Can playing FIFA and Football Manager make you the next Pep Guardiola? Of course, you need other qualities to access the highest levels of football team management, but practicing these simulation games which constantly tend towards greater realism can only help you there. This is the assertion of a certain William Still, the youngest coach of the Belgian first division, who recently declared in an interview on Sportbible that the game Football Manager had greatly helped him in his “real” career as a coach.
Towards a new generation of coaches?
Admittedly, the Belgian first division is less well known than the English Premier League, the Bundesliga or even Ligue 1, but there are still excellent international players and coaches there. This is the case of William Still, whose very place is a little special because he is quite simply, at 29, the youngest manager in the history of the Belgian First Division.
And he is therefore part of a generation that has often grown up with the popularization of video games. Football Manager rocked him in a way, and above all opened his eyes to the real dimensions of modern coaching, in the world of football.
The ultimate simulation game for Domingo
William Still is not the only one to credit Football Manager with a real aura of realism. In France, Domingo told L’Equipe newspaper last year that Football Manager was ‘a bit of the game of his life’. Coach Bizot always achieves mind-blowing figures on Twitch as soon as he starts a season, and praises the realism of the transfer window and management sessions.
photo credit: Reuters
While we thought that FIFA 23 would be the last game of the license, it is not! EA Sports will unfortunately not be part of it, but FIFA intends to take back the name of the legendary video games and exploit it for future productions in collaboration with third-party studios.