The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - PTFO - How a Video Game You’ve Never Played Changed the Biggest Sport on Earth

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

Sports video games pride themselves on their simulation of reality. But the most popular ones that Americans know and love — Madden, FIFA, NBA 2K, MLB: The Show — cannot compete with an intensely specific and uniquely important game called Football Manager. Which got so good at simulating soccer that it converted a worldwide army of real-life players, coaches, and executives into genuine obsessives — changing the multi-billion dollar soccer industry itself. PTFO’s London correspondent, Kieran Morris, embarks on a global quest to explain the Football Manager revolution… and jeopardizes his impending marriage in the process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing Tim's new savory pinwheels. The perfect flaky and flavorful snack for those on the go. Like me, who's recording this while snacking. Ooh, delicious. Try the roasted red pepper and Swiss, or caramelized onion and parmesan pinwheels only at Tim's. At participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. It's a dangerous, dangerous, almost like narcotic feeling when you're really in the midst of it. It's more than a football game. Far more than a football game. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe King's Network. So Kieran Morris, my favorite sorts of episodes on this show are passion projects. Until today, I've never been concerned that someone I'm about to talk to has too much enthusiasm for a subject.

So thank you for joining us. And I guess preemptively, I'm a little worried about you. I can't say thank you. Whatever the opposite of that is, is what I'm saying to you. You brought a sickness back into my life. You brought years and years of hard won sobriety crashing down as soon as it was the last thing you said to me in this studio months ago. Hey, do you like football manager? I just thought, here we go.

Okay, so I didn't know how much I'd be ruining the life of Keirud Morris, our 27 year old British correspondent, when I assigned him this story. This story about his particular sickness, known as Football Manager. And Football Manager, if you did not know, is this globally popular and uniquely important and extraordinarily strange video game that I knew jacksh** about.

Because look, I'm not a soccer expert. Guys, I love FIFA. That is my video game of choice. And Football Manager, apparently, by contrast, is not for me. It is not for casuals. It is in fact so good at simulating what it's really like to run a soccer team in real life

that it has changed what it's really like to run a soccer team in real life, that it has changed what it's like to run a soccer team in real life. As in, the simulation of a multi-billion dollar industry has changed the multi-billion dollar industry, which is not a thing that Madden or 2K or these other video games have ever done. It is also the sort of cultural institution that dudes in England will do standup comedy about. I went and did a gig at Manchester City, right, and I met a load of the players, and it was well exciting.

It was last year, Robinho and Richard Dunn, all these. I met Michael Richards, the defender, and I was a bit rude to him, okay? I was like, oh, yeah, not bothered. Afterwards, my dad was with me, he went, you're a bit rude there to Michael Richards. I said, see, I don't know why. It was only when I got home, I realized on Football Manager, he turned up late for training a couple of times. But the whole reason I even started thinking about Football Manager in the first place

was because I started seeing these videos last year, these memes about a real life flesh and blood actual football manager who was a cult hero. A cult hero because of what the video game had done for him. A cult hero named Will Still. Will Still is one of us, a football manager addict who just happens to also be the manager of Stad Durantz in Ligue 1. You've seen that **** about their manager? Nuts. Learned about the game through football manager.

Yes. Doesn't actually have his pro coaching license, so they get fined 22,000 euros every game. William Steele. Dude, he's 30. 30! The perfectly poetically named Will named Will Still was the guy that I'd wanted Kieran Morris to locate and interview and fact check for us.

