In September this year the England winger Andros Townsend received a frantic text message from his girlfriend. “When did you get fined for not turning up for training,” it read, followed by that iPhone emoji that resembles the troubled subject of Edvard Munch’s The Scream: eyes locked open, mouth agape, hands clasped to cheeks.

“Huh?” he replied, in bewilderment. “I got fined?” Then, a demand: ‘Show me.” Townsend’s girlfriend, Hazel O’Sullivan, obliged with a screengrab of a headline that read: “Andros Townsend accepts his fine.” Townsend, the article could be seen to continue, had learned his lesson and “indicated a willingness to improve his behaviour in future”.

Townsend is an avid player of Football Manager, a football-themed video game that launched in 1992 under the name Championship Manager, in which he also features as a player. The simulation game has been cited in divorce papers as a contributing factor in the breakdown of two marriages to date. Every year more than eight million players log in (more than half playing on pirated copies of the game) and attempt to take their chosen club, be it one of the heavyweights of the English premiership, known as the Premier Division, in Football Manager’s parlance, or a local team from some far-flung parish, to victory.

The game can appear, to the uninitiated, to be little more than a series of soccer-themed spreadsheets. And yet, within the neat rows of familiar and not-so-familiar names, a fully rounded representation of the beautiful game is hidden. Transfers, public relations, training regimes, injuries, diet: no aspect of the modern game of football is left un-simulated by Football Manager’s purring algorithms. Even the matches themselves play out on screen, as players pace the living-room floor, peeking through a cage of fingers at the unfurling action. Those who succumb to the spell can find it unbreakable. In 2015, Football Manager players spent an astonishing average of 252 hours playing the game during the course of the year, a statistic that includes people who bought the game in a sale and never booted it up.

Townsend immediately recognised the headline’s font. He duly tweeted a screenshot of the conversation with his girlfriend to the game’s official Twitter account, along with the question: “Do you wanna tell her or shall I?” The tweet was reportedly viewed more than a million times. While the headline may have been fake, the data upon which Football Manager builds is fanatically accurate. Sports Interactive, the London-based studio behind the game, employs no fewer than 1,300 researchers around the world, ranging from bloggers who every week watch promising youngsters on the training field up to professional consultants who survey the first teams playing under the Friday night lights. Football Manager’s database bulges with information on 320,000 active players, drawn from 116 divisions in 51 countries and lists up to 250 data points on each individual, such as their fitness, stamina, acceleration and speed, all of which is used to bring verisimilitude to the game.

The fiendishly tactical Football Manager. Photograph: PR company handout

Outside of the computer game too, Sports Interactive’s vast scouting network has become a high-value asset, one that even professional recruiters such as André Villas-Boas, former manager of Tottenham, admit to using to help guide their transfer decision-making. For smaller clubs, recruiting talent from relatively obscure clubs around the world and selling them on for significant profit is an essential way to run the business. Football Manager’s database offers fortune-changing tipoffs. Since Villas-Boas went public with his secret, many others have joined him. In 2013 Ole Gunnar Solskjaer credited the game with helping him to prepare for life as a manager, while, in 2008, Everton signed an official deal to use Football Manager’s database to search for players and staff. When Alex McLeish was manager of Rangers, he was tipped off by his son, a keen Football Manager fan, about a young player he’d spotted playing for Barcelona B in the game. The boy urged his father to sign the player. McLeish ignored the advice, telling his son that he’d never heard of the player. In doing so, he overlooked a young Lionel Messi.

The game’s database is so highly regarded that most days Sports Interactive fields a call from a sore player complaining that their stats in the game aren’t accurate. “You hear about footballers racing one another in training to see whether the game is right about who is quickest,” explains Miles Jacobson, Football Manager’s director. “Players can get very upset.”

We meet in a grubby cafe, a few hundred metres from Vicarage Road, home to Watford FC, of which Football Manager is now a sponsor (the game’s logo is stitched into the leather head rests of each luxurious seat on the bench). Jacobson was awarded an OBE in 2011 for his work on the game. When Elton John, Watford’s best-known supporter, doesn’t show up to a match, Jacobson takes his place in the directors’ box. Today, however, he’s jostled as if he were a native from the stands, high-fiving every member of staff and contractor he runs into.

Jacobson first came to Vicarage Road for his seventh birthday. “In Watford, at that time, you either supported Liverpool, as they were best team, or Tottenham or Arsenal, as they were relatively nearby,” he says. “I wanted to support my local team; it was the only way that I’d get to see matches.” Jacobson’s father, an unemployed inventor, had no interest in the sport, so his mother begrudgingly brought her son along for his first Tuesday night fixture. “She sat in the stand, read Woman’s Weekly and did the Evening Standard crossword,” Jacobson recalls.

