Team Assistant had just been added and it caught my eye. Hmm, I thought. I’m a member of the community, as a football fanatic I have lived by the maxim ‘there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’, and assisting, well that’s what any creative midfielder does, right?

So, I speculatively sent out my CV to SEGA, along with a hastily put together cover letter. In retrospect, this possibly resembled a teenage girl’s fan-mail to a boy band than professionally-crafted, career-defining correspondence.

Fortunately, my lifelong love of games, and all things SEGA must have shone through, as I was phoned the next day and invited to the Community Team’s Offices in London for an interview. The scenario of working for a company that had entertained me through many a rainy day (and many a blazing hot summers day too!) was becoming a tangible reality.

Upon entering the building, I was impressed to see that Sports Interactive were based on the floor below SEGA’s offices. This brought a smile to my face, as I’d played Football Manager for many years, and even in a state of semi-retirement due to trivial distractions like ‘studying’ and ‘girlfriend’, I still kept an eye on the incredibly active and well-supported forums over at SIgames.com.

So, you can imagine how my smile broadened to something reminiscent to Samba de Amigo’s eponymous monkey when I was told the job would be principally on Football Manager Live. Ever since playing the game on my ancient Amiga 500, the vision I’d always had of the dream FM game was playing against hundreds of other managers. As engrossing as playing the Computer was, or competing with a friend, having all the teams being run by humans was kind of the Holy Grail for me, as a fan. Like with most games, multi-player is simply more fun. With an open-ended title as ambitious as this, the potential is tremendous, and that’s exactly what came across when I met the team. Everyone on the team is brimming with ideas to implement into the game and make it as immersive as possible - Marc Duffy at SI told me during the interview that he has a file as thick as a novel full of ideas for the game.

Needless to say, with the track record of those involved, this game has all the makings of a massive, massive title. Where traditional Football Manager is a 5-course dinner for one, this is more like a huge, tasty pizza where there is enough for everyone to have a slice. It’s snackable, and you can fit it in with all the other distractions a typical routine has. There’s just so much that can be done with the games and the thousands of people that will be playing it. So, I tried to get across my enthusiasm for football, SI’s catalogue of management sims, and ground-breaking games across to the guys interviewing me.

I left SEGA that day with a real buzz. The icing on the cake was being invited to take part in the Beta test, so even if I wasn’t offered the position, I’d get to try FML out and join in the fun straight away. As it was, I’d barely had a chance to name my team and start scouting for players before I received the fantastic news that the job was mine. In just a couple of weeks, I’d be working for SEGA on Football Manager Live.