What I did not realize was how much bigger this story would be. When you open up this game, and I tried to just to dip a toe in to get a sense of this I am just staggered by how much text there is so much like you open this up and it is like Suddenly I am just living inside of a spreadsheet Oh, yeah a spreadsheet that you come to love and to prune and to admire all of its little contours like that spreadsheet your squad is your pride and your joy but at the end of the day it is Functionally a spreadsheet. Well, it's also actually emails. I should say that too, right? Yep It's responding to press requests take me through responding to a press request. How does that work? So give me give me an example scenario

so You are leading1, 85 minutes gone. Opposition, you just kind of feel in the game that something's going to happen. One of the opposite side hits it from 40 yards, 2-2, sudden draw. You immediately go after the game to a press conference. And not just one question, but like eight or nine questions. all of slight variations of, oh, well, how did that happen? What did you do there that was wrong and all of that? And if you get them wrong, the journalists in the game build a negative opinion of you. And if you start to sort of piss them off in some way, they'll come back to you more.

The club itself and the players can react badly to what you say in that. So you are in this spotlight of like fake media spotlight from the off. You get tweets come up on the side of these fictional fans calling out your decisions, wondering why you didn't do this, didn't do that. And there was a funny detail that I think I read about a complaint about how similar all the journalists' questions were and how boring they were. And the response from Sports Interactive was, no, that's what press conferences are like. Like, no one is asking interesting questions.

Like, they are, like, an interesting question is a once in a million thing. Yeah. Journalist Manager is an even more boring game, it turns out, unfortunately. My favorite game, I love video games, my favorite sports video game of all time, my favorite video game period is FIFA, right? And so I refer to FIFA as almost this beautiful constant flow of motion. I control these players, it's super social, there's almost like a meditative aspect. When I hear that, like there's an upbeat song when I open the game and I'm already like transported. EA Sports. It's in the game.

But when you open Football Manager by contrast, what is that like? Silence. Silence and you feel the creak of your laptop. You hear the whir of the fan as it gets into gear, as all of the systems are going off, being you're about to go into a very solitary space. And the concept of the game is that you have a job that millions dream of. You are going day by day through the life of a football manager. And that means everything.

From negotiating contracts to tactics to the size of the pitch for the season ahead, whether it's this many meters or that many meters. You can do sponsorship deals, you can argue with your board, you can grow weird parasocial attachments to players that you've never met. You can live your dreams. You can take your club, however big or small, to the very top of the game. You can reorient the world of football around your dream. And that is somehow why I keep coming back. How much of the game then is spent actually playing the game, like controlling players?

None. Not a second. You are the football manager. The players are the players. That's a whole other world. If you want to be a player, you know, FIFA's around the corner. You can go there. I just need to tell you that all of it of it sounds insane right so you play sports

video games to play sports unless it's football manager in which case you're trying to be an administrator and only an administrator and I wonder when you're hearing the whir of your laptop spin up again as you relapse on assignment for me I know that you're engaged what does your fiance think about this? She heard it before she saw it. She heard the sound of the laptop. It hadn't made that sound in years. I remember when I made the decision to cut football manager out of my life. It was about the start of the pandemic and I got out and I worked and I read stuff and I watched

movies and spoke to friends and you know, watched the seasons change and all of that. And it was happy, some of the happiest times of my life. And then this assignment came back and I just knew Sarah as soon as she saw it, years of work. Years of work unraveling. And all I said, no, Pablo said he insisted. So I'm staying up till two, three o'clock in the morning. You've seen, I've told you. You've kept diaries for us, Kieran. It's a work thing. And I just want to point out that like you, and I feel like this is something that they

say in therapy too, you're not alone. It's not just you. I mean, there's one book called Football Manager Stole My Life and it cites a 2012 statistic that football manager was cited as a significant factor in 35 divorce cases that year. And that's just, it seems the tip of the iceberg in terms of how obsessive lots and lots and lots of people are about this enterprise? Think of the women who stay. The 35 who call it done. Think of the millions out there listening to just this nonsense come out of their partner. every football fan I know. So this is one of those episodes where my ignorance is perpetually revealed. And yes, by the way, we are going to get to Kieran sitting down with Will Still, the football

manager, football manager, in a bit here. But first, what I needed Kieran to do was go on what turned out to be a truly global quest. A quest to just help me personally understand how the whole virtual world of this very specific video game actually interacts with the most popular professional sport on the planet and in the process influences it. And one of the more surprising things I learned almost immediately talking to Kieran was that the players love this game. It's not just the nerds and the Dungeons and Dragons types, no offense to Kiran or me,

I guess. It's also the jocks. The jocks love it. And so I just needed Kiran to bring us one. Tobias Heidsten. So he is a former Swedish international, legend in Sweden, played in England, and he is one of the hardest playing football manager obsessives I've ever encountered of any form.

