Pesquisa Portuguesa na Imprensa: Coordenadores entrevistados pelo MaisFutebol

By: Daniel Dantas

Football Manager (FM) is a football management simulation game that, much like the beautiful game itself, stirs up real passion. It came to life in 1992 under the name Championship Manager (CM) and now, on 10 November, celebrates the 13th anniversary of its rebrand. Speaking with Maisfutebol, Bruno Gens Luís and Carlos Bessa, head researchers for the Portuguese team, explain the behind-the-scenes work and all the coordination involved in the exhaustive activity they carry out.

4-3-3 instead of a 4-4-2? Inverting a midfield triangle for more solidity rather than creativity? Aim for the Champions League or the Europa League? Given the sheer number of goals you can set for a season, and the complexity of the decisions available to the strategist, it's only natural that defining FM proves anything but consensual. "It's far more than just a game, it's something that stays with you your whole life, from your youth into adulthood. There are countless examples of people who started out sitting in a chair in front of the computer, followed their dream, and became real-life managers. It's also been described in a funny way: 'the only game that can stress you out, drive you crazy and make you extremely happy all at the same time'. Sometimes you think you're just going to advance the calendar and play one match while you wait to head out, and before you know it, two seasons have gone by and someone's shouting your name, or you've got 100 calls on your smartphone. Wives and girlfriends usually aren't too fond of that [laughs]», Bruno begins by saying.

Both of them first came into contact with the game developed by Sports Interactive (SI) back in the days of the old Championship Manager, and later on, the paths that led them to their current roles were quite similar. "As an avid CM and FM player, I noticed the database's quality slipping over the years, with growing errors and thousands of missing players. So, during a holiday, I decided to post on the SI forum every error I found in the Primeira Liga. For about a month, my daily routine was: wake up, post errors, sleep. At the end of that month I put it all together into a 120- or 130-page Word document, which I sent straight to SI. They immediately put me in touch with José Chieira, who was FM's coordinator for Portugal at the time, and he brought me on board and put me in charge of coordinating the entire Campeonato Nacional de Seniores, now the Campeonato de Portugal. The squads only had about five or six players each, and I had to build almost everything from scratch. After that I became the main researcher for the PALOP countries, where, for example, I created Gelson Dala and Ary Papel, just breaking through at 1º de Agosto.

Around May 2015, José Chieira invited me to become one of the coordinators, together with Carlos Bessa, and that's how the adventure as Head Researcher began. In the first database we received there were about 8,200 players. Three years later, there are now around 22,000 players in Portugal alone," says Bruno. "In my third year contributing, in 2012, I felt some of the changes I'd suggested weren't making it into the game. So I asked to edit the database directly and become his [José Chieira's] assistant. From then on, he started sending me files and put his trust in me. I'm still grateful to him for that today," Carlos added.

Like Bruno, Carlos is a Head Researcher for Portugal, coordinating a large team of virtual scouts, who either follow clubs in person or watch matches from the comfort of their homes, and make a decisive contribution to building an extensive database. "We try to bring together a cohesive team that helps us build an extremely accurate database, to reflect Portuguese football's reality as closely as possible. We want anyone managing a team to feel that the players genuinely resemble what they're like in real life. It makes no sense for an extremely fast, physically powerful player to be portrayed as weak or average. As a challenge for this season, we're improving the regional league a bit, although it's a fairly tricky task given how big it is."

The tasks carried out by Bruno and Carlos are fairly similar, both in leading the database and in managing the team that supports them. "The tasks are more or less split up. Bruno handles certain Primeira Liga clubs and I handle others, but then, at a certain point, we swap teams. We both handle attributes, updating squads, transfers, adding affiliations, updating membership numbers… Fans have no idea of the sheer amount of work behind the database. There are fields in the database for almost every kind of information: setting the minimum and maximum attendance at a stadium, the average over a season, ticket prices, membership numbers… For the Primeira Liga, apart from three exceptions, teams we trust to three contributors, everything is handled exclusively by me and Bruno, so we can keep an extremely high level of reliability. From the Segunda Liga downwards, we give our assistants more freedom to edit the teams they regularly follow. Obviously, we can't cover everywhere, or watch every team out there, which is why having a team behind us is so important. If the game has the quality it has today, it's also thanks to the assistants working under each country's coordinator. They play a key role in this database, and we're very grateful to them," Carlos describes.

Coordination happens in good time, at the start of each season, and covers a series of stages that need to be strictly followed. Some people fall by the wayside. Others stick around for the long haul. "We have a page where people can apply to be a general or specific research assistant. Anyone with a passion for the game has the chance to contribute with us. Say someone regularly follows Estrela Vendas Novas or Aliança de Gandra closely. If they genuinely follow that team consistently, they can apply to be a specific research assistant. Then we have a private group with stages set according to the deadlines set by Sports Interactive. We usually give our contributors three to four weeks of work, roughly speaking, and once the deadline arrives, they hand in their files and we review them."

Within the overall research structure, there's naturally a hierarchy, albeit a simplified one. "First, there's the Head of Head Researching, who oversees every country's head researcher. Then there are the head researchers for each country, and below them, the research assistants. Their job is to help maintain the database at a more local level. In terms of work, the person overseeing every country ends up coordinating the entire team worldwide, making sure the deadlines for handing in the database are met, and passing on feedback. Sometimes players send feedback and complaints straight to Sports Interactive itself, and it falls on him to pass along the information he receives."

