The team behind Football Manager 2017 have produced a stunningly detailed collection of football data. In this short film, Copa90 find out how they did it

“The last time we tried to calculate our strike rate it was around 99.5%,” says Football Manager head honcho Miles Jacobson. For him and his team at Sports Interactive, the aim is always to create the most real-life representation of football year after year. Creating Football Manager 2017 has not just been about building a commercial product. It’s also about constructing a game they want to play over the next year until they release the next edition.

Jacobson strives to build the most realistic game yet so he can live out his dream of leading Watford to the Premier League title, albeit with the heavy heart that comes after he has relieved Walter Mazzarri of his duties in the process.

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For the people who build Football Manager and enjoy it, the detail is what makes the game so compelling – detail built out of Sports Interactive’s pride and joy, their database. The Football Manager database originally included around 4,000 players and staff but it’s now nearing 700,000. The players in this database have been rated by an on-the-ground network of roughly 1,300 scouts who span the globe – a network that football clubs would only dream of possessing.

“If a football club is going to sign a player they might watch him 10 times, where as we’re watching them over years and years,” says Jacobson. Football Manager’s local scouting team means they can find that next big thing quicker than anyone, whether the player is from Gibraltar or Guatemala. These scouting assignments judge a player on everything from their acceleration to work rate, place of birth to preferred moves. This information offer managers, virtual or professional, the insight needed to decide whether they players are worth buying or not.

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Ever since André Villas-Boas openly admitted to using the database to help source players during his time as chief scout at Chelsea, there have been a string of stories of Football Manager’s role in the professional game. While these stories are always countered by critics who focus on the few players who failed to live up to their potential – “But what about Freddy Adu, Maksim Tsyhalka, Andri Sigþórsson, Cherno Samba and Fábio Paím?!” – there’s no denying that the successes have massively outweighed the disappointments. And, from licensing data to football clubs to Sky Sports News’ use of the data to compare players, the Football Manager office’s desire to create the most realistic football simulation game has had an impact on the sport they’re trying to simulate. This is how they do it:

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