Good morning. Right. Sorry. Good morning to you. Good morning. Good morning. Is it every bit as freezing in Sweden as it is in London right now? I think we've got somewhere in between seven and 15 minus. Anyway,

from the world of real football to the wonderful world of virtual football, football manager, the reason we're talking today. Yeah, yeah,'d say, I'd put it the other way around. The football-major world is the one you want to be living in. So he has been playing every step of the way from the earliest version of the game 25 years ago. On one of the games in 2000, yeah, one of the games when I was between games between 2025 and 26, I think I had the same pace as Thierry Henry and I was like, yeah, I'll take that. I could buy myself, which I always did, which my friends always tease me for, but I could buy myself to pretty much any of the big teams. So that was fun.

It's an obsession machine. You get the obsession you put into it all the way back. These guys have got time. There's buses to catch and planes and times when your muscles are sore and you don't want to talk to anyone but you're still up from the game, what do you do? I've always enjoyed playing the game, which is coaching basically, but you also do a lot of other stuff. It could be everything from scouting players to being an assistant manager, manager, you could be the sports director. In Swedish it's a chief of sports the ones who sign players and negotiate contracts and on football manager you do you do it all like you're all in Everything in one in one person. It's about it's about your own It's about it's about a bureaucracy. You're an office manager the best office manager.

Have you met many people in coaching or in the back office side of football who have had no direct pro experience but have come into the game, come into the sport rather, having had experience with the game and a love of the game? Yeah, definitely. Because they've been playing football and enjoying football manager. And then they've noticed pretty early that I won't become the player I want to be. So they get into coaching instead.

But I think that some of it that they've chosen to get into coaching instead of maybe just setting football aside completely is definitely because of football manager. It sounds like a cult, Kieran. You know, it is to a certain extent. It really is. It's a dangerous, almost, almost like narcotic feeling when you're really in the midst of it. It's more than a football game. Far more than a football game.

It is not a feeling I've ever gotten from Madden. Okay. And by the way, people love Madden. NFL players love Madden. They obsess over all that stuff too. NBA players love NBA 2K. But this is different also on the level of I just haven't heard of a sports video game that is more respected than football manager by the sport that it seeks to emulate to the point where it seems like the relationship between the two is just two-way. It's extraordinary. The team itself behind the game, Sports Interactive, have you ever interacted with them as a tester or a scout? There was this one time when I got a text or an email from Miles Jacobson asking if we wanted to try the game out and see from a pro footballist point of view to find different things that maybe this needs to get taken out, maybe this can be added.

But I remember the first time when I actually got that email I was like, whoa, that was cool. So the name that our jock friend Tobias just mentioned there, almost starstruck, Miles Jacobson, is significant here. Because Miles Jacobson is the big boss over at Sports Interactive. And you should know that Miles Jacobson's proper name is technically Miles Jacobson OBE. Because in 2011 at the Royal Palace, Prince Charles himself appointed Miles an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire,

that's the OBE part, for his services to the gaming industry, or in other words, for football manager. Which is exactly why Miles was the next guy that Kieran needed and was dying to meet. Miles Jacobson is the king of the universe when it comes to football manager. He was a player, he started off in the 90s when it was championship manager, its original name. And he went from being a guy who just volunteered,

a bit of advice on how to make it a bit better to, oh, I can come in and do a bit for here and there and build the business and the distribution. Before you know it, turn of the millennium, he's in charge of the whole operation. And he is the very center of all of it. It is his sort of obsessive desire for perfection, for complete verisimilitude from real life that drives Football Manager. We are rolling.

