Zealand: The one item on my wishlist that Football Manager 26 has already delivered on

In the second part of an exclusive interview with Esports Insider, Football Manager content creator Zealand Shannon has revealed how creating content about the game led him to leave his job as a professional sports commentator.

Speaking ahead of the release of Football Manager 26 on November 4th, the YouTuber also revealed the difficulties that come with knowing people at Sports Interactive when criticising their decisions or their work.

Finally, he discusses one big feature that he wanted to see the developers address that appears to have been taken on board for FM26.

Read part two of the full interview below. To check out part one of the interview, click here.

Zealand: I think the first time I ever had any contact with SI was maybe three or four years ago. To be honest, most of the guys that I knew from the first time that I talked to Sports Interactive aren’t there anymore. Miles, of course, is still there.

I do know guys at the studio. It’s hard not to when you make content about one game because you just cross paths, whether it’s with the person that runs the Twitter account or the person that handles their communications or whatever.

I know some of the guys at the studio in a personal way and have interacted with the studio before. Obviously, they invited me for a tour when I was in London, and I went around the offices and looked at everything.

I know they watch what I do because I’ve had standoffs with them before, and I know that they watch and react to the things that I do, which is definitely weird because I used to make whatever video I wanted to make, or react to anything the way that I want to react to it. 

But now I know that the guys whose work I am reacting to are undeniably paying attention to my reaction, and using that as some sort of barometer for where everybody’s at, so in some ways, you have to meter your reaction a bit.

I can’t react in the way that your friend at the lunch table can react. I can’t come out and tweet the absolute first thing on my mind because that might cause too many problems. I have to take an hour, go for a walk.

How do I actually feel? I can’t just start bleeping words or whatever. You have to meter it a little bit when you know the people. I’m gonna have to interact with these people again and you can’t just come in and be like, well, he’s the worst person I’ve ever met. He’s completely failed. You don’t talk that way about people who you have a personal relationship with. 

That’s exclusively reserved for the people at the bottom of my comments that don’t think I’m funny, which is a fair opinion. Sometimes I’m definitely not.

Zealand: I think they’re symbiotic, to be honest. Football Manager and SI will always say that they’re not really trying to compete with FIFA, now EA Sports FC, because it’s just a different type of game. 

They’ve talked about it publicly to say thank you to EA FC for their help with basically carving Football Manager out of some of their rights agreements. EA FC clearly doesn’t view Football Manager as a competitor if they’re carving out a hole in their rights agreements for Football Manager to be able to use. 

I think that EA FC is a gateway drug to Football Manager and that EA FC is almost glad that Football Manager exists because it’s able to absorb all of the people who look at EA FC’s career mode and are wholly unfulfilled. That’s how I ended up playing Football Manager. I would grind career mode for years and I just wished there was a way to play more than 12 years into the future. 

Or I wished there was a world where I couldn’t sign İlkay Gündoğan in League One, which I did the one time I played EA FC’s career mode last year, or Kvaratskhelia in the Championship. It’s so unrealistic if you know how to play it. Football Manager doesn’t allow you to get away with that stuff, and it’s this huge living, breathing world of football. 

I think what Football Manager can hope to do is offer itself as a more appealing option after you get hooked on EA FC Career mode.

Zealand: It could. That’s how it worked for me. I know that’s how it worked for a couple of other people. 

But on a scale of one to a hundred, Football Manager’s marketing in the USA is about a negative five, so it’s not like they’re on a huge push. I don’t think they really care. I think that the United States to Sports Interactive is still a gigantic backwater.

There’s a poll that is probably four or five years old now but it asked Americans what is your favourite sport? Soccer was fourth on that list. It was already ahead of ice hockey. It was about 9% of the population that said it was their favourite sport.

9% of the population of the United States is three times the population of the Netherlands. It’s closing in on half the size of England, and that’s just people who say it was their favourite sport. 

I’m gonna be honest, if somebody comes up to me with a clipboard or however this stuff works, and they go, ‘what is your favourite sport’? It’s going to be basketball and soccer, depending on what mood I’m in. I could even say American football. If it’s football season and my team just won then yeah, you know what, go Bucs! So I think there are a lot more people who love soccer than those who picked soccer first, or who are at least paying attention to the sport.

The issue with soccer in the United States is that the people who don’t say it’s one of their favourite two or three sports, they know nothing about it, whereas something like ice hockey, even if it’s your fourth favourite sport, you know the players, you know who’s doing well. 

