Studio: Signature Entertainment
Directed by: Louis Myles
Screenwriter: Louis Myles
For anyone that has every played Football Manager they will know the emotional and intellectual involvement required by the player (see the incredible video below), it is that involvement that has been looked upon for years with confusion by non-players, until now!
Signature Entertainment have made a documentary on the life and times of a Football Manager player. For those of you not familiar with the game, it is a video game which allows players to follow their dream of managing a football (soccer, it will be referred to Football in this review) club. From tactics to transfers, press conferences, training sessions, you are the manager. There are so many ways of playing the game too, you can start off with a low league club and build them up to become the best team in the world by finding hidden gems of players, or you could start off with a team like Manchester United and have an unlimited pot of money and success comes naturally and your job is keeping them successful.
So now you know the premise of the game, was the documentary any good? Well in my opinion it was fantastic. It really is a love letter to Football Manager fans and acts as a nostalgic anecdotal film on a game that is much loved the world over.
There are a lot of anecdotes in the documentary and it covers many facets of the culture surrounding the series. We are shown descriptions of interviewee’s favourite teams, players, and where and how they like to play the game. We are introduced to the concept called ‘Suiting’ where players literally put on their finest suit for a cup final and sit at their computers giving imaginary team talks and press conferences to the mirror. This was hilarious, yet as a fan of the game, I can see why people do act this way and there is a relationship between the game and the player and this documentary did really well at portraying how that relationship comes about without making the players of the game seem crazy.
The documentary features some great interviews with the original creators, famous fans, sports individuals and even a stand-up comedian who has a show called How Football Manager ruined his life. All elements of the film worked superbly and produced an excellent viewing experience for this Football Manager fan. And that is what this documentary does so well, it hones in on the key points of what makes this game so special and why fans feel the way they do about this game. I do question whether the documentary is successful in appealing to non-fans but for anybody who has a wife or girlfriend that has had to wait to go out because you just had to finish one more game can watch this and see why, see that we are not crazy loners and must be uniquely annoying, there are others out there and I thing this documentary encapsulates the addiction caused by the game very successfully and shows that it is all encompassing and takes over one’s life.
So what is the movie? Well it’s a great advert for the new game that was released last Friday (even if it was not meant to be) and the film really invokes the need to play the game, and I am definitely going out later to buy the game. So it was successful on that level. It is also just a great laugh and the anecdotes are truly hilarious and very informative. There will be disbelief in the lengths people go to when playing the game and if you have played the game there will be points where you are just sitting there nodding silently in agreement to something you do too when playing the game.
Overall, it was a great 72 minutes of indulging in a film about a passion which so many millions of people share and creates an understanding that though this game is played alone, we all share the dream. And at the end of the day we all want to be Football Manager’s!
An Alternative Reality: The Football Manager Documentary is out now and is available from Amazon and iTunes.
Here is the trailer for the documentary
