For years, it’s been football’s worst-kept secret: professional clubs quietly mining the Football Manager database to help them unearth soccer’s wonderkids. Now it’s a secret no more, with the game’s makers turning that very database into a professional recruitment tool.
FMDB Pro contains 760,000 profiles of players (male and female) and staff from around the world, all researched by the same team of 1,600 evaluators that provide the data for the long-running video game. Sports Interactive, the game’s makers, claim it’s “the biggest database in the world” for this kind of football data, and it’s already being used by more than 40 clubs to help with their real-world recruitment.
It’s quite the transformation for a game that started life more than 30 years ago, coded by two teenage brothers in their bedroom.
Finding Eligible Players
One of the biggest recruitment challenges football clubs face now is restrictions on international signings. In the post-Brexit era, English clubs have much tighter criteria to meet if they want to sign a player or staff member from Europe, for instance, but the FMDB Pro database includes a Governing Body Endorsement calculator that provides an estimate of whether that person has the necessary number of points to come and work in England.
That kind of data isn’t only of interest to English clubs. “If you’re a foreign-based club and you want to see whether your players are eligible to sell into England, this kind of data is invaluable there as well,” said Whitby.
Data on players with multiple nationalities is also incredibly valuable to national teams, especially smaller countries that don’t have a huge pool of players to pick from. Richard Trafford, Sports Interactive’s director of business development, cites one example where a nation asked them to find players who would qualify to play for them. “It was quite a small nation,” he said. “We found an extra 5,000 for them that they didn’t know about.”
Big Business?
In an industry awash with money, particularly when it comes to recruiting players that can cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, is there a chance that the FMDB Pro spin-off will end up becoming a bigger business than the game itself?
Sports Interactive had a turnover of around £72 million ($96 million) in 2024, which was the last year in which there was a full game release. Trafford was coy about how big an opportunity FMDB Pro may prove to be. “To be completely honest, it’s a little bit unknown,” he said.
Trafford claimed the business was already profitable, with about 40 clubs already signed up. “Pricing is relatively bespoke,” he added. “Depending upon what the club wants and levels of access: whether they want Europe or England or the world or women’s football or they’re a national team, it’s very different. But we think that this is going to fill a really interesting gap in the market. Nobody actually does this on this scale.”