The problem is soccer just hasn’t existed in the US long enough. That’s just a soccer in the USA discussion. Football Manager falls into the trap of the sport not being a dominant part of the public discussion but that can’t be mistaken for a lack of interest among a large number of people.

I don’t think the makers of Football Manager really care or are interested in promoting the game in the United States. EA FC are and I think that is a pretty significant difference because EA FC makes a ton of money from the US market. I mean, that’s the game I played before Football Manager.

Zealand: It’s such a strange world where there just wasn’t a Football Manager game released last year. It’s the one year where we just didn’t know about all the 16-year-olds who were really good.

We’ve had all these kids appearing now. Normally, when a kid appears in the Champions League and scores their first goal or something, I already know who that guy is because I’d know him from Football Manager. They’re not just appearing out of nowhere.

But now they are just appearing as if from nowhere, the same way that they appear for all the people who don’t play Football Manager so I honestly don’t know who are going to be the wonderkids this time round.

This is going to be one of the coolest parts about Football Manager 26. Every time that Football Manager comes out, 10 to 15 random 16-year-olds have their lives changed just like that because all of a sudden, the 10-15 million people who play Football Manager are going to go into the game and look to sign the wonderkids. They go scouting for them, and these kids are going to pop up in the game.

But soon all the real-life teams around the world are going to be looking at them, too. Who’s this guy in Uzbekistan? Wait, hold on a second. We should take a look at this guy. That’s what happened to Abbosbek Fayzullaev, the Uzbek wonderkid from a couple of years ago. The whole football world decides that maybe we should give this guy a call. Apparently, he’s pretty good according to Football Manager.

But I don’t know who those kids are for Football Manager 26. They probably don’t know who the hell they are either. They might be hoping they’re that guy, but when the game comes out on November 4th, we’ll finally know their names.

Zealand: It’s the arrival of women’s football in the game. That’s great, particularly for the US, because I mean the US men’s national team is just not nearly as fun to play with as the US women’s national team, let’s be honest. 

Every time I bring up that I’m excited to manage the US women’s national team there’s always somebody who’s just calling that woke nonsense but why? Objectively, and this is still true by the way, the most watched soccer match in the history of the US is a women’s national team match in the Women’s World Cup final against Japan. 

The US loves women’s soccer, and so I am really looking forward to managing the US women’s national team. Of course, international management might not be in the game, in which case I’m going to throw that monitor out that window, but as long as it is, it is a World Cup year, women are coming into the game, it should be there. That is the thing I’m looking forward to the most.

I think that the cleaner UI makes making YouTube videos easier, too. The hardest part about making YouTube videos in Football Manager is if you go through and play the entire save, and you experience the information so you just know it. 

How do you show that information in a very quick and digestible way? The UI improvement is going to hopefully make that a lot easier, at least using space better to look cleaner, and I think make it all more recognisable for people with a modern internet brain.

Zealand: Dribbling is better. This is actually part of the most recent video.

They talk about how your players are going to attempt to stand the opponent up. I had no idea how much of a difference that made, but then when you watch the video.

Players in Football Manager used to just get the ball, and they’d either go or they’d stop but now, and this I think is something I’m very excited about, your dribbly players are going to have a rudeness on the ball. 

We won’t have all the different skill moves, and we won’t be getting steps overs and all that other stuff, and it’s still miles away from being realistic, as the players basically don’t touch each other. There’s no collisions or physical contact in the physics engine, which is why the football in Football Manager can look weird to some people.

But as a starting point, standing the opponent up and setting up a dribble move, I did not realise how big of an impact that was going to have on the way the match felt, and I am very excited to watch my 16-year-old wonder kid I signed from Croatia, who has 18 dribbling just obliterate defenders. 

You’re going to be able to enjoy it more watching players breaking a defence down with a dribble, which is fantastic.

Zealand: I think that people really enjoy breaking games. I do it just for fun, too. But I also understand that Sports Interactive are not going to spend a lot of their time optimising what somebody with 20 speed looks like compared to somebody with one speed. I think the biggest issue people have is that it’s not 100% balanced. 

Football Manager 24 has been out for so long, and there were errors, right? I was making a couple of videos and there were a couple Reddit posts, and we were kind of almost going back and forth in discovering how broken the game was. The idea was that you could build a team of players from the Championship or below with the right physical attributes and with the right tactic that was super physically demanding, you could win the Premier League.

