The quirk of the game is that it’s a sports game in which you never play sports. Illustration by Ben Wiseman Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

In November, 2012, the Azerbaijani soccer team FC Baku hired a Swedish immigrant named Vugar Huseynzade to oversee the scouting and acquisition of new players. Although Baku’s history included two league titles, along with appearances in prestigious European competitions, the club was now struggling, and facing financial ruin. Anything was worth a shot—even entrusting the team to Huseynzade, who was unknown within the professional soccer establishment. He was a twenty-one-year-old college graduate, whose primary qualification was that he excelled at Football Manager, a computer game.

The first edition of the game—then known as Championship Manager—was released in 1992. Its creators were two British brothers, Paul and Oliver Collyer, who, in the late eighties, were dissatisfied with the simulation games that existed. “These games tended to make you the center of the world,” Paul explained in an interview with the Web site Factor. “We would prefer to be in a world.” Although tabletop sports simulations had been popular since the fifties, computer processing allowed the Collyers to build a game that felt expansive, in which your team’s progress was just one story line among many. The early versions of Football Manager mostly eschewed graphics. You picked a team, bought and sold players, and set them up in formation. The subsequent action felt almost like an afterthought. Most of the game’s computing power was dedicated to storing statistics and strategies.

By the late nineties, Football Manager had become one of the most popular computer games in the world. To date, it has sold more than twenty million copies. There have been books (“Football Manager Stole My Life”) and films (“An Alternative Reality: The Football Manager Documentary”) chronicling the attachments that players develop to the game, and at least one academic study has used it to test theories of organizational strategy. There are Reddit threads and one famously busy message board devoted to sharing unusual successes. As the capacities of personal computers have grown, so, too, have the world-building possibilities of Football Manager. The newest version of the game, released this month, includes the input of more than thirteen hundred scouts from fifty-one countries, creating a database of information on more than seven hundred thousand players, coaches, and officials. It’s possibly the most comprehensive look at the global soccer rank and file in existence, a resource that’s frequently cited by players, scouts, and television analysts. In 2014, Sports Interactive, the producer of the series, began sharing its scouting reports with all the English Premier League teams.

The peculiar quirk of Football Manager is that it’s a sports game in which you never actually play sports. There are no rewards for dexterity or reflexes. Instead, it’s about management, from contracts to advertising deals, scouting to training regimens. You can begin as the manager of a famous club, where an open checkbook comes with a high level of scrutiny. Or you can apply for coaching positions in the lowest rungs of professional soccer, and try to work your way up. Regardless, the game demands extreme dedication to the minor calibrations that can separate the good from the great. You set the intensity of a training session and determine managerial philosophies, such as the tone and the language you want to use when suggesting that a mercurial superstar fire his meddlesome agent. Then, based on your decisions, the game simulates play. Your choices have only a mysterious, indirect effect on what happens on the field.

At first, Football Manager feels tedious, like setting the table for a meal that you won’t eat for days. A great deal of game play involves clearing your in-box of scouting reports, C.V.s from prospective assistants, questions from journalists. If you choose to be the manager of a national team, there are entire virtual months during which basically nothing happens. But the meticulous, bureaucratic slowness becomes mesmerizing. The game bears more resemblance to SimCity than to most modern-day sports games. The most engrossing parts involve scouring leagues around the world in the hope of finding underpriced talent or a sixteen-year-old prospect who might become the next Cristiano Ronaldo.

Perhaps its hypnotic, lifelike rhythm is why Football Manager continues to feel cultish and idiosyncratic, its mainstream success notwithstanding. This year’s edition includes a more sophisticated view of team psychology—it requires you to cozy up to influential leaders or to gently break up cliques. Huseynzade bolstered Baku’s roster and helped the club get to a respectable place in the standings, though gaming had not prepared him for the intricacies of interpersonal politics. He served out his contract and returned to Sweden.