Pablo Torre finds out correspondent Kieran Morris speaking to Miles Jacobson, game director of Football Manager and your title at Sports Interactive. We're joined by our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest,

our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, our first guest, chairman and executives, the people at the very top of football coming in and telling everyone, oh my god, I love this game. Oh my god, I do this on this game. I have been playing this for so long. It's crazy the level of detail they go to. They have access like absolutely nothing else.

We interview loads and loads and loads of different people from football and they could be managers, they could be youth coaches, they could be data analysts. We've got one coming up with the people who basically put the fictionalists together. We've got one coming up for people who work for the FA and putting rules together. And all of them are set up as things that are, how can we get knowledge from these people

that is going to help make the game better? It's also possibly the best lunch and learn session any company's ever had, because the people that we get involved are really ridiculous. And managers at the top level, international managers, directors of football, analysts from Premier League clubs, nothing ever leaks.

If you ask a manager about their team line-up for the weekend, they're not going to tell you because they don't want the opposition to know. Whereas we'll go one further and we'll say, OK, can you give us the exact tactical team talk that you gave your team for the game this weekend? And they go, yeah, OK, and get tactics board out and start showing us exactly what they're going to be doing at the weekend because it's not going to leak. I'm really lucky to get to do it and really lucky to get to speak

to speak to these people and call it a job. Yeah. But it's also really important for the game. I imagine at some point someone somewhere had to wonder, like, OK, Call it a job. Yeah, but it's also really important for the game. I Imagine at some point someone somewhere had to wonder like, okay, so all these other games They're getting off on CGI and they have all of these graphics and the player Controlling the player as if they're an avatar for you a fan pretending to be the athlete like that's clearly where the rest of this business Is headed in video games and sports video games in specific? That's clearly where the rest of this business is headed in video games and sports video games in specific. But what they decide to do, what Miles decides to do is actually,

we're gonna seemingly double, triple, quadruple, quintuple down on the fact that we're a database game. We're a game in which information is currency. And so how does like the most powerful valuable currency here work? How does player scouting, how does like the most powerful, valuable currency here work? How does player scouting? How does player ranking actually work? It's this huge data bank of hundreds of thousands of footballers all over the world. Before you even play a single game, you have access to everyone from the ages of 15 to 45 who have kicked a ball in any sort of spirited way from here to Columbia and back again.

The first awareness that we had of the football industry taking games seriously was André Véloz Ballas, who's always been a bit of a trailblazer. When he was chief scout at Chelsea, he was asked in an interview how he'd found a couple of players and at that time we were making Championship Manager before we moved to Football Manager and he went, well, Championship Manager, I've been playing it for years. And then we did a data deal with Everton in 2008 which was probably more of a PR thing than anything else, but other clubs then started going, oh, if they're doing that, we can. So we now work with a bunch of football clubs

on the data side of things. I'm under non-disclosure agreements, can't say who they are, but Champions League quarter-finalists, semi-finalists, top clubs from around the world are using our data as part of their scouting network because to be frank any football club that isn't is pretty stupid because we've got more scouts around the world than any of them have.

It goes all the way back to the same methods that the sport uses. You know that's people on touchlines, it's people at training grounds, it's actual observation of matches, it's extraordinary. It's half the job of a whole front office of a professional athletic team. And to get people doing that legwork, I think you hit something with a cult. Like, that is free labor. Enthusiastic labor. I didn't know. This is a volunteer network of how many people were doing all of this? All over the world. Like thousands. Thousands of people. We have 1300, 1400 scouts around the world watching players week in, week out. No one

else has that kind of coverage. So it's good to be there as a reference tool. Well, it's also on its face something that seems deeply untrustworthy. The idea that, okay, we're going to get all these random people seemingly all around the world to just like send in their scouting reports, even though they're doing it in person, even though they're local and they're seeing it with their own two eyes. It just seems deeply untrustworthy, eyes. It just seems deeply untrustworthy, except for the fact that seemingly actual football clubs trust it. Completely. The extent to which the databases have been used and moved into the sport is wholesale. There is software in football scouting that is directly modeled on that database, on the format of it. The way that it plays on a PC is the gold standard for scouting software.

