STUDIO PROFILE

For the sports management giant, the challenge is clear: adapt or die

BY PHIL IWANIUK

Only a stone’s throw from West Ham’s London Stadium, in a trendy development of glass-fronted office buildings, sits Sports Interactive. Walk through the doors and you’re in a dressing room where signed shirts from giants of football line the walls: Messi, Ronaldo, Beckham, Totti, Cannavaro. You walk into the studio space and discover that framed shirts line the walls of the entire space – there’s Ruud Gullit’s Netherlands shirt from Euro 1988, hanging just above the espresso machine. There are meeting rooms with names such as The Terrace, and on the back of every office chair there’s a football shirt, from the staff member’s favourite team, with their name printed on the back. There can be no confusion about the kind of game this studio makes. This studio makes football games.

Sports Interactive, founded by Paul and Oliver Collyer in 1994, has had a singularity of purpose from the very start. Except for brief dalliances with baseball and hockey management, football games are all SI has ever made. And it’s arguably made them better than anyone else. Each Football Manager game is an impossibly detailed reproduction of the sport, covering everyone from the players in all its major leagues across the world to the backroom staff, scouting networks, agents and media who shovel the coal into the sport’s engine room. The real footballing world used to laugh at Championship Manager, as SI’s stock-in-trade was known before the studio parted ways with Eidos, leaving the name with its former publisher. In the two decades since that split, though, things have changed an awful lot.

“I can remember exactly where I was standing when I read it,” studio director Miles Jacobson says. “I was in the old office on Upper Street, on the fifth floor. Someone handed me a copy of the Evening Standard and said, ‘Have you seen this?’ It was an interview with André Villas-Boas, who at the time was José Mourinho’s chief scout. “And he was asked the question: ‘Where have you found all these players that we haven’t heard of before?’ And he said, ‘Championship Manager’. We were like, ‘What the fuck?’ We’ve been talking to clubs about this, and they’ve been laughing about the idea of using our database. And here’s André Villas-Boas going, ‘Those of us who’ve grown up playing the game use the game‘.”