It’s often said that gaming deviates from the traditional understanding of narrative storytelling. Age-old anxieties about artistic intention, along with the moral lessons we learn from serious art, drift away when every player appears to be in total control of the story. As gaming grows increasingly immersive, there’s a stodgy charm to Football Manager’s clunky graphics and overwhelming array of variables and data points. Meaning accrues over time. Some of the hotshots you’ve carefully mentored become stars; others flame out. What happens is largely beyond your control, because the game isn’t actually about omniscience. It’s about powerlessness.

In September, Electronic Arts released FIFA 18, the latest edition of the best-selling sports-video-game franchise in the world. Unlike Football Manager, in which largely indistinguishable players glide across the field, FIFA boasts fluid, head-to-head play and astonishingly detailed graphics. You can marvel at a player’s angular, fringy hair style, or at his wonderfully garish boots. Last year, in FIFA 17, E.A. introduced a cinematic play mode that revolved around the fictional athlete Alex Hunter, a gifted mixed-race youngster working his way out of a gloomy neighborhood in southwest London. Hunter’s story line is essentially a movie, shot with real actors and then rendered into graphics, that progresses as you achieve certain developmental markers. As Hunter, you have to score goals and earn the trust of skeptical coaches. In one scene, Hunter and his friends play FIFA at his apartment, and debate whether the game’s programmers have correctly rated their skills. But, unlike Football Manager, which offers a different experience to every single player, your choices in FIFA are ultimately limited. It’s impossible to stray too far from Hunter’s preprogrammed success.

FIFA 18 continues the story, with Hunter trying to keep a level head despite his anointment as England’s next superstar. One of the by-products of FIFA, and of Electronic Arts’ hugely popular baseball, football, and basketball games, is that they encourage gamers to identify with predominantly nonwhite protagonists. There’s a moment in FIFA 18 when you jump from Hunter’s story to that of his sister. Even in the world of fantasy, it’s rare for a cast of characters to embody the diversity of a typical European professional soccer team. Football Manager takes this idea even further, requiring that you deal with language barriers and homesickness—typical problems among global labor pools. This year’s edition includes a moment when a player generated by the game comes out as gay, affecting his club’s revenue and its public-relations strategy.

These games, like the similarly data-driven world of fantasy sports, began as expressions of fandom—of a basic desire to spend more time with our favorite athletes and teams than a given season allows. Now they are worlds unto themselves, stories that run free from what happens on the field. I’ve felt meaningful attachment to professional athletes I’ve managed in Football Manager but have never watched play, and I have imagined the interior lives of teen-age prospects whose non-pixelated faces I would never recognize. Does this draw fans closer, or does it simply recalibrate our expectations? Following sports these days means having access to players’ social-media feeds and to round-the-clock reporting on practices, preparation, and medical information. Ideally, this kind of access might engender empathy toward people who often seem larger than life. On the other hand, in gaming, as in fantasy sports, professional athletes may become abstractions, commodities that can be bought and sold, disciplined or replaced. Video games come with an illusion of control and ownership, a sense that empirical models can provide the basis for predicting tomorrow.

There is a streamlined version of Football Manager for phones and tablets. Since last November, I’ve played through twenty-five seasons, beginning in 2017. Initially, I turned to the game as an escape. At some point, it ceased to feel like much of one, as the game intersected with real life. It’s not that I forgot that I wasn’t actually the greatest manager in the history of Manchester United. But, last summer, when Brexit caught many political commentators by surprise, the game’s developers revealed that they had built the possibility of a “Leave” vote into the latest edition. Why not be prepared? Brexit would, after all, have real consequences for the movement of workers across Europe, including professional soccer players.

Decades from now, in the story that I am both playing and creating, the United States becomes a global soccer powerhouse and England wins the World Cup. British voters decide to reverse Brexit. I look up from the screen occasionally, remembering how many taps and swipes it has taken to move so many years into the future. And then I look at the clock and realize how little time has actually passed. ♦