Scouting software came afterwards. That's the incredible thing. In its real sense now, it's been fused into how transfers are made, how the game is analyzed for a decade, at least. So just a very basic logistical question then is like, these clubs have money, right? Like, why is it that they don't have their own thing? Why are they relying on the publicly accessible Kieran Morris's favorite database version

of this whole scouting network? You know, you've got to fly a scout somewhere. You've got to pay them. You've got to think of their logistics. They're a living, breathing person. No club should ever sign a player based on their football manager data. But it's a good reference tool to be able to get some information when deciding whether to fly to Chile to go and watch a player whose agent sent you a YouTube video.

In Madden, right? Like I know NFL players always obsess, they complain all the time about what they're rated. It's become a whole thing for reasons I understand because Madden matters a whole lot in America. But what you're saying is that in football manager, it's actually levels beyond that because the way that these guys are rated actually is at times a proxy for an actual scouting report that is relied upon by an actual scout, an executive inside of the football industrial complex. Yeah. And with that, it's not just the way you start out, but how you're going to be after five

years, how you're going to be after five years. How you're going to be after 10 years. It's will they grow? Are they assets that will grow in the value that they're meant to? Which is a great sales pitch for the game, except that the game sounds less and less like a game as you go on to describe the business of the game. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't have an elevator pitch, but fortunately, it's simulating the world's

most passionately, fervently supported sport and is just able to tap into that groundswell of enthusiasm at any moment. When you talk to Miles, how did he talk about the question of what is the business of football manager here? He sees it as transitioning kind of out of the game space. I think he knows that its value is obviously as a game, but as an entry point to obsession. I think we are now probably more of a football brand than we are a gaming brand and more of a part of football culture. We need to be seen as a football business more than a games business.

It would not be out of touch at all for him to be alongside the president of FIFA or the president of UEFA. I'm sure he's met them. You know, he has casual conversations with players coming out of the sport who want to go into football management. And so they ask him, the expert, you know, what's it like being a football manager? Because he has simulated that exact role like nothing else on earth. Well, it's now clear to me that it's not just a function of the way that football manager can give information about the world to people. It of the way that football manager can give information about

the world to people. It's the way that football manager teaches football itself to the world. Like to what extent is football manager experience actually a relevant data point on your resume as somebody who might want to be a coach? Well, there was one line that I think is as telling as you can get from Miles in the interview, where he says... A director of a league one club turned around to me a couple of years ago and said, if a data analyst is applying for a role at this club and doesn't mention football manager, they're not getting the job.

as applying for a role at this club and doesn't mention football manager, they're not getting the job. To understand data in football, the way that data is used, if you have never played football manager, how do you even know what any of this data means? Yeah, that is a lot of power to give a video game. But I just want to drive this point home because last November, Bromley FC, a fifth-tier English football club posted this extremely real ad online. Hi my name is Andy Woodman manager of Bromley Football Club. We all know

when it comes to football fans have strong opinions. Today we're looking for Bromley's next actician and it could be you. We've partnered with Xbox to create an application process in Football Manager 2024. Anyone can apply. We can't wait to see the talent out there. Follow the link to apply. And this brings us back all the way around to our last stop on Kieran's world tour. The reason I got tipped off to Football Manager in the first place. tour, the reason I got tipped off to Football Manager in the first place. The legend of Will Still. The youngest manager in top flight European soccer, and the guy who used Football Manager to become one of the hottest coaching prospects in the world.

