English Premier League: This Is Not Football Manager

Above is a screen shot of one of the most popular football management games, Football Manager. While this game has revolutionized gaming and the way fans look at their teams—it has given everyone a wrong impression of how the game actually works.

Perhaps, a more fitting statement would be that it has given an incomplete impression of how the game works.

Let me firstly confess, that I don't know the ins and outs of how football works completely. After all, I'm someone who has only watched the game and supported a team. I cannot claim any knowledge of what happens within a football club or how a manager works.

Neither can most football fans.

What Football Manager has done is that it allows you to build a club to your liking. You can get promoted from the Championship, stay in the Premier League after attracting two or three players (which is getting tougher as newer versions are released!), and after a couple of years start pushing towards a respectable finish.

Who knows? Maybe you could even qualify for the UEFA Cup while you're at it!

Here's the bitter truth for a lot of people, though—Football Manager is just a simulation at best while offering very little in the way of reality.

Every time I see or read fans saying "Sign this player, buy this guy!" and I say to myself, "This guy must have played FM..."

In "FM," as we call it, you can bid for a player and if the bid gets accepted, offer him a contract and then sign him. It's quite simple. I'm sure that the real transfer system does not work like that.

Agents, for one, make life so much more difficult for clubs. There is a human interaction when negotiation takes place, and clauses in contracts that perhaps nobody has heard of.

So, when geniuses who play FM see their club doing very little by the way of signings—they claim absolute knowledge of the footballing world and wonder why the club didn't sign X or Y. For all you know, that genius found X in some unknown Colombian club by using the search option in the game.

FM makes management simple. The fact of the matter is that management is so much tougher. If you lose a job in FM, you can click exit and move on.

Can football managers afford to do that?

Can football managers spend 30 million pounds on certain players just because you want them to? Can they renew contracts for greedy players by clicking "offer new contract" and sanction 100 thousand pounds a week?

Can they see one bad performance and decide that they need a signing to ensure that they win the forthcoming matches?

It's just not possible. Moreover, it's not at all feasible.

A football club is built over time. Managers spend their lives on building these clubs. They endure sleepless nights because their team might have got beaten when they were not supposed to. They make players, and don't just sign them only to sell them because they feel like it.

This is reality. A lot of fans seem to be losing sight of the fact that football management is not the same as Football Manager.

I don't think you can sign the player you want with the click of a few buttons in real life in any case. FM has increased the already unreasonable expectations of football fans, who now claim new found footballing knowledge.

So, my suggestion to those fans is that if they want to sign X or Y, they can very well do it in FM because the real deal is different.