I would love for that to be more balanced because to me that’s the biggest issue. Those are real players that we know in real life are not good enough to play in the Premier League. But if we build a whole team of them the right way and they’re all fast and strong then you can actually go and win something. 

But you’re not going to find a lot of people with 20 speed and one in everything else, not unless you’ve got Usain Bolt, and obviously, he didn’t do too well in professional football in Australia. 

So I’m okay with that part of the game being broken because it’s never going to matter too much but they definitely need to find a way to address it, and I’m assuming this just comes with the way you design the match engine to make mental attributes and the technical side of the game a bit more important relative to pure speed.

In terms of the tactics, though, I don’t think it is an issue. What top-level team doesn’t press? Everybody wants to be able to win the Champions League with a 4-4-2 and park the bus with a defensive formation, but what top-level team does that? 

You could argue maybe Atletico Madrid, but when was the last time they won the Champions League? Sure, they’re able to pick off some teams, but if you really want to compete, you need to play like Liverpool or Barcelona. You’re going to have to, at worst, play like Inter. You’ve got to be able to counter. You’ve got to be aggressive in defence. You’ve got to be able to do this and that. And so, no, I think that the way the game has gone, you have to be able to press and you have to be able to build a team that can get down the field quickly.

Zealand: I think sometimes they do, but it’s also really impossible to argue with the amount of talent and money that’s flowing into the Premier League. It’s absurd.

It’s an impossible argument, is what I’ll say. I think that it is clear in past years that maybe they valued the Premier League a little bit more than maybe they should have done, especially in that era of Spanish dominance, where Spanish teams were winning every European competition. 

But now I think they were maybe just ahead of the curve. The Premier League is the best league in the world. Premier League teams in every European competition are the favourites in basically every match they’re playing, with the exception of a few clubs. 

It’s only going to get worse too because of the financial disparity, and Football Manager captures that financial explosion pretty well as you play through the rest of the game. 

So, no, I don’t think there’s a significant bias from FM, but it’s impossible for there not to be a little bit of bias because it’s human beings that are providing the ratings.

Zealand: I’m not biased other than the fact that the US and England have a pretty solid football rivalry in which we have never lost to y’all at the World Cup in three attempts. It’s one win, two draws, so thank you for playing. 

I can tell the English are very pessimistic about the national team. To be honest, they’re pessimistic about sports in general. They always assume they’re gonna lose until they win.

The English national team is stupidly talented. It’s got a national pool that rivals Brazil as the deepest in the world, and it’s up there with France. You’ve got a ton of fantastic players; you just need the right moment to click. 

In my opinion, the 2018 England team wasn’t close to being the best England team that’s gone to a World Cup in the last five. They just figured it out, though. They found the right tactic. They found the right vibe. They found the right momentum. That’s what these tournaments are about. You just need to put it together for a few matches. 

Objectively, based on their talent, England go into every international tournament with a very legitimate chance to win. They have the players. It’s just more torture for English fans.

Thomas Tuchel is a very good coach. Even if he’s combative and abrasive, the guy can get a team to go and win games. There are three or four teams in the world that probably should have higher odds to win the tournament, and it’s not by a lot. England can win. England can win the next World Cup. There is nothing stopping England except for England.

Zealand: If you had to choose between the two, it’s Jude Bellingham who I’d build the team around. I think Cole Palmer is a great player off the bench. I don’t know if he’s somebody I want starting my World Cup-winning team so I would go with Jude Bellingham. 

I think you have to rely on Harry Kane. The guy gets a lot of slander, but it’s not like this guy isn’t capable of being the guy. I mean, how many goals has he scored for Bayern Munich? This guy wakes up, falls out of bed and scores 25 goals.

Nobody else has that striker. Nobody. France doesn’t have a nine like that. Spain just doesn’t play with a striker, and they’re fine. They had Alvaro Morata just puttering around up there, and I love him, but England is a great national team with a great striker. You’ve got to lean into that. 

So your tactic needs to funnel the ball into Kane’s direction. It needs to rely on the fact that Jude Bellingham is arguably the best midfielder in the entire world. And you need vibes guys.

