Why Sports Management Sims Either Consume Your Life or Bore You to Death

In a prior job working the front desk of an MMA gym, I described a first BJJ class as the least gray-area activity ever, as nearly every student after their first trial class came off knowing it was either not their cup of tea or that it was about to take over their life — there was no in-between. As someone who has both bounced off Football Manager on many occasions and just yesterday confirmed promotion to the 9th tier with the Clapton Community FC save I just took on as my latest challenge, because I could never stop once I got past that first hurdle, it’s hard not to see parallels to sports management gaming.

So, why is it that management sims seem to have such a stark yuck-or-yum for players that is strong and nearly immediate? It turns out there are a lot of reasons conspiring to make it so.

A Lack Of Direct Influence Is Not For Everyone

By far the biggest reason that many sports gamers do not love management sims is that they are, on a gameplay level, vastly different from traditional sports games. This is so true that I think most gamers would agree that after being familiar with a given sports game, it’s likely easier to transition to a different sports game than to a management sim in the same sport.

The major disparity is the way you control the outcome of games. In a standard sports game, you are in control of your players and can directly influence how the game turns out. Few gamers will have never been on one side or the other — if not both at different times — of a matchup between two gamers with skill disparity so high that the better player chooses the worst team in the game, either to make it fair or make it hurt worse when they still win, depending on the gamers’ relationship to each other.

In a simulation, there’s only so much you can do when your fourth-tier side draws Pep’s City in the FA Cup, and not every gamer wants an experience where sometimes your best is never going to be close to good enough.

Onboarding Can Be a Nightmare

Screenshot: Operation Sports

The way simulation games counteract this lack of direct influence is by giving you a lot of indirect influence over your players. This means that you get a level of micromanaging of your club and its operations that can be entirely off-putting to a new player.

Boot up a first save on a management sim, and you’re likely to spend an hour being led through a series of onboarding introductions to the game’s various systems before you even manage to advance a day on the calendar. Compounding this, many of the decisions you make will only allow you to see the effect in several in-game weeks when things start mattering, and even then, it’s not always clear what is and isn’t the cause of the good and bad you see. With that considered, it’s unsurprising that some players bounce off out of sheer confusion.

The Bells And Whistles Simply Aren’t There

Let’s say you are a player who is having a hard time with a new game but wants to give it a fair shake. With most modern sports games, at the bare minimum, you know you’re going to be treated to a visual spectacle. Modern graphics and rendering engines create games that look nearly lifelike.

Management sims, to be generous, often do not match this level of fidelity, with some acknowledgment that the F1 Manager series may not have matched its racing-sim peers but was still beautiful. The Football Manager series was so famous for having highly behind-the-times visuals that it was a major selling point of the move to Unity for Football Manager 26. And, for all the problems that move has caused, the visuals are no doubt better, in that they now look only about two console generations old.

Simply put, with a management sim, the game better grab you, because the basic models and pages of spreadsheets likely won’t.

Sports Analytics Remain Divisive

Image by Out of the Park Developments

Modern sports have been taken over by data and analysis, but fans’ reactions are split. On the one hand, many still want little to no involvement with it and find the whole thing an intrusion and a distraction. For sports fans like that, the idea of a management sim is likely to hold little appeal.

For sports fans who love to dive deep into the data, however, management sims are suddenly a dream avenue. There is nearly no limit to how much time you can spend on optimizing, so if that is your thing, you’re going to get a lot of playtime out of it.

If It Lands, The Possibilities Are Nearly Endless

So, for the most part, we have covered why so many gamers bounce off, but why are they so addictive when they land? Because the scope is simply unmatched. The challenges you face at different clubs are so different when you don’t control the players, so whenever you get bored with what you’re doing, a new save or a change of jobs is all you need to find your next opportunity.

If you love a management sim, you can find hundreds of hours of fun in it without breaking a sweat. This means that once a gamer has gotten over that initial challenge of getting invested in the first place, there’s a high likelihood they’re going to be in it for the long haul.

So, where do you stand on the management sim divide? Do you love them, hate them, or like me in the past, do you want to love them, just as soon as you can figure out how to do so?