The Unbridled Joy of a Football Manager Network Game

I started a Football Manager network game a few months ago with my friends Ste and John. There was originally a fourth member of the group, Shaun, but he made the hilarious mistake of trying to play videogames on a Mac and so, obviously, was unable to participate in the fun.

Not that setting up the game was a walk in the park for us three PC players. As best we can tell, playing a Football Manager network game over the Internet requires three things:

1) Pseudo-VPN software (we used Hamachi).
2) Firewall software that doesn’t act like a dick (impossible – we had to delete our firewall software).
3) A small novelty bottle of gin with which to ply your router (pour into a free ethernet port).

Even then, you still have to add Glaswegian guile, Suffolk resolve and Berkshire whinging to the mix to get it to work. Oh Lord how I did whinge. I whinged at the router, I whinged at SI Games and I whinged into Skype at my friends. If I hadn’t put all that energy into whinging, they probably wouldn’t have worked it all out for me so quickly.

We chose to compete in the English Premier League, and drew teams out of a hat (leaving the top four from last season out, because we are just a little bit hardcore). I was doing the actual draw myself, with everyone else intently listening to a Skype group chat. As such, my friends had placed their trust in me – the team I follow, Liverpool, was sitting there in the hat, and it would have been oh so easy for me to fix the draw.

I drew for myself first, and Liverpool came out. I put it back in, out of sheer chivalry. “Amazing scenes”, said John, disbelieving. I drew again, and Fulham came out. I was happy with that, because Fulham are the team with the comedy statue of Michael Jackson outside their stadium, and I’m a huge fan of making unpopular and regretful decisions. As my new chairman, Mohamed Al Fayed, eventually found out.

Ste got Newcastle United, and John got Tottenham Hotspur. In the data update we used, Tottenham are one of the best sides in the league and comfortably have the strongest squad of the three teams we drew, Fulham are a stable mid-table team with a modest budget, and Newcastle have a weak (newly-promoted) squad and a huge wad of cash to spend.

We set to work in the first transfer window. I splurged my entire transfer budget on a Croatian playmaker (I didn’t need) named Milan Badelj that I’d bought in a previous singleplayer season, largely because the words “Croatian” and “playmaker” excite me. In that way, yes. John called upon his rich knowledge of Football Manager to sign a young, quick Czech striker named Vaclav Kadlec. I did not dare ask if this excited John in that way.

Ste called upon his rich (and, it turned out, pernicious) knowledge of rubbish ex-Liverpool strikers to ejaculate a combined £16 million or so on Milan Baros and Djibril Cisse. Ste also forked out around £5 million for the Manchester City striker Jo, which was surprising because by that point John and I were expecting Ste to bring Stan Collymore out of retirement. “Just wait”, said Ste. “Just wait”.

We waited. Nothing happened. Certainly no goals.

For those unfamiliar with football, what Ste might as well have done with his transfer budget is buy Jedward, cut all of their legs off and play them up front. This also almost definitely would have gone down better with the Newcastle faithful.

Towards the end of the first transfer window, I took the important step of finally looking at my current playing squad. As it appeared that Fulham had only one left-back, and because I had already wasted all of my money on a presumably handsome yet ultimately pointless young Croatian midfielder, I suddenly realised I was screwed. I needed a left-back, fast.

John came to my rescue, by signing my skillful moneybags Senegalese striker Diomansy Kamara for £1.5 million. I was happy to see him go not just because of the much-needed cash injection, but also because Diomansy Kamara has a Decisions attribute rating of 5 out of 20. This conjures up images of Kamara arriving at training each day wearing nothing but a rubber chicken, because he’d given away all his possessions to a company that sent him an erectile dysfunction email once. Nevermind – he’s John’s problem now. See below for the video John made regarding how well that went:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoqBrgKM0z4[/youtube]

We cried with laughter for 5 solid minutes when that happened. It was the greatest moment of my life.

