Over the last decade we've ran into Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson in many places. Ten years ago at the event where Sega and Sports Interactive announced they had acquired the rights to Football Manager after they had to abandon their old Championship Manager rights when parting ways with Eidos, and several meeting rooms and trade shows since. But recently we haven't seen much of him as Sports Interactive's busy schedule and their new Korean studio means he's got less time to meet with the press. In fact, this interview was conducted via Skype from the Cambridge-based offices of Sports Interactive.
Miles Jacobson is sometimes referred as Mr. Football Manager, even if he wasn't there when Sports Interactive was founded by the Collyer brothers many years ago, and he certainly didn't have anything to do with the original Football Manager. However, he is and has for many years been the face of the studio. As many current-day SI employees he started out as part of the community (we recall his Watford tactic guides for CM2 back in the day), and went on to become a tester before adandoning his career in the music business to manage the studio full-time.
Sports Interactive are working hard this time of the year making sure their product launches with as few bugs as possible. The beta version is out on Steam for those who have pre-ordered the game, but work on the final game is still under way with the release date set for November 7.
"The way that games are made these days with PC games, normally at this stage of the year the game would be finished. I'd be travelling around the world doing PR. But nowadays with Steam we have discs of the game in the office, but they don't even have an executable file on them."
"The game itself will probably, literally I'll give the greenlight for it to be finished two or three days before it comes out, whereas before it was six weeks before. It's good that we get longer to work on it, because it means the game is more polished when it's released."
Speaking about this summer's World Cup Jacobson describe it as "interesting" and "a lot more attacking than usual, particularly in the group stages".
"I think the right team won, cause that's the team I had in the sweep stakes," says the always modest Jacobson. "So I was quite pleased with that. Certainly we saw a few players coming to the fore, most of which were players that FM have known about for a while and FM fans have known about for a while, like James Rodriguez. I was a little big disappointed with how the French did, I thought they'd go a little bit further, but obviously they ended up facing stiff opposition. But overall I think it was a good tournament. I wasn't at all surprised that England went out when they did, it was kind of expected. I mean we were coming towards the end of an era for England. It was a lot of player's last chances and quite a few have retired since the World Cup so I wasn't really disappointed in that."
Jacobson did have one regret about the World Cup and that was not being able to travel out to see any games live ("as a football fan it was gutting") as things were too busy behind the scenes at the office with the game and the recently launched Football Manager documentary.
"I did see every minute of the tournament and we had a lot of fun on Twitter giving away games every time goals were scored so we were pretty active throughout the tournament."
The start of the new season is naturally of great interest to the team as they are entering the final stages of development of this year's product.
"I think the transfer window was really interesting. Manchester United for me, and I've written about this for the Mirror - it's all well and good signing a lot of offensive talent, but if you don't have a defence you can't win the ball in the first place. And what they desperately needed was another centre back and another defensive midfielder and they didn't manage to bring those in. If they had I think they'd be higher up in the table than they are. With a lot of other teams it's taking time for their players to gel. For their new players, even Burnley signed a bunch of new players. They bought them all cheap, but they still signed a lot of players in the window. And my beloved Watford at the moment we're second in the league on our fourth manager of the season, which a lot of people think is crazy, but there were reasons for it. There wasn't much that we could do about manager number two and manager number three, if we called him caretaker people wouldn't be saying anything about it, but overall it's been a good start to the season in England.
"Spain just proves that football is bonkers with Ronaldo. What is it 14 goals in 8 games now? [editor's note: 16 goals in 8 games is his current tally] So yeah, Spain are basically trying to break our match engine, which has caused a few problems during testing. Because we like to get these things right and get them balanced."
We raised the issue of the structure of Manchester United's deal to bring in Falcao - a very costly loan deal with a mandatory (some sources claim) buyout at the end of it. Jacobson, doesn't consider it much of an anomaly though.
"We've often had people complaing in the game when clubs are asking half a million or a million pounds to loan a player for a season, plus their wages as well. Because people don't really realise that it does cost money."
"If you look at Chelsea. Last season they had 31 players out on loan. This season it's about 24 or 25. Now some of those players are going to their feeder clubs, some of them are going out to get first team experience, but some of those players are actually bringing in substantial loan fees. I mean in all cases their wages are being paid. Chelsea are actually using those extra players they've got in their squad to get around financial fair play. And it is a business model that clubs have used. Parma. Udinese have three clubs now."
Having famously introduced the 3D match engine with Football Manager 2009, there may not be all that many watershed features left to add into Football Manager, we suggested it was more about evolution as opposed to major significant new features, at which Jacobson said:
"As always with our games there are thousands of new things. And whilst you're right, there is a lot of evolution in there, you can still have evolution in revolution. And that's what we try and do."
What then will people notice is different when they boot up Football Manager 2015?
"I think it's going to be very difficult to avoid noticing the new user interface when they first play the game. And one of the first things that they'll be doing this year will be setting their own profile. Which is something to be honest, it's a bit of an oversight that we haven't done this before, because you do start off, you've always started off the game with a profile, but everyone's had the same profile. And it seems a bit crazy when we have half a million NPCs in gaming terms, all of them with their own personalities inside the game that the human would start with one default boring character trait set. We've added that in this year and that is one of the first things you'll see. Do you want to be a tracksuit manager? Do you want to be down on the coaching grounds being able to train your team? Or do you want to be more of a mind games mindset and be better at dealing with the press by default and have your players respecting you more by default? And all of those can go up and down over time and you can get better coaching skills by doing coaching badges in the game. So that will also be instantly noticeable."
