Zealand: it will take years for another studio to create a Football Manager rival, but someone needs to step up

In an exclusive interview with Esports Insider, Football Manager content creator Zealand Shannon has named the four clubs that could provide the most interesting challenge for players when the next title in the series is released in November this year.

The YouTuber also revealed how he took inspiration from the NFL’s Red Zone coverage when Football Manager took a major step forward to become a competitive esport at the FIFAe World Cup 2024.

However, Zealand also laid out the challenge ahead for Sports Interactive, the developers of the best-selling football management game, after it failed to deliver a game last year, increasing the pressure on the studio to live up to expectations with Football Manager 26. This is part one of a two-part interview with one of Football Manager’s biggest content creators. 

Read part one of the full interview below.

Zealand: If you take an extra year to make a game when you promise a yearly release, then you have to be able to deliver in that second year. That’s the thing that might put more pressure on them than they even realised when they cancelled the game initially.

I think that they figured they’d ride out the storm after they cancelled the game. All sorts of people were disappointed or upset that that happened. There was the whole sliding scale from your true internet crazy people to the players like me who just said ‘aw shucks, I really wanted to play that game. I guess I’m gonna have to wait another year.’

You’re going to get that again when the game comes out if it’s not perfect. I’ve been saying that the whole time because now you’ve waited another year, and if the game comes out and it’s all buggy.

Like everybody else, I was really excited when I saw the first couple of seconds of video footage with the lighting and the stadiums, but then the more you watch it, you realise this is still Football Manager. It still has its weird quirks, and the way the players move and all this stuff. So my hopes for what it is, is that it will be a clean game. 

It would have been excusable when FM25 came out for there to be bugs, right? Because there was this huge transition, and they were still learning how to work in Unity, even though they’d spent years behind the scenes working on it. 

Now that you have had another year, I think people are going to hold the game to a higher standard and obviously, if the game’s able to meet that higher standard, that won’t be a problem. 

But my hope is that they’re able to deliver a game that feels cleaner than they would have initially been able to get away with, for lack of a better term.

Zealand: I’ve never worked in the games industry and as my brother — who I work with now as a director and editor — likes to remind me, I’ve never had a real job, allegedly. So I’m not somebody who’s great at being able to comment on the hierarchy of a business. But that being said, the seat is hot. There’s no way it’s not.

Leaving all of that to one side, just knowing Football Manager and Sports Interactive and having a personal relationship with some of these people, I haven’t been told directly any of this, but even just from the interviews, Miles said, ‘look, if we don’t deliver on the game this year, I’m out’.

You don’t say that unless the seat is hot and there’s no way the seat isn’t hot. They didn’t fire anybody after the first game was cancelled, but let’s say you cancel the game and then release another game that gets universally condemned for being too buggy.

That’s going to be really, really difficult for the team to survive as it is because you’ve then proven conclusively that for two straight years of trying to put out a game on this new engine, which you’ve decided is the right thing to do, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot here. They’re the ones who decided to do this. It was a good idea. I love the idea to switch to Unity, but you decided what year it was going to happen. You decided how you were going to do it. You couldn’t deliver it the first time, so you’ve got to stick the landing the second time or else.

If we were doing power rankings like they do for the managers that are in the most danger of being sacked, people at Sports Interactive are rising up that list, right?

Zealand: I think it’s difficult for Football Manager to be an esport. I’ve always said that I was surprised at how well they did in 2024 with it, and I think they learned a lot of lessons as well.

At its best, it’ll be like professional poker where, because you don’t actually control the end result, you control all of the inputs into it, so there are so many different things that can go right or wrong in the competitive format of the FIFAe World Cup.

There was the English team and the Portuguese team, and they had the best regular seasons of anybody, but they kept having these really random, uniquely unfortunate things happen to them in the Champions League, which would remove a ton of potential points. 

Now is that their fault, or is that just the cards they were dealt, where they just get pocket twos every single time? Their goalkeeper would get injured right after they’d made all their subs, for example. You’re just left thinking maybe they shouldn’t have taken that chance, and they ended up paying for it or whatever, but it is a very difficult game for it to be an esport for these reasons. 

I do think the best person won though, which is what you want. If you have a game that you’re trying to prove can be an esport, if the best person wins, that means that your competition is actually reflecting what happened. 

I think the future for Football Manager is bright in esports. I think there was a lot of interest. And let’s not kid ourselves. EA FC and FIFA have had a divorce, so Football Manager is now the most popular football game that FIFA can interact with for esports.

I was invited in a creator capacity, which was really cool. But being an American, I watch this show called Red Zone every Sunday. It is the greatest invention ever. It follows American football from one big play to the next big play. 

In what I call soccer, what y’all call football, that is maybe a slower burn of continuous action. American football is action, action, action, play commercial, play commercial.