Even with the cash from the Kamara transfer, I was struggling to find a new left-back. John recommended that I sign the Hearts left-back, Ruben Palazuelos. In case you didn’t know, Hearts play in Scotland, so I was understandably highly skeptical of his abilities. Nonetheless, I quite like saying his name – “PA! LA! ZUE! LOOOOOS!” – and that is more than enough for me so I signed him up.

However, it soon became apparent that this was not a good call. Palazuelos moves so slowly across the pitch that you’ll swear that he has only one leg, or at least you would if the lack of grace with which he kicks a football didn’t strongly imply that one of his legs is three times the length of the other.

Once our transfer business was completed, we began the far less interesting business of actually playing matches. All three of us started the season brightly. Ste’s Newcastle racked up a win away at megabucks Manchester City, my brave Fulham side bravely secured a 0-0 draw at the hideout of the shadowy corporation Manchester United, and Vaclav Kadlec scored roughly 10,000 goals every game for Tottenham, propelling John into a tussle at the summit of the league.

However, as the Autumn drew to a close the cold, harsh winter weather began to take its toll on the hastily assembled Newcastle squad. Almost all of Ste’s players had one of their limbs snap, twist or burst, leaving him with a threadbare collection of shankers and bottlers. He even had to play Alan Smith.

Newcastle plummeted down the league, closely followed by my Fulham side. I also had injuries to deal with (Ruben Palazuelos’ one good leg contracted gout or something, keeping him sidelined for five months), but Fulham’s big problem was psychological. The epicentre of ennui that swept my squad was our main striker – a man named Bobby Zamora.

My “friends” quickly discovered that Zamora’s achilles’ heel is apparently that, if you praise him publicly in the press, he can slip into a sort of existential reckoning. This cripples his morale, and makes him even less likely to score a damn goal at least once in a while (which is very unlikely indeed at the best of times). I tried whinging at him, but it didn’t help.

So, every week, either John or Ste would release a press story praising Bobby. The AI managers even got in on the act – just when Zamora had perked up a little in mid-December (mainly because Ste and John had grown bored of prodding him), Wolverhampton Wanderers manager Mick McCarthy, out of nowhere, said that he thought Zamora was an excellent striker, and he would love to have him in his team. This somehow destroyed Zamora’s fragile psyche once and for all. I put him on the transfer list and moved on. I like to imagine him sitting in a darkened room, painting abstract art and listening to The Cure.

With Zamora locked safely in his fortress of solitude, and the Icelandic striker Eidur Gudjohnsen now leading Fulham’s line, we rose back up the table to glorious mid-table mediocrity. John was still riding high in the league, battling for first place. He was also through to the final of the league cup after beating Wolves in his semi final (shove that up your pipe and smoke it, McCarthy). Ste and I had to face each other in the other semi final to decide who would win the right to have Vaclav Kadlec score 14 goals against them in the final. I won the first leg 1-0, and we drew the second.

The exit from the league cup piled the pressure on Ste. Knee-deep in a relegation dog-fight, and also eliminated from the FA cup by lower-league opposition, he had been fearing for his job for a few weeks. Eventually, we all woke up one morning to the news that Ste had been relieved of his post as Newcastle manager. John and I initially were stunned and left numb by the news, but after a few milliseconds those emotions were overruled by a powerful inclination to laugh out loud. Ste was the Geordies’ new Chosen One. He was supposed to bring balance to Newcastle, but all he did was figuratively shag Natalie Portman and kill Samuel L. Jackson.

That’s where we’ve left it. The next game is the league cup final between John and I. In the league, we’ve each won once in our two fixtures, so it’s surely going to be a hard-fought battle. My plan hinges on introducing Zamora to Kadlec 15 minutes before the start of the match, in the hope that Zamora might depress Kadlec so acutely that he won’t leave the dressing room at Wembley because no-one understands him.

Beyond that, many questions linger. Will Newcastle accept Ste’s new application for his old job (they’re apparently “considering” it at the moment)? Will John win the league/league cup/FA cup/Champions League (sigh)? Will Ruben Palazuelos apologise to me for existing (as he very much should)?

I’m looking forward to finding out.