Dear readers, 

It’s been too long since i last put out any kind of blog post up here, although there are a few reasons behind this, some of which are simpler to explain when compared to others.

I should also mention that my main Leicester City / Operation Suffoco save file became corrupted, which have resulted in me making some changes to a couple of previous posts on Operation Suffoco, but that’s a story for a different day (I’m going to restart the save, just with a different team. It was too difficult to build up that Leicester City team from scratch).

There are a few different subjects I want to bring up in this post, although there may be one or two rabbit holes and different tangents that I could go off on. As such, please be patient and keep reading, as I promise there is a point to all of this. 

As a 38-year old man boy trapped in a man’s body (or maybe the other way round), I look back on all the hours spent playing football manager games from my pre-teens up until now.

I remember my first experience was with Ultimate Soccer Manager – still an absolute diamond of a game – as an 11 year old at my well-to-do friends house, who happened to have a PC as his parents had more than a few bob to spare. 

Those memories were magical; signing players on loan and then selling them; betting on games so you could get loads of money once you’d won, only so you can go and buy Ronaldo and Batistuta to play for your second division club and watch them tear the opposition apart.

Premier Manager was next, and was just as if not more fun. I remember borrowing the game from a friend and taking Crystal Palace all the way to multiple league and European cups, and expanding their Selhurt Park to a wopping 200,000.

My time with the Championship Manager series started when I was about 12/13. Again, playing over at a friends house for several hours as Real Madrid, only to start another save two months later when I was allowed back round.

Even though we were always friends, our inevitable arguments in the aftermath of my 4-4-2 being superior to Barcelona’s (aka my friend) 4-4-2 after scraping a 1-0 courtesy of a 78th minute Raul tap in would always lead to expulsion from the house until we were friendly enough again to start from scratch.

I was lucky enough to get a PC in my mid teens, playing Championship Manager 3 for several years before graduating to Football Manager 2005 when I was about to head to University, despite the confusion and my lack ability to believe that as one great franchise had disappeared into the abyss, a new one was just about to begin.

In my younger years as a teenager, there was not one thing I enjoyed more than creating my own headlines and fantasy storylines within these football manager games (other than actually playing the game in the street on the fields).

The transfers, the results, the squad building, the trophies. It’s something that I left and went back to several times through my 20s, and something I decided to get properly back into in my mid-30s, despite being a grown ass man with a grown ass job and in a grown ass marriage. 

But as I get older, there’s one thing that I’ve always struggled with when it comes to the Football Manager games, two concepts that aren’t necessary mutually exclusive but are paramount to the continuing of any save.

And these are the concepts of reality and immersion.

As a kid, it’s easy to get wrapped up in a video game like Championship Manager, where your imagination can run world and isn’t burdened by the reality of experience that starts to form and shape our daily decision making as adults in the real world.

Conversely, whilst the Sports Interactive team have continued to add realistic elements to the game – press conferences, media summaries, post-game interviews, pre match build up and the like – there are many of us who feel that instead of adding to the richness and depth of the game, they are annoying additions to a game that seem to make it feel like an expansively thinner experience.

The concept of adding wonderkid after wonderkid to your squad; playing 4-2-3-1 Gegenpressing week in week out or being able to build up a club’s finances via shrewd transfer dealings are  in-game experiences that have been mirrored a couple of times within the last couple of decades in a way that’s led to some form of sustainability (Southampton and Brighton being ample but not perfect examples).

But what does this have to do with this blog?

As a creative first and foremost – I originally went to university to study journalism to become a football reporter, only for the Great Recession of 2008 to take my career in a different direction – and an FM fan a very close second, I’ve always wanted create a form of literary content creation that I could use as an outlet when playing my saves and exploring different concepts and nuanced subjects within Football Manager.

Football Manager Diaries was born out of wanting to write an FM blog that was a little different. Primarily using the in game avatar and his inner monologue as a way of writing diary excerpts on the particular games, transfers and idea, I thought this might be an interesting way to continue building a world in which readers would be interested.

Taking inspiration from how Jack Karouac and the concept of ‘stream of consciousness / spontaneous prose’ the idea was to be able to knock out a blog within a couple of minutes by writing it on my phone as the game was playing, taking a couple of screen shots and then posting them online. 

However, as I continued to do this, I realized that the blog didn’t have the impact that i wanted it to have, in that to build an alternative FM world in which fellow fans would be interested, it needed to have more depth.

The concept of a diary entry was a good idea, but not as good as I’d hoped.

As such, the concepts of realism and immersion – two concepts that can sometimes seem at opposite ends of the spectrum within FM, but two concepts that must also work in synchronization for a save to be able to stand the test of time – were subjects that I had failed to capture.

That being said, I’m adamant that these two ideas can still be folded into Football Manager Diaries, and are the driving force behind not only this post, but this blog in general.

Since my last blog post, I’ve been hit pretty hard twice with a bout of Flu and then a respiratory infection, which I’m just starting to see the end of.

Coupled with some intense and long shifts over the festive period, and another long work stint which is going to take up my time both in the short and long term, its fair to say this blog probably wont get the love and attention it deserves, although I’ll do my best to honor it.

By I digress. One of the other reasons why I haven’t been as active as I would have liked is because I’ve been exploring some other mediums with which to add realism and interest to not only my save, but to the blog in general.

Some of the ideas and concepts I’ve been working on have been real fun, although incredibly time consuming, alongside a job which requires 50+ hours a week, alongside being a parent to two dogs and a husband to a wife who puts up with too much.

I hope to employ some of these ideas over the coming weeks, and to continue rolling out some of the more fleshed out concepts in the near future, all the while honoring the ideas of immersion and realism that can sometimes slowly escape from the game without us even knowing. 

For those of you who have been reading this blog thus far, thank you so much. I don’t do it for the readers, I do it for the fun; but having other people and FM fans take the time to involve themselves in my save via my writing is a huge honor, especially as i never thought i would ever get to make use of my education and passion in one place. 

Stay tuned; Operation Suffoco will recommence shortly, albeit with a new club, some new content, and with a bit of a cool new angles to boot.