I watch Red Zone every Sunday just jumping from play to play to play. It’s awesome, so basically, after spending a day at the FIFAe World Cup I went, okay, there is no real way to keep track of the Football Manager competition the way that I would want to keep track of it if I was watching it back home. So I just did my own Red Zone. 

I pulled up all the streams and was just keeping track using a little piece of paper, trying to make sure that we could lock in for the big, important matches in each group, and it ended up working. It was a lot of fun.

Zealand: It is so, so difficult to create a competitor to Football Manager. The database itself has 480,000 players. Normally, when I say that, people are like, 480,000 people play the game. It’s like, no, there’s 480,000 players that are scouted and put into the game, right? It is the grassroots scouting network of football that Sports Interactive has developed for the game, which is almost like a buffer. 

I majored in history, so I’ll throw it back here. It’s like creating a buffer state, right? Between you and any potential competitor, you’ve just built this wall to say ‘look at all this scouting data we have. There’s no way you can possibly compete with this’. It would take years for somebody to do it.

I obviously hope somebody does. I think competition in that way drives you. If I was the only Football Manager YouTuber, my videos would be worse. That’s just how it works. But if I see another one of the great Football Manager YouTubers make a video, and I go, I didn’t think of that. Now I really have to step up my game because I don’t want to get outdone by that guy.

But there is none of that at the Sports Interactive studio. It’s not their fault. It’s because they’re the only people making any game like this. It would be foolish of me to attempt to predict what the PIF is going to do with a video game company, right? I have no idea. But I hope, whether it’s through them or somebody else, that there is a competitor at some point for Football Manager. 

I have no idea how that would materialise. It would take a very long time, but as an end result, we would have a better game to play somewhere.

As somebody that grew up with a lot more sports games than most people, because in the US we obviously have 45 sports and in most of them there used to be two video games. There would be NBA Live and NBA 2K, and they would both come out. There would be NFL 2K and there’d be Madden. Each sport had multiple games.

As I got older, one of these games would just fall away, and the other one would stay as the only game in that category. I don’t know what the contributing factors were, but I do think that when competition occurs in sports video games, it can only last so long until one kind of goes away. 

Do I think that if Championship Manager had managed to exist for another 20 years that FM25 would not have flopped? Maybe. I think they only existed at the same time for one year before Championship Manager kind of just gave up.

I mean, it’s pretty unbelievable that a yearly sports game just didn’t come out last year. Can you imagine if the NBA game just didn’t come out for a year? Oh sorry, we tried to do this thing, and it just didn’t happen. 

I mean, it turns into the golf game at this point, where every couple of years they just come out with a new golf game or a new UFC game or something. But those yearly sports games, they just don’t fail to come out one year, so that was pretty wild. 

That’s how you know that game must have been terrible. It must have been awful. They clearly made the right decision in not releasing it, and some companies wouldn’t have done that, but let’s not pretend that if that game was just slightly below average, they would not have released it because it is catastrophic to just not release a game.

Zealand: I don’t know if I’ve ever had an interaction with an actual FM wonderkid. I don’t know if that’s ever happened. 

I’ve never talked to Ousmane Dembele or Antoine Griezmann. I know they play the game. I’m fairly certain that those types of people will have at least seen some of my videos, but I’ve never interacted with them. They don’t follow me or anything.

The coolest one for me, and this is probably not one that’s gonna be the coolest one for other people, but there’s this guy called Terrence Boyd who has 16 caps or something for the US national team. Right when I started playing EA FC, he was the next big American talent. He was just breaking into the national team. These are always the players that become like your core memories for you.

I ended up doing a video with Terrence Boyd, which I just thought was so neat. He had these injuries, and he was actually starting to revive his career at the age of 32, and I think he was scoring a ton of goals in the second Bundesliga. He ended up having a really nice career, but he didn’t become some guy who was playing for a club like Bayern Munich either. 

But he loves Football Manager, and the most surreal part of all of that is we get on this call to do a video, and I’m going, ‘this is so cool, it’s so nice to meet you’, and he’s like, ‘what do you mean? You’re freaking out? I’m freaking out! It’s so nice to meet you! I’ve been watching all your videos’. 

I was like, this is so weird. Why are you excited to meet me? I’m supposed to be excited to meet you. So that was a really funny experience just because of my personal life. Doing that video with Terrence Boyd was really, really cool.

Matt Smith, who was this guy who played for the Wales national team at the last World Cup, he is somebody who plays a ton of FM who I’ve interacted with. He gave me his jersey after an international match, which is objectively the coolest thing that’s ever happened. I said something stupid like, ‘oh, I should have brought a keyboard to like hand to you’. I didn’t even know how to react. It’s a sweaty jersey. 

