Nearly 30 years ago, teenage brothers Paul and Oliver Collyer coded a basic football management simulation in their Shropshire bedroom. They called it Championship Manager and it was released in 1992 to modest sales and lukewarm reviews.
Owners of Commodore Amigas or Atari STs could choose to “manage” one of 80 English clubs. There were no animated players, there were just fictional names and simple numbers representing their attributes. It was a simpler time.
The Collyer boys have come a long way since then. Their game is now known as Football Manager and its most recent edition sold over a million copies in its first two months of release. Now you can manage any one of 10,000-plus real clubs, their real players all faithfully reproduced by a horde of researchers. And therein lies the problem…
Earlier this month, after a long, legal tussle, Manchester United and…
