Football Manager: The MMO

Friday 20 April 2007
Sports Interactive has unveiled an audacious plan to take Football Manager online, creating Football Manager Live, an MMO that has the capacity to over take World of Warcraft in the lives-reduced-to-mere-clickery stakes.

Set to debut next year on PC and Mac - and with a Beta test later this year - the game promises to juggle casual and hardcore players in a virtual world of 24 hour football. You'll create a team from scratch, bidding in auctions for valuable players, and take on other players from around the world.

%26ldquo;Imagine a cross between Football Manager, fantasy sports and auctions sites and you are part of the way to understanding Football Manager Live%26rdquo; says Miles Jacobson, MD of Sports Interactive.

Imagine a way to lose hours of your already time-squeezed life in a startling realistic and utterly addictive stream of nail-biting matches, where 'every game is a cup final', say we. With grins barely contained by our heads.

Early impressions suggest the interface has been vamped up for Vista-style multi-window tasking, while the game engine and pitch view will be the same 2D stage we all know and love.

Head quickly to the official websiteand join in with the SI community for your chance of an invite to the beta test this May. God, we can hear the crowds now, and they're singing our names...

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.