Zealand: I think out of all those guys, I know Luis Suarez plays it. He even plays it sometimes on the team bus for Inter Miami and back and forth, but I just don’t feel like I’d get along with Luis Suarez. I’ve just got to be honest. 

So I think that out of all of the players that have been up there, I think Griezmann is the biggest grinder of FM. I think a lot of people play FM. I think Antoine Griezmann really is in with the Football Manager culture. I think he’s secretly on the subreddit. I think he’s doing different road to glory challenges. I think Antoine Griezmann loses real training hours because of how addicted he is to Football Manager.

As a result, he would be the one person that I would probably love to play a save with the most and come on, it’s Antoine Griezmann! He is one of the greatest players of his generation. That would also be super surreal. But I think he is a legit Football Manager grinder.

Zealand: No, Messi doesn’t play Football Manager. That doesn’t surprise me. I mean, somebody like that, who uses their time maybe a little more efficiently. I used to do a podcast with a guy who played for Inter Miami. That’s how I found out about Luis Suarez playing Football Manager. So, of course, I asked does Messi play it too? You know, he’s like never even seen him on a phone. He’s not that type of person. He doesn’t need that.

Unless Cristiano Ronaldo’s playing it when his legs are in the cryogenic chamber or something where he can’t physically move, I can’t see him playing Football Manager unless there’s no more kale he can eat to be a better footballer.

Zealand: That probably comes down to who you think is the best footballer who would have been playing Football Manager. I think that you could probably go back to the early 2000s and find some of those English guys. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a Gary Neville or somebody from that ilk that put a lot of time in as a Championship Manager player back in the day, particularly in England, when you’re talking to people that maybe

Scholes or David Beckham or somebody back then, but are they better than Luis Suarez? I don’t know, right? Because Luis Suarez is slept on as one of the greatest strikers of all time, so maybe. 

The game is not as popular in Brazil, so you’re at least safe with the great Brazilians. Brazilians still play it. There are resourceful internet happenings over there, right? But technically, it’s not allowed to be sold and played.

Zealand: Stop pretending to be something you’re not. I mean, the worst mistake people make in Football Manager is that they pretend to be a different team to the one they actually are. 

Manchester United are not very good. Look, if they were talented enough to do what they think they should be doing, they would have done it by now. They’ve had multiple great managers that have come through, and they just haven’t been able to do it. 

This happens all the time in Football Manager when a team gets promoted and you were really good in the Championship with this tactic, but now you’re playing the best teams in the world. That tactic is not going to work up there. You’ve got to switch it up like Atletico Madrid, where you’re able to hit on the counter. You’ve got to have some speed while also minding your P’s and Q’s on the backside, too. You’re not preventing short goalkeeper distribution up there constantly, because you’re just going to get destroyed, but you don’t want to invite too much pressure either. That’s when you get into trouble. 

I think Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was on to something. I’ve said this for a while because Ole Gunnar Solskjaer did not pretend that Manchester United was better than PSG. He went out and said: ‘We’re going to counter you. I have Rashford. You are not going to be able to break us down’. And you know what? He beat PSG, and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer got good results. 

I think if you want to roll it back even farther, Jose Mourinho was doing a lot of the same thing. It was about saying we’re going to survive and we’re going to win, and I think Manchester United’s issue, if I could get into the tactics screen, is that they are trying to play like Liverpool. They’re trying to play like Manchester City. In some ways, they’re trying to play like Arsenal, right? They’re trying to be one of those teams when they’re just not. 

You need a few years of being responsible tactically, doing the Ole Gunnar Solskjaer thing, and then you start to build, I mean, just look at what Arsenal did. Arsenal were bad. Not as bad as United are now, but they were bad. They were losing to teams they shouldn’t have been losing to and they were eighth in the league, but then they built the survival system, they survived, and then they grew a team that could step forward.

Obviously, they’re not as aggressive as some people think they should be. They have 45 defensive midfielders on that team somehow. But they have been able to step forward and dominate games and control possession again because they grew into that. I think Manchester United needs to go through that reset process, and the longer they delay that, the harder it’s going to be.

Zealand: No, I mean, if you go band for band, player for player, talent for talent, they’re just not a top six team. You’re just not going to get to that point if you invite one vs ones all over the field

Zealand: Wirtz is a nice modern player that I think you can stick anywhere. You can put them on the wing as long as you have a fullback that actually plays down the wing to overlap him, and they do have those types of guys on that team. 

Ekitke and Isak? I love it. In Football Manager, when I’m playing that type of team, managing one of the best teams in the world, I’d sign two world-class strikers. They can play 60 or whatever games a year. They’re playing one and a half times a week the entire season. Fight it out. 

