Inside the World of a Football Manager Analyst

Tom Davidson has a "dream" job. He is a Football Manager Analyst; a man who deals in the numbers and statistics so many players have come to adore over the years. Ahead of FM16's release, he kindly agreed to chat with B/R UK about his position, Sports Interactive and more.

B/R UK: We’d love to hear about your specific role within Sports Interactive. First of all, would you be able to explain what your job entails?

My role is to use FM, the FM "Data Editor" and the vast FM database—which contains data on over 650,000 individuals at the latest count—to run simulations of real-world football scenarios.

For example, if a big-name player is linked with a move to another club, we can use FM to predict whether or not the move would be a successful one.

We’ve also had a lot of success in the last few years at predicting the end-of-season league tables; for the last three seasons, we’ve correctly predicted the champions of the Premier League and Championship months before the end of the season. I’m known as the only person in the studio who actually gets paid to play FM!

B/R UK: How does your average day shape up?

An average day generally sees me dealing with domestic and international media. We have a regular working relationship with a number of UK-based media outlets, and over the course of the last two years, we’ve begun to extend the work of the Football Analyst to the international press.

That means I can go from profiling the next crop of Swedish wonderkids to predicting how Lionel Messi would perform on a wet Tuesday night in Stoke. It certainly keeps things interesting.

B/R UK: Does this mean you can settle the age-old question once and for all?

Messi definitely can do it on a wet Tuesday night in Stoke. He is Lionel Messi after all, and sometimes it seems like it’d take a hurricane to stop him.

B/R UK: How did you progress into the role of a FM analyst? Was the series a feature of your childhood?

I’ve been playing the game since the mid-90s when I was probably five or six years old, and it’d always been a bit of a dream to play FM for a living. It’s helped form the bulk of my footballing knowledge; I knew almost everything about virtually every member of AC Milan’s 1995-96 squad on the back of a title-winning save I had with them.

Courtesy of Sports Interactive.

By the time FM 2009 came out, I’d started playing around in the Data Editor, creating various clubs, stadia and competitions. Teaching myself how to use a few of the more advanced tools within the Editor helped me get the job.

There was also a lot of luck involved. I’d just finished university and didn’t really have a clue what I was going to do when I saw the job advertised on the Sports Interactive website. When you see the dream job, you’ve got to apply for it.

B/R UK: Could you give us an insight into running a custom simulation? What is the process behind setting this up and how complex can the sim become?

Setting up a simulation can be a very quick process or a lengthy one depending on what’s requested by the media. We recently ran a simulation of Brian Clough’s 1979 European Cup-winning Nottingham Forest team in the Premier League, and while it only took about an hour to run the actual simulation, collecting the data for Clough’s team took weeks.

As a general rule, we keep up-to-date league tables of the major European leagues as well as keeping up with injuries, suspensions, manager hirings, firings and transfers. This is so we can replicate exactly what is going on in the real world, and it means we can quickly add in the data required for the simulation without having to start from scratch each time.

For Champions League and international tournament simulations, we’ll actually add in the draws for those as they happen in real ife so we can fire out the final results as quickly as possible.

B/R UK: How in-depth do the variables go? For instance, if I wanted two publicised "enemies" on the same side—say Luis Suarez and Patrice Evra—would you take into account the impact of potential unrest on the team?

The simulations can go into a very deep level of detail. The database not only contains data regarding a player’s on-pitch ability, but it also lists information on a player’s personality, their relationship with fellow players and managers and even their favourite clubs. All of these factor into the simulations that we run.

B/R UK: Do you regularly stumble across unknown talents who soon become popular real-world stars when running through simulations?

I think everyone has their own "Football Manager legend" who they discovered before anyone else. I’ve certainly seen it in simulations but also during my own FM career saves. Raheem Sterling and Memphis Depay were two notable players who kept putting in very impressive performances in FM13 before they were well-known in the real world.

Courtesy of Sports Interactive.

Before I joined SI, I had a save on FM 2009 with Palermo where I tried to assemble a young, talented squad. In the end, I had (among others) Eden Hazard and Alexis Sanchez in midfield and a young David De Gea in goal, so it was quite nice seeing those players develop into top-class players in real life. I did miss out on signing Neymar, though.

B/R UK: Can you recall any obscure happenings in your simulations, ones that would make football fans stand up and take notice?

The most obscure thing that I’ve seen happen on a simulation was England turning to Tim Sherwood to take over from Roy Hodgson, but in the FA’s defence, he was coming off the back of a successful spell at Tottenham.

On my last career save, Danny Welbeck became one of the best managers in the world, so look out for that happening around 2033.

B/R UK: Have you ever had a simulation request from a club or someone involved in professional football? Presumably nobody has ever asked "what would happen if we signed X?"

We’ve not had a direct request from clubs to run a simulation, but in the past, they have been known to use the FM database to scout a player. Last year, we partnered with Prozone who are using the FM database as part of their Recruiter software. This is used by clubs across the world, so there may well have been a few signings made off the back of it that we don’t yet know about.

Courtesy of Sports Interactive.

We don’t know of any confirmed transfers that have gone through with the help of FM, but with our data becoming more and more widely used within the footballing world, it’s possible they have already happened.

B/R UK: Do you expect elite European clubs to use FM simulations as a tool for scouting in the future? Would there have been value in, for example, Manchester United requesting a sim with Memphis Depay in the side before they signed him?

I think clubs will increase their use of the FM data that’s found in Recruiter as well as the FM database in the game. That’s just the way that football is going, and I think it’s a good thing—you want to know as much information as possible about a player before they sign, and Football Manager is fantastic for delving into that level of detail.

We always say that clubs should never sign a player just off the back of our data; there’s no substitute for seeing a player in the flesh with your own eyes.

B/R UK: We've seen famous YouTube signings before (Bebe, anyone?), so surely utilising FM would offer a more complete, well-rounded assessment of a player's ability?

It’s very easy to get swept away when you see clips of players producing dazzling skill and tricks, but the best managers know that great players need to have more about them than just silky footwork.

That’s why FM is such a good scouting tool. All of a player’s weaponry is broken down into defined categories so you can see just what they could offer your team, and a manager can form an immediate opinion of whether this is a player they want to look at or not.

B/R UK: Do you think using FM as a tool is becoming more accepted now Sky Sports are utilising the data on their broadcasts?

We definitely saw FM become more accepted after Sky Sports started profiling potential signings using our data. At first, a lot of people were sceptical and saw us as still being firmly in the video games genre, but by the end of the transfer window, we’d seen that people had started to see us as a part of football.

We showed people exactly what goes into scouting players for the FM database; we have over 1,300 researchers across the world—covering everything from the Premier League to the Malian Premiere Division—who are watching every level of football and constantly evaluating players. The level of detail is quite staggering.

B/R UK: How do you expect the role of a FM Analyst to change in the future, and how will simulations evolve?

I think we’ll see FM’s data being more widely used internationally and perhaps even in a similar way to how Sky Sports News have used it.

The first few simulations that we’ve run for the international media have been broadly successful—we predicted the winners of the MLS play-offs as well as the winners of the major European leagues—and that will help to potentially bring Football Manager to the attention of a new audience.

I think our simulations will evolve as football evolves; maybe even a little bit faster as we have the capability to simulate something such as a European or World Super League before such a thing has become reality.

A huge thank you to Tom for taking the time to chat with us. You can follow him on Twitter right here. FM16 is available on PC, Mac and Linux now.