During the match a woman sitting behind the pair with her own son and daughter leaned over. “You really hate this, don’t you?” she said to Jacobson’s mother. “Would you like us to bring him in future?” Each week, Jacobson would be dropped at the corner of Vicarage Road, where he’d meet up with the family. “When I was 11 or 12, I’d stand with this little group of yobbos in the family area,” he says. “We’d try to bunk over into the proper home section. That group of us is still going to games together. That’s where the love affair started.”

Miles Jacobson shows how to handle the media. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

While Jacobson was fuelling his growing interest in football, in a village in Shropshire a pair of boys of a similar age began making a computer game about the sport. Paul Collyer and his younger brother Oliver were at school when they started building on Championship Manager. “We had spent quite a lot of time playing football games but they all essentially made you the centre of the universe,” says Paul. “We wanted to make a functioning football world, and then put you into that world.” The pair began seriously exploring the idea of making a different kind of football management game in 1985, when they were just 16 and 13. They tested the earliest version of the game with friends at weekends and soon found a committed audience.

Video game publishers, however, were less enamoured with the boys’ work. The pair still have the rejection letter they received from EA, the American game publisher best known for the FIFA series. “I think that publishers were obsessed by graphics, simple as that,” says Collyer. “They didn’t get that the imagination was the best place for the action at that point in time. Luckily a couple of publishers did get it, and we were able to make a deal and get a foothold.” The pair made enough money from Championship Manager, which launched in 1992 for a range of home computers, to not have to apply for jobs when they left school. But throughout the early 1990s the series remained a relatively niche enterprise until, as Collyer puts it: “Miles got involved.”

“We didn’t have much money when I was growing up,” says Jacobson. “My dad was unemployed and my mum was a teacher. Then they split up.” Jacobson, a talented musician, earned a scholarship to the prestigious Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School, which he attended at the same time as the comic actors Sasha Baron Cohen and Matt Lucas. The disparity between Jacobson’s home and school life, however, drove him further into football. “At school I was seen as the poor kid,” he says. “At home I was seen as the posh kid. At football, meanwhile, I was just me. Nobody cared. It became an escape. That’s endured. Even though football is my job now, it’s still a release.”

As a child Jacobson believed that he was destined to become a singer. He sang at the Royal Opera House, the Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican and St Martin-in-the-Field, even appearing in Carmen alongside José Carreras. “Then my balls dropped and my voice wasn’t as good any more,” he recalls. Jacobson took a job at a burger restaurant, a job that he lost a few months later when it was acquired by Burger King. He took his redundancy money to a record store. Jacobson left the shop, not only with a bag of records, but also with a new job. “It was a chart record shop so we were constantly being given free tickets to gigs,” he recalls. At concerts, Jacobson was often offered the chance to meet the acts. He began recording these conversations, transcribing them and releasing them in a fanzine format. “I’d tour with the bands and sell their T-shirts so I could sell my fanzine in the queue.”

The NME editor, Steve Lamacq, picked up a copy of the fanzine. He approached Jacobson to see if he’d be interested in writing a review of a forthcoming Counting Crows gig for the magazine. “I filed the review and Steve bluntly told me I wasn’t ever going to be a journalist,” Jacobson recalled. Lemacq did, however, introduce Jacobson to Andy Ross of Food Records, an independent label that published Jesus Jones and Seymour, the band that would later become Blur. Spotting his entrepreneurial talent, Ross hired Jacobson as an A&R manager.

“We were paid nothing in that job,” says Jacobson. “Maybe £8,500 a year – not enough to pay rent.” Jacobson was, however, given free records with which to barter. “I’d always been a gamer so I’d swap concert tickets for video games under the auspice of looking for a way to get bands on to video-game soundtracks.” It was via this arrangement that, in 1994, Jacobson swapped two Blur tickets for an advance copy of Championship Manager 2. “I played the game and then sent faxes through to Paul Collyer listing my feedback. It was much like the feedback we get now: some was constructive and some was horrible.”

Later that week Collyer called Jacobson to ask if he’d like to meet in a pub in north London. “I thought we were meeting up to talk about my feedback,” Jacobson recalls. “When I turned up his exact words were: ‘You’re used to ripping bands off for a living, right? Well, we think we might have been ripped off. Would you look at our contract?’” Jacobson confirmed Collyer’s suspicions and set about improving the terms of agreement. So began a long-lasting relationship between Jacobson and the Collyers, albeit one that wouldn’t be formalised for another five years. “Effectively, I began helping manage these people whose games I loved,” says Jacobson. “I refused payment.”

Then, in 2000, the Collyers, whose passion was for game-making rather than business, invited Jacobson to become managing director of the company. He drew his first payment. “We always hired from the fan base where possible in the early days,” says Collyer. “It proved to be a fantastic strategic decision.”