It’s a great situation to be in. The last time I managed in England on Football Manager, it was a team called Taunton Town, and I had two of the five best strikers in the world on that team. 

Sure, every once in a while, you find a way to fit them both on the same field, or you put one as an inside forward or something off the left, but chaos reigns. It is really nice to have two strikers because let’s say you put Isak out there and all of a sudden hater central is dumping on him because he can’t hit the target, then you know for the last 30 minutes you can bring in Eiktike. Boom! That’s another world-class striker that just walks on the field and he’s pissed, he’s got something to prove, he’s angry he didn’t start the game, so he comes in with his hair on fire. It’s an embarrassment of riches.

I’m happy for Liverpool that they finally realised they can spend money because everybody else seemed to realise that a while ago. I don’t think that there is a need for a solution. I think if you are a pure world-class team in the category of Liverpool, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Manchester City, you can have two world-class strikers as long as they tolerate being there, and they will both play a lot.

Zealand: No. In the new Football Manager, Real Madrid and Barcelona are going to be really terrifying. 

I don’t know how you’re supposed to stop Real Madrid. Real Madrid, on paper, is ridiculous and Football Manager is a game that is basically played on paper, right? Obviously, they’re still trying to figure it out a little bit in real life, but when you get Vinicius Jnr and Mbappe coming at you, and then Rodrygo coming off the bench, he’s ridiculous on Football Manager.

Barcelona, of course, are going to have Rafinha, who’s going to get one of the biggest upgrades anybody’s ever seen between Football Manager games. Then there’s Yamine Lamal, who in the last Football Manager was like 15 years old when the database was finished and is now 18 and second in the Ballon d’Or voting. Lewandowski is still amazing too, although I’m not going to lie, Lewandowski is old, and when players get old on Football Manager, even if they don’t get slower, they just gradually become slower because it’s assumed they’ll slow up. 

I think Barcelona’s best starting front three on Football Manager is going to be Rashford with Rafinha and Yamine Lamal on the wings, and then Pedri just kind of floating behind them. I think that’s your best starting line-up up Barca, but I think Football Manager has always been right on Marcus Rashford.

I think he just soured on Manchester United, but the guy has proved it immediately after going to Barcelona that he is a bona fide star. He’s an unbelievable player. You just have to put him in a spot that isn’t toxic.

Real Madrid and Barcelona are gonna be the toughest teams to stop. There’s a weird problem with the Premier League where they never have the best team on Football Manager. They just don’t. Everybody’s in the top ten, and the big six is basically almost all in the top ten in terms of talent on the game, but they never have the number one team. It’s always Bayern, Munich, Real Madrid, Barcelona or PSG.

Zealand:  I think there’s a lot of very good saves this year. You have Bordeaux which got relegated because of financial reasons, down to the fourth division of France. You’re gonna have to like load some lower leagues in to be able to play as them, but that’s a team that is a big club. You can return them to glory. Bordeaux is one that jumps off the sheet right away for me. Deportivo La Coruña in Spain is another team that got yeeted down the leagues. It could be really fun to pick up and to play as.

Everybody’s favourite save to take a crack at will still be Wrexham. That’s your Disney save, and I want to be clear, I love the Wrexham story. I think it’s awesome. I think if everybody could do it, they would. There’s so many stories of rich idiots buying teams and it not going well, thinking they’re going to do what the boys at Wrexham have done, but they’ve actually pulled it off. I have a ton of respect for them. They’ve gone from the fifth division to the second division. They’re playing Football Manager in real life. You don’t even need to get in there to take over in the game as the manager. They’re doing it themselves. 

I do think Wrexham will end up in the Premier League in the next couple of years, which is just going to set off some sort of English firestorm about how they’ve allowed this to happen. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia will go to number one on Netflix or something.

I think a sleeper pick for Football Manager 26 though, is Manchester United.

There’s a lot of people in England, obviously depending on who you’re fan of, that hate Manchester United, but there is no other massive club that has fallen off harder than United. Tottenham Hotspur were never as big as Manchester United, obviously, but they went and won the Europa League last year.

I saw this graphic today, I couldn’t even believe it. Ruben Amorim has one of the worst point totals of any appointed manager in the Premier League after 33 games. Not for United. Ever. For any team since 1990. They are so spectacularly, impressively, unbelievably bad, considering where they were 10 years ago, and while that is super fun for a lot of people who had their childhoods ruined by Manchester United, there’s no way that’s not an attractive save to try and figure out what’s wrong with the team and fix it. 

I’ve tried to do it in Football Manager. It is hard. Those contracts are ugly. Those players are not very good. Football Manager has started to lower their ratings, and boy, are they gonna be a lot lower in the next game.

Part two of Esports Insider’s interview with Zealand will be released on October 9th, 2025.