The FIFA and Football Manager games continue to be some of the best-selling games year after year.
That’s bound to happen when you take the world’s most popular sport and serve it up a simulation for the masses.
But as these simulations have become more complex, they’ve begun to inform the sport and not the other way round, reports The New York Times.
“Data is the bedrock of everything we do,” said Duncan Alexander, the head of British content for the data provider Opta.
The rise of the analysts — a seismic shift for soccer, an inherently conservative sport — may owe a debt to the success of Football Manager.
As Alexander observed, many of the people working for clubs or for external advisers grew up “in the 1990s, when Football Manager was becoming popular.” Even if they did not play it, they were at least familiar with the language.
The players and coaches themselves are also some of the biggest advocates of video games.
“Ibrahimovic said that he would often spot solutions in the games that he then parlayed into real life as a young player.”
Mats Hummels, the Bayern Munich and Germany defender, has suggested that “maybe some people use what they learn in FIFA when they find themselves on a pitch.”
Andrea Pirlo even went so far as to suggest in his biography that Pep Guardiola’s lionized vision of soccer stemmed from computers: his “gentle programming of players” is pure “PlayStation.”
As footballers become world-class stars at the age of 17, 18, and 19 its easy to forget that they’re practically still boys.
And which soccer-mad 17-year-old doesn’t love a quick game of FIFA?
@EASPORTSFIFA 59 passing ??? so weak pic.twitter.com/9dwrP4AkYH
— Michy Batshuayi (@mbatshuayi) September 12, 2016
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