I Can’t Stop Playing Football Manager

At the end of March 2020, as the pandemic lockdowns entered their first full month, Dan Olson published “I Can’t Stop Watching Contagion,” a short video essay from which this work takes its title. Olson’s video is a tidy summary of the mental state many found ourselves in during those first few days and weeks—glued inexorably to media that would hurt us, but hurt us in a good way, in a way that felt like learning, or at least like we were keeping abreast of the daily horrors.

The night of the election, I stayed up until 3 a.m., constantly refreshing Bluesky and the New Yorker live blog, which was itself constantly refreshing new results from the AP. Then they called Pennsylvania, and I gave up. Unlike the 2016 result, which felt like a bewildering repudiation of common sense, this one felt worse, a dismal confirmation that pure cynicism at the state of our national polity was both the only sense-making option and utterly unhelpful. My partner and I sat up for a long time, neither of us sleeping, and we apologized to each other—not for anything in particular, I think, other than our immediate sense of helplessness in the face of what’s to come.

Over the next few days, as I watched the Democrats dutifully engage in the traditional double-elimination tournament bracket of recriminations while every queer person I knew tried to make themselves digitally inconspicuous, I booted up Football Manager 24 and played it for maybe four straight hours. I played for a similar stint the next day, and the one after. I was regularly going to bed at two, three, four in the morning.

F.M. is one of those games that, like Warhammer or Magic: The Gathering or chess, has grown to include a neurosis-inducing level of complexity. Developed by Sports Interactive and published by SEGA, the game just passed its twentieth consecutive year of releases, but its bones go all the way back to 1992. There are, after so much time, systems within systems for scouting, transfers, promotions, mid-match player instructions, training, and basically everything else involved with the running of a competitive soccer team. Jumping in at any level is tough enough, and jumping into a league where the odds are against you, in a sport where, moreso than most, cash rules the road, can cause one to become a sort of hyper-arrogant football Sisyphus, pushing a boulder infinitely up the hill of their own inexperience and inability. In my haste, I thought that, with absolutely no foreknowledge beyond casual consumption of the game, I could pull off a heroic phoenix club run (I couldn’t) starting start things off in the sixth tier of English football (I failed) before moving over to the highest tier of Welsh football (I failed again) and then taking a spin in the third division of Turkish football (and here I’d contend that my players failed me, but I was the one who got forced out, so). It is a game about surmounting the insurmountable, about using a combination of wit, encouragement, strategy, and deft mid-season player acquisition deals to win the small things, and winning the small things can help you win the big things. It’s a lot like politics, in that way.

That, I think, is why I can’t stop playing Football Manager. Football Manager is in many ways antipolitics—namely, it is coherent and the win conditions make sense. The board says you are supposed to stay within the club’s payroll and end in the middle of the table. You either do that and stay, or you don’t and get fired. But, in its baser moments, Football Manager is exactly like our politics. It has no narrative, but it has stakes, and those stakes are dire. There are people counting on you to succeed, and if you don’t, they all lose their jobs. Sometimes you have to be the one to end those jobs. Sometimes there’s no right answer, no magic phrase to pull everyone out of a slump and see a match out to its end. Sometimes you collapse in the final minute of play. Football Manager is, somehow, politics in its most ideal form, a space where conflict is created and money sloshes around and undeserving victors are granted purchase and the actions of others reverberate outward into lives one never sees but knows must exist, just behind the screen, deeper in the soul of the game itself.

Football Manager makes sense to me in this moment because it layered a coherent structure on top of a deeply unstructured moment when my faith in basically everything I couldn’t reach out and touch collapsed. We are entering what’s likely to be a prolonged and psychologically injurious moment of history, and some very deep, very old, very Jesuit part of my subconscious still wants to be the kind of person who believes in cura personalis, in caring for the whole person and the worth of my fellow man, but as the days grind on I can feel myself getting smaller and crueler, narrowing the scope of my observable universe down, far down, down past my family and my friends and myself, because, as Olson put it, the situation we find ourselves in “doesn’t have meaning, [and] the only meaning is in how we choose to respond.” I think I’m taking the cowardly route, and choosing not to respond at all. I think I can’t think straight, and the motions of work and dinner and drinks with friends feels so perfunctory and blasé, but they’re also the only things I can keep ahold of. I can’t sleep, and I am gripping so, so tightly on to the things I can exert some influence over, for now, and, before I got fired, that included a second-tier Turkish football club whose history and name and staff and players I am entirely ignorant of.

Maybe I’ll learn, and maybe I’ll give up, and maybe in another thirty hours I’ll crack how to motivate my boys, and maybe I’ll win the whole fucking league. But it won’t be soon. It might be never. But it can be, and for now that has to be enough.

more tk,

Luis