Football Manager is at its core a single-player gaming experience. There have been visible attempts to expand on the multiplayer aspects of the game recently, which made us ask the question: is Football Manager heading toward becoming an esport? Sports Interactive Managing Director Miles Jacobson was kind enough to answer.
We sat down with Miles to discuss Football Manager’s function as a hobby for many players, the difficult yet ultimately successful process of accurately depicting Erling Haaland’s real-life dominance in the frames of Football Manager 2023, and the possibility of SI turning FM into an esport title.
Luckily for anyone curious about the esports future of Football Manager, Miles Jacobson laid out the picture in great detail. Here’s where things stand on that front at the moment.
“There are already people playing FM competitively. I don’t think any studio can turn around and go ‘Hey, we’ve made an esport.’ It’s down to the people playing the game to decide whether they want to play competitively or not.
Jacobson said that FM, down the line, could become bigger than a singler-player game, but he stressed that the developers will “do things at the pace [they] think is right” so as not to rush the process of becoming an esport game.
It appears that the thought of becoming a competitive esport is not foreign to the Football Manager developers. Miles also made it clear that any serious development toward realizing this idea will not materialize for the launch of Football Manager 2023 at the very least. With the concept obviously on the table and players showing interest in FM multiplayer modes, the days of Football Manager esports may not be that far into the future.