Football Manager database to be used by Prozone Recruiter

That guy in the top left looks pretty chuffed about it all.

This is only tangentially a videogames story, but it’s quite entertaining for those familiar with tales from the Championship and Football Manager database. Prozone Recruiter, a third-party data service offered to real life football clubs, is going to be incorporating the information from the Football Manager series into it’s existing technical and video footage of over 80,000 worldwide players.

It’s difficult to figure out whether this promotional partnership is more beneficial for Prozone or for Football Manager, really.

Recruiter claims to be used by “more than 20 elite clubs” although doesn’t seem to actually mention any names in the press release. After digging around a bit, it looks like Barcelona were at least using it in 2010, so that’s pretty good.

Anyway, they’ll now be making use of the data gathered by Sports Interactive for the Football Manager series. I’m pleased to see that even Prozone Recruiter themselves admit they’re not a “one size fits all” method of finding amazing young footballers, since the idea of signing a player on the basis of numerical stats and video footage alone is quite a silly one (though crazier signings do happen.) This is obviously something intended to be combined with an actual scouting network.

The Championship and (after the publisher split and name change) Football Manager series have a long, infamous history of hyping up certain wonderkids who turned out to have rather more understated careers. We all signed the near-invincible Mark Kerr and Tonton Zola Moukoko back in the day.

That’s the nature of real life scouting too, mind you. It’s presumably very difficult to judge the external factors like how well a player will settle down after (say) an overseas move at a young age.

The next edition of Football Manager, Football Manager 2015 will be out in November.