Jacobson, who talks in pitter-patter, winding sentences, is driven, fixated and, by his own admission, a control freak. He demands sign-off of “everything to do with the brand” much to, as he puts it, “everyone’s dismay”. As well as managing the business, Jacobson also decides the changes and improvements that will be made to the game. “I go through all of the ideas as they come in, whether they come from a staff member, a football player or someone we overhear in the pub,” he says. “We have about 4,500 features in a wish list. At the start of each development year I sit and go through and put this giant jigsaw puzzle together.”

His energy and commitment haven’t dulled in the afterglow of success. In 2011, when Jacobson took his mother, sister and Collyer to Buckingham Palace to pick up his OBE, he told them to stand near the back so that they’d be the first in line for the official photographs. When they asked why that was important, he told them that he needed to make a swift exit for a meeting. While his mother is fathomlessly proud of her son, Jacobson’s father, who claimed to have invented the automatic mechanism on record players, died before his son joined Sports Interactive full-time. “My dad was actually a very important part of my life because I never wanted to be like him,” says Jacobson. “He was such a clever bloke and he squandered that. I’m not as clever but I need to use what I have to try to get as far as I can. With Football Manager I’ve been able to find that thing.”

Each July Jacobson begins to play the game obsessively after work each night, writing long lists of feedback and changes he wants implemented before the game’s release in November. On Christmas Day each year, he spends six hours manning the phones for customer support. “Lots of people get the game on Christmas, so we need to have support!” he says. “As a boss of the company you have to be prepared to get your hands as dirty as other people. If I’m asking people to do a three-hour shift on Christmas Day, then I’m going to do a six-hour shift.”

Miles Jacobson makes his point from the touchline. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Indeed, Jacobson believes that the game itself has honed his management techniques. “You need to be able to balance the books,” he says. “One of the biggest complaints we have from users is the amount of injuries their players sustain in the game. In reality, we have only 70% the frequency of injuries that occur in real professional football. Liverpool have 11 injured players at the moment, for example. In professional football, injuries mean that you have to spend a lot of time on squad management. It’s not enough to just have 11 players. When you’re running a football team you need to have 33 players: three per position, to ensure that you’re covered. That takes careful planning. If you blow your budget on a star player with a high weekly salary you’re not bringing people through and, when you’re left with six players on the bench, you’re in real trouble. That translates well to running a business. You have to have a spread of talent.”

Football Manager appears to have a multitude of real world applications. The League Managers Association uses the game to help train managers. In one training session, managers were given a Norwegian squad who were in an unfavourable scenario and told to turn the team’s fortunes around within so many weeks. The manager who had dealt with this scenario in real life then marked the students on their performance.

The game is now inextricably linked to the sport via collaboration with Prozone, data software used by professional managers to analyse their team’s performance and future opposition. Prozone and Football Manager share data with one another, creating a symbiotic relationship between the real and virtual sports.

“We provide player data to Football Manager to enhance the game’s realism in terms of, say, player movement on 3D animation or fitness data,” says Jens Melvang, product manager at Prozone and a former professional footballer who played for a decade in the Danish league between 1990 and 2000. “Then, twice a year before the transfer window, we get an update from Football Manager of its most up-to-date player data.”

Photograph: PR company handout

The system makes it much easier for scouts at clubs to find players who correspond to a particular team’s playing style. Melvang argues that the approach is revolutionising the way footballers are hired. “In the past a scouting department would typically watch 200-300 players per year, most of whom are introduced by agents,” he says. “The dynamics have changed from push to pull: clubs search for the players instead of agents pushing them.”

Jacobson sometimes uses his insider knowledge to help out his local team. “There are lists of players that I give to the club,” he says, with a wry smile. “When, say, the chief executive is pissed off with a particular scout and sends him to a less pleasurable country I’ll provide a list of 20 players that could be good enough to play in, say, the Europa Cup. That gives them a head start.”

Football Manager’s sales remain steady. Around 40% of players are based in the UK. Most buy a new copy of the game every two years. Unsurprisingly for a game centred on numbers, Jacobson and the team take great delight in monitoring how players’ habits change.

“We can see the numbers spike whenever there’s a soap opera or a reality show on TV and one partner wants to watch the show, so the other gets some time in the game,” says Jacobson. “We went over 100,000 people playing our games last week during I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here at the weekend.”

Not everyone plays so casually, keeping one distracted eye on the television. Some players have, for example, photographed themselves wearing a suit before, after an arduous season, their carefully curated team competes in the cup final. Neither is every player of the game a rank amateur: numerous professional managers play for fun.

When Gareth Barry first joined Aston Villa as a 19-year-old he stipulated in his contract that the club coach had to have plug sockets so he could play the game on his laptop. “It’s the perfect video game for professional footballers to play on an away trip, when they’re sat in a hotel room after the manager has told them to go to bed at 8pm and you want something to do.”

For Jacobson, it’s a scene that brings him unimaginable pleasure. “Five years ago we were just a computer game,” he says. “Today, we are a part of football.”

MANAGER’S TACTICS