What if the Soviet Union Never Collapsed? Meet the Football Manager Fans Rewriting History

The Below Was Originally Published in Wired UK 

Its data-driven realism has led to Brexit presentations in front of parliament – yet many use Football Manager to create their own footy science-fiction

The year is 3019. The mighty Brentford FC have won the Premier League for the second year in a row. The Berlin Wall still stands, and Yugoslavia is a hotbed of world football. Leicestershire, meanwhile, has declared independence from England to become a tax haven, leading to unprecedented success for Leicester City.

This is the mad, fan-created world of Football Manager. It’s a footy sim that’s long been notorious for its dense, data-driven gameplay and unwavering attention to detail. But for nearly just as long, there have been dedicated players customizing the game’s database to spin personal football fairy tales that play out over in-game decades in alternate realities.

They vary from the minuscule (Chernobyl’s FC Stroitel Pripyat making a comeback); to the fantastical (the addition of make-believe countries); to the great, grand what-ifs. “I wanted to completely recreate the political, economic and footballing world as it was before the Berlin Wall came down,” says the man behind FM16’s ‘Iron Curtain’ database, Mladen Barbaric. “I had nearly 30 years of history to reinvent.”

As a backstory, Barbaric – a former journalist – tweaked the database to include an EU-style Socialist Union. Sides were only able to sign three foreign players, with most Iron Curtain footballers returning to their home clubs. Those were just three of more than 100,000 changes made to the original database – including a quarter of modern-day European nations being wiped from the map. “All international tournaments down to U18 level had to be redone – it was quite annoying,” says Barbaric.

But all the work and painstaking research, which included adding the badges of defunct East German clubs, was worth it. In the alternative timeline, Soviet teams such as Zenit Leningrad and Dynamo Kyiv became the Real Madrids and Barcelonas of the east, regularly making the latter stages of the European Cup. The saved file was made available for download on Football Manager’s official forums so any player could rewrite football history.

It’s an online community which crackles with life: from high-brow fan fiction told via the introduction of a UEFA super league, to downloadable fantasy scenarios which include Somalia as a global superpower. Hardcore Leicester City fan JoePalestine has even made Leicestershire a Monaco-style tax haven, adding every cash-rich village to the database (“I let my imagination run away, it was more fun than I could describe,” he says).

Although it’s a game steeped in realism, backed by a thousand-strong global research team, Football Manager has always been a platform for players to live out their footballing fantasies. “We love seeing fans write their own football stories – through our own database or their own custom one,” says Tom Davidson of Sports Interactive, the game’s developer. “Football Manager, ultimately, is about escapism.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Brexit. Knowing its seismic impact would hit football, Sports Interactive began working on 10,000 different scenarios the day after the 2016 referendum, with each event assigned a percentage chance of occurring in FM17. “We considered Northern Ireland long before it became a parliamentary issue,” explains Davidson. “One of my first Brexit scenarios playing the game was Northern Ireland leaving the UK. I thought, ‘That’s a bit mad.’ Yet, three years later, it’s a possibility.”

That devotion to detail caught the attention of MPs, with studio director Miles Jacobson presenting Sports Interactive’s research to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Davidson says the most doom-laden Brexit scenario includes the UK fracturing into independent states and the introduction of player work permits. “I’ve had saved games where I’ve had to quit – it’s just been too hard signing players. In 30 years’ time, the quality of football suffers and so too does the England national team – it’s borne out in our calculations.”

Had the Halloween Brexit happened, the upcoming Football Manager 2020 would have been shorn of its alternative timelines. Instead, they’ve all been revised and updated. “We’ve evolved with the negotiations and followed them very closely,” explains Davidson. “Our people have had the glamorous job of reading through Boris Johnson’s proposed deal. In some quarters, we’ve become as much a Brexit simulator as a football game.”

But it’s far from the first time that the series has been used to try and predict the future. Back in 2015, Reddit user Lorf_Yimzo generated headlines by simulating FM15 for 58 days straight – one in-game millennium – with Sheffield United becoming the most successful English team in history.

The results are updated every year – Lorf_Yimzo has even played the game in the mind-boggling year of 3165; more Futurama than Football Manager. “Generally, it's a great simulator," he says. "When you go centuries into the future it does quite well – even though the game was never really meant to go that far.” Ironically, in his Brexit-free future, nearly all Premier League players a thousand years from now are English.

But it goes further than political drama and sci-fi adventure. Some players customize the database to create fully-realized, football-fanatic fantasy worlds which they then blog about on the official forums. Barbaric describes the work of LewisQ – who plays the 2010 version of the game in real-time, to this day – as the “mother” of all alternative timelines, transforming a sports management sim into a futuristic role-playing game.

For Davidson, it’s those truly one-of-a-kind stories that are at the heart of Football Manager. “Fans are now creating their own futures and entire worlds. You mention the new game to someone, but they still have a save from FM15 that they’re 200 years into playing. It’s all about writing your own history and going ten seasons deep – becoming more attached to a squad of imaginary players than those you see every week on TV. There’s no other game quite like it.”