And this also brings us back to our Swedish soccer player and Football Manager obsessive, Tobias Heisen. Because Tobias had told Kieran this about the Will Still phenomenon unprompted before they parted ways. I mean look at the Will. Will Still. Will Still yeah. I mean that's that's a fairy tale story for anyone. If he can do it, if he can play football mangeres all life, start coaching and go through that, go through all those steps and end up in the top flight in France, well then I can do it. Will Stil. Oh my, Will Stil. Will Stil is by all intents and purposes living the dream of any football manager player.

The elevator pitch on Will Stil is, it's as if Kieran Morris became an actual football manager and got really good at it. I think I always took it into consideration when I started all of this and I knew that I am, or the story is a bit different in regards to other people without disrespecting anyone. But yeah, I am, or I was, 30. I'm big ginger. Talk funny English, talk funny French. So I knew I was going to stand out a bit because I've always sort of stood out in a weird way. As a result, despite managing in France, despite being English, but being born out of the country growing up in Belgium, he's a famous figure here now.

Whenever there is a new management role that comes up, everyone says, oh, is Will Steele going to come over? Is this Will Steele's next step in his career? Will Steele plans to be back at Stade Rheims next season. Jules, I think there was more than one Premier League club sniffing around the ginger Anglo-Belgian Enfant Prodigie. And they're predicting his future like they would predict anyone on the game. No, I mean, he's the football manager, football manager. Here is the prodigy who played video games all the way to the top. How would you describe Will Stills' experience with Football Manager specifically?

Did he actually like the game? He loved it. He is a type of guy I've met so many times Where you get a little bit out of him and then you find out that it wasn't just Dabbling with the game. It wasn't just sort of power using with the game It was like getting in the way of school studies levels. It was insomniac levels and Yeah, I think he's he's let that slip in the past he's told people about that. Obviously I've spent hours playing it because well pretty much everyone has

you know and you smash the spacebar until about three o'clock in the morning until you realise it's three o'clock and you say yeah I've got to go to bed. I think people see that in themselves as As soon as you let that known, you're away. You can see, oh, that could be me. He becomes a totem for every single player. And so this totem, this avatar for every nerd out there who wanted to play video games and become a real life star, when you go to him and have him tell you his story, the story of how football manager made him who he is today, what was his response?

He doesn't want to talk about football manager anymore. I actually did an interview with football manager because they were like trying to understand how the game had an impact on my life, on my career, how I saw things. But it just sort of blew up into this massive story that I'd basically learned everything off football manager and I'd come from being this spotty teenager geek that played the game into a league manager, which was a load of rubbish, but it was a story that people like to say. As soon as news got out that there could be one of us in the game itself, a real un-reconstituted football manager nerd, the world just set upon him and kind of muddied his story up a little bit. Well, it just sounds easy and it sounds different. You go from literally sitting on your ass

at home behind your computer where no one watches you and no one sees you and no one even knows you exist to being a football manager. It's like, oh, he's done it. He's gone from the game to the real game. It's like, wow. Once they saw past it, it was a bit more than that. But it sounds a bit fairytale like. And I think his view is, hey, yeah, you know, I like football manager, but I'm a football coach. Like, you know, for as much as I've learned on the game, I have a big squad of very athletic

grown big men out there who I need to go and tell to run around in a circle, kick a ball in a certain way. And like, they're not going to do that if they just think I've got experience from the game. You've never played the game itself. How could you know how to run a professional club? You know, a can't all be football manager. And he's like, no, it's not. It's everything else. Everything else. And so what does Will still want everybody to know now that he is trying to fact check his own legend? What does he want people to know about how he got to be the way he is? What's actually the truth behind his rise then?

Make no mistake, he is a young prodigy excelling way beyond his years. And some of that might be attributable to an obsession fueled by this game. But I think what he wants the world to know is that it's the obsession with the game itself, rather than football manager, that drives him. It was just like football, football, football, football, football, every day. At home, at school. From the age of about eight, nine, I was training three times a week, had a game at the weekend. So it was just non-stop football. After going to college or university in England for two years, I came back to Belgium and

played for a year in the reserve team of the first division side. And in that period I realised other players were getting shifted up to the first team squad. They were going to train a bit more than I was. I just got frustrated. And what a frustrated Will Still did next does kinda make sense when you remember that he grew up loving this video game where you could try every conceivable career path inside a virtual backroom bureaucracy, replying to thousands of virtual emails if you so desired.