"When people play their first match as well it's very difficult to avoid the 2000 new animations that are in the game. It is looking a lot better. It doesn't look like a game from the 90s anymore. Still not maybe looking like a game from 2015 for those who expect FIFA and PES level graphics, but then that's not what we're striving for. We're striving to make the game look like a real game of football. We don't want it to look like an arcade simulation of football. And that will still take us a few years. We're quite realistic about that. We have a longterm plan for the match engine and this year is the first step in that new longterm plan."
"People are expecting major revolution... what else is left for us to do? There aren't many things inside football that we're not replicating. We're not about to give players guns and run around shooting each other. Or have the age old aliens feature of having aliens landing on Earth and everyone has 30 paces now. Those kind of things just aren't going to happen. With financial fairplay coming in. With the 3D engine coming in. With the Player Power which is in there this year which is a major change. You know, we'll continue to innovate both with the series and in the genre by adding new things. But another year of adding 3D for the first time, we can't do that. We can't add in 5D because at the moment people don't really have screens that throw water on you when it's raining and that would be a little bit dangerous. So we're going to carry on with the path that we go on and we seem to be selling more copies of the game each year. People seem to be enjoying it more each year."
But while aliens aren't making an appearance in Football Manager 2015 - "dodgy lasagna" is - at least in the more "arcade style" offering of Football Manager Classic - the stripped down version of the full simulation.
"FMC you can have a bit more fun with. It is a simulation, but it's not a pure simulation, which is what we're trying to have with FM. But yeah, dodgy lasagna was one of those things that we've spoken about many times and this year... Basically seeing how the other unlockables and consumables have gone down in FMC has taught us a lot. Because there were quite a few of us at the studio who were against it and there were quite a few people in the community who were very vocal of being against it. And we've told everyone and made it very clear that FM stays sacrosanct when it comes to things like that, apart from the in-game editor which allows people to do whatever they want to anyway. But with FMC we can have a bit more fun and if someone is coming to that last game of the season and wants to influence it and wants to give the opposition team food poisoning who are we to stop them?"
[Editor's note: Arsenal supporter Mike just pointed out that in fact, Tottenham Hotspur didn't get food poisoning on the eve of the last game of the 2005-06 season, and actually several members of the Spurs squad contracted novovirus. That said, he still thinks it's hilarious.]
While Jacobson is upfront that Football Manager doesn't aim to be realistic as far as the finances of football goes ("our game's financial model is not identical to the real world, because if it was you'd need an accountancy degree to understand it") - the financial fair play and rules regarding co-ownership and player rights is something that certainly is part of the game.
"Financial fair play we've tweaked and improved it. We had it nailed last season, thankfully. The weird thing when it comes to FFP is we've been getting a lot of advice from chief executives from football clubs on exactly how it works, but we've also been getting advice from someone who's actually doing a lot of the financial fair play stuff for UEFA. He now works for us. So any issues that we did have last year have been ironed out."
"I don't think any of the clubs that failed financial fair play this year, well one of them knew that they were going to, the others didn't think that they were going to. Because they thought that other things that they were doing were going to offset the failings. There's at least one club that minorly failed financial fair play because the exchange rate in their country changed. They'd planned based on one exchange rate and when it came to it they were on another exchange rate so therefore failed. So we're not that harsh [in Football Manager]. Our exchange rates don't fluctuate because of war."
Recently FIFA decided to outlaw external ownership of players (investment funds that are a huge part of the football economy in certain parts of the world) - currently it is being phased out.
"I would be really annoyed off if that happens. The reason I'd be annoyed is that we've had programmers working for the last two or three years on making sure we map this properly all around the world so that clubs in Portugal do go round selling rights of their players to get a bit of extra money. And just as we get that nailed and absolutely spot on, according to our sources in the countries that have tried it out FIFA are talking about outlawing it. So, frustrating."
"Brazil and Portugal are probably the two biggest. To the point that there are transfer funds out there with some very big-name agents and very big-name managers, as well as well as club owners, involved in these schemes where they're buying percentages of player rights. But you know it will change the landscape dramatically for clubs in Brazil and Portugal as well as in other countries. Because without that extra money coming in, in the short term, they may not be able to compete."
The Indian league is a new feature in the world of football and one that is perhaps a little odd in that it has convinced retired players to return to the game. It won't be included in this year's iteration, and Jacobson spoke of a few reasons why it would be difficult to realise in Football Manager.
"Purely because we didn't know if it was going to start. With the start date being as it was in October. We didn't know the rules. You can't programme something in if you don't know the rules. There were also the added complication they had of persuading players to come out of retirement. So we're going to see how it does this year..."
"Two month deals and 44-year olds coming out of retirement. Football is bonkers. And the Indian Super League takes that to new levels."
The Football Manager 2015 beta version is currently playable for those who pre-order the full game via Steam, and the full version of the game will drop on November 7.