Stop trying to pick the 11 most talented players, right? Nobody’s going to argue Harry Maguire was one of the most talented players at the 2018 World Cup but he’s somebody the nation, the team, could get behind for some reason. This is how the US made the round of 16 at multiple World Cups. You need a Kyle Beckerman who comes in with dreads and there’s just this weird belief that the team can do it.

International football is odd. It is not like club football. It’s just a couple of moments that are going to make all the difference. What the United States has actually been very good at, at most World Cups, is finding the guy that’s going to be able to make that difference, and England sucks at it. The one time they made it work, they had Kieran Trippier and Harry Maguire, who are both good players, but they’re not that good. They were in that moment, and they felt the confidence of the nation and the team.

If you can combine the fact that you have some of the best players in the world with what is essentially an American concept of riding the hot hand, finding the guy who’s having his moment and letting him have his moment, then that’s what I would do. But you don’t need to overcomplicate it.

Kane you’d play as a complete forward. I would love maybe a 4-3-3 and go with the Centre Mid role on attack for Jude Bellingham because then it allows his lanky athleticism to cover more of the pitch. 

I think if you’re going Cole Palmer you want attacking midfield on attack because he just doesn’t cover as much of the field. But I want Jude Bellingham involved in as many phases of the game as I can get Jude Bellingham involved in. 

Declan Rice does everything at the same time. It’s hard to not have him in that team. If you’re Tuchel you’ve got about five options that you can plug into the third spot. You can have a third guy who can do whatever you want who complements your tactic. You can have a guy that’s very aggressive, you can have a guy that’s screening the back four or, if you want to be like Mikel Arteta, you can just have a bunch of defensive midfielders out there. You can do that too. You need your players to show up to the training field two weeks before the tournament and be the guy who feels like it’s going to be your moment. 

This is the part of management everybody overlooks. Everybody’s always obsessed with the tactics and Ruben Amorim sitting over on the side with his little tactics board, but you know what guys like Carlo Ancelotti are great at? It’s what I’m describing right now. They can go to the field two weeks before the match and go, ‘and he’s ready’. This is the guy who’s going to have his moment.

I think that is maybe the spot in the team where you’re allowed the most creativity, if you’re too cool. Adam Wharton? Put him in there. If you want my answer, I’d go with Connor Gallagher.

I’m thinking ball-winning midfielder or box-to-box because Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham can have the ball. I want a guy who doesn’t want the ball. I want a guy who’s going to do everything that doesn’t involve the ball. Connor Gallagher is that guy, at least right now.

Zealand: I don’t know how you would add that sort of thing to the game other than having your coaches tell you your player is looking sharper or that they think he’s ready. Do I trust that coach to tell me?

Football Manager does a very good job of hiding the actual game mechanics, and they don’t get enough credit for this. 

They hide the actual game mechanics so they make your decisions feel realistic. I’m not seeing that my player scored that goal because he had 16 finishing instead of 15. What you experience is that I had a gut feeling that this guy was going to do well, and I put him in, and then he did well. You knew it was his time based on these random things that you saw.

Over time, playing the game, you create your own philosophy to decide who you pick and why. I’m playing this guy because I have these indicators that he’s going to be great. You find your own way to be Carlo Ancelotti.

Zealand: That was my job before YouTube and streaming. I was a sports broadcaster. As of a year and a half ago, I don’t do that anymore. The way it worked for a while was that broadcasting was my job, I would just call sports matches and then YouTube and streaming was my hobby. It was something I just did for fun. I would do it way too much. It took up way too much of my time for a hobby, but it was a hobby. 

And then it switched. There was an inversion where all of a sudden YouTube and streaming was the job but I’m just still calling games because I like calling games and slowly over time, my free time evaporated and I was not able to call games anymore. Or at least devote the amount of time that’s required.

It is a very time-intensive job. You have to do the research on players and build your little sheets to call the game, and I just didn’t have the time to do it. I would be calling games, and I would be stressing that I don’t have enough information. I’d stay up until 4 am to finish these call sheets. 

The producers that I’d worked with in the past would text me every year about the game calendar and whether I would do a couple of these games and I started to reply to say no, I can’t. 

While I loved sports broadcasting, it did allow me to transition very well into Twitch streaming. It really trains your brain to think about one thing while you’re talking about something else, which is an incredibly useful life skill, especially in the branch of life that I seem to be living in.

I can’t do it anymore. That was my start, and it definitely helped me for the career that I have now but I just don’t have the time.