Because what he decided to do next was set his sights, again, on a screen. I knew that video analysis in Belgium back at the time wasn't actually very big, it wasn't really a thing yet. If only a few clubs had got it and no one really saw the importance of it yet in Belgium. And my basic reflection was, you know, what is the quickest way and the most easiest way to get into professional football? What do clubs need the most?

And the clubs needed video analysis. This career pivot turned out to be incredibly smart. He was watching lots and lots of games, gleaning meaningful insights that he could relay to a coaching staff. And this all got him hired by this tiny second division team in Belgium. And then one day in 2017, when the manager of that team suddenly got fired,

the bureaucracy settled upon Will Still at age 24, 24, to become the youngest manager in Belgian soccer history. I felt completely stupid. To be totally honest, I felt like a complete you know idiot because I was 24 and I should never have been standing on that touchline you know giving any form of advice to you know the 32 and 36 year olds that were on the pitch but in some weird way in some miraculous way it worked and we got you know good results and I was able to stay on.

And then, you know, sort of made him a name for myself in that way when I was 24. But I was just, you know, I was making stuff up as I went along. It was totally should never have happened. You know, it shouldn't have happened. But it kept happening and he kept winning. In 2021, Will replaced another sacked manager at a bigger Belgian club. And in 2022, it happened again, this time in France in their first division, when Will replaced the manager of his current employer, Stadarans.

And just a dozen games into getting that job, Will earned a shocking draw against Leo Messi and Kylian Mbappé and Neymar and the best team in all of France, Paris Saint-Germain. Into the middle, beating the trap, beating the defense and slamming it home! Maybe the final kick of the match! And Will Still... Still unbeaten. In fact, Will Still was unbeaten in his first 17 consecutive matches. A league record. So what are the differences that he articulates between the simulation and reality? What are the limits on the game now that he's

actually, you know, done the thing for real? People, I think. And just the complexities of people, whether that's, you know, injuries or feeling upset and slighted because you've been left out of the squad or people disagreeing with, you know, your seniority. It's easy to think when you're in your 16th consecutive hour of playing the game at home that you could just get up and do this if you wanted to. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have to go through, earn your stripes, feel what it is out here. You need a certain background. You can't just go from being a geek that gets a few good

results on football manager to a proper football manager. But I think as long as you love the game and you try and understand it and you're actually good with people, because a lot of people forget that football management is actually all about people. It says it in the word as management. So you manage people, you manage emotions, you manage a little more than football. Where he is now is he's trying to really give this tag the shove and try and put himself forward as, no, I'm not the football manager's football manager. He is the genuine article and all power to him. I think he's becoming that head coach figure that he's always dreamed of being. And yeah, I think time remains to see

whether or not his potential is as bright as we think it will be. I guess the next question then is, okay, does Will still ever feel that itch that you have felt? Does he ever get twitchy? Does he ever play? Does he ever dare to boot up the game in the present tense? I did hear from him that the last time he did was on holiday in Dubai. I think he was taking a break between one

job and another. I can see how it comes about. You know, your partner's asleep. It's hot out there. You don't want to go to the hotel bar. Hey, what's that laptop doing over there? Last time I played football manager. Wow. I think I was on holiday in Dubai three years ago. Yeah, end of season at Beerscott. After the Beerscott season when I was head coach, I was 28, 29. Yeah, three years ago now, probably that version of it. And I was just on holiday, wasting time time playing football but I haven't touched it since. That's not that long ago see they made me relapse like this is the thing that the that Meadowlark made me do for this I haven't touched it for three years and probably at the time that you were last playing it and they made me get back on

it and the addiction is here and forever. My god. So stay away. I will. My god. So stay away. I will consciously try to stay away from it.