At a national level, though, apart from the coordinators, there's no distinction within the rest of the team, although the type of tasks does vary. "Club researchers follow one to three clubs, usually local ones, and only worry about those teams; the general researchers ones do 'background' work, that is, they update every team without dedicated coverage, mostly at the district level. Those players aren't individually rated, but are given values based on that division's level, using history, statistics, news and other information we come across; and finally, there are video scouts. That role will be new for FM 2019. Since we now have access to video footage of matches from various Campeonato de Portugal teams, and given how many teams have no dedicated coverage, we'll be recruiting default researchers with the same duties as club researchers, but to watch matches on video instead of having to travel to grounds," Bruno explains.

Currently, there are around fifty research assistants spread across the whole country, although that number varies seasonally. Sometimes, between people joining and leaving, it reaches 100. And there's room for women too: Catarina Faria is part of the team and covers Fátima, who play in Série D of the Campeonato de Portugal. "Consistently, it usually hovers around 50 people: from the north, centre, south and the islands. We honestly feel there's real passion for FM, even in areas with a smaller population," Carlos reports.

The research model applied in Portugal is mirrored in other countries. However, each country's coordinator has the freedom to coordinate independently, and the size of the team they work with varies a lot. "We know of coordinators who don't have as many research assistants. While that does happen, we feel it's a disservice to limit the database to just two people's opinions. We'd rather open the doors to anyone who wants to help us. In terms of gathering information, the database would never be as good if we were so closed off. For example, if I were from Lisbon and wanted information about Coimbrões, I'd know it wouldn't be as easy as having a scout scout

there. He has much faster access to information, can watch matches more easily, and can get to know valuable people."

«However, we've also seen a few cases where people take their love for a club too far, well past normal bias. We don't want that in the game. We've had situations where we had to remove research assistants because we felt they weren't providing any real help. We didn't want to create 'Tó Madeiras' in other teams. We really need to be very careful and selective about the assistants we bring in, though we never insert any contribution without reviewing it first. If we have 100 people contributing with us, we review all 100 files they send in. I can guarantee, with total certainty, that the 50 people we consistently work with are impartial.»

No room for bias: "We don't want to create more Tó Madeiras" scouting that let us download Campeonato de Portugal matches, for example. That way, we can analyse matches we didn't have the chance to watch at the stadium or on TV," Carlos continues.

The hours dedicated to scouting drop noticeably during the peak editing periods. During that time, the game's database once again becomes the top priority. Filling in staff members' technical and psychological attributes, transferring players or updating players' potential ability are just a few examples of the tasks carried out by the research team. "During database submission weeks I end up working an average of 16 to 18 hours a day on the database, and on the day it's due, you don't even sleep," Bruno reveals. coaching, transferir atletas ou atualizar a habilidade potencial de jogadores são apenas alguns exemplos de tarefas levadas a cabo pela equipa de pesquisa. «Em semanas de entrega de base de dados chego a estar, em média, 16 a 18 horas diárias a trabalhar na base de dados e no dia da entrega nem se dorme», revela Bruno.

"The time I spend on it doesn't feel like wasted time, because I actually enjoy the time I spend working on it. In the lead-up to a new game's release there are about seven deadlines that have to be met. I can tell you that, the week before handing in the database, I leave my job and end up working an extra four, five or six hours a day on it. It ends up being almost like a second full-time job on top of the one we already have. Obviously, we can't please everyone, and every year it's normal for people to criticise the database. We'll never get everyone to agree, because it's football. For me and Bruno, this is like a baby we're helping raise," Carlos admits.

Asked whether the game distributed by SEGA could be an important tool for clubs or agents, Bruno and Carlos both seem to agree that it is. "People might try to discredit the game just because of what it is, but there have already been several public cases of players being discovered thanks to FM. We've had Roberto Firmino as one example. A few months ago it came out that he'd been discovered early in his career through the game. We even had one situation that, unfortunately, wasn't a positive one, and showed a slip-up. I'm talking about the player who was going to be called up for Bolivia's national team because the FM database listed him as having Bolivian nationality. It's a mistake that can happen to anyone, but it does suggest this game really is being taken more seriously by certain organisations and clubs. Any club that buys the game easily gets access to a massive database, with thousands of players and real scouting work behind it. So why does something like WyScout or InStat get credibility, and not FM? While others get paid to do it, we do it purely out of love.»

«It's a great complement. I wouldn't recommend it as the sole tool for signing certain players, but rather that a player's profile in the game sparks a club's interest, and from there they feel the need to watch him live and confirm whether the game's scouts' assessment is realistic. You need to know whether the rating was shaped by certain contexts, and how the player behaves in different phases of a match, among other essential things the game still hasn't fully captured,» Bruno states.

For the 2018 edition, Carlos revealed a few new features: "One of the main ones is called Dynamics. I can tell you it'll be something genuinely innovative within the game itself, adding yet more realism. The match engine has been refined, as have the 3D visuals and the database. There's also a series of new roles, like Data Analyst and Academy Scout, for 2019. As for the bigger, headline features, we'll have to wait a few more days. I can't share that information [laughs]». The rest, of course, remains a secret.

Interestingly, as a result of the work they've done for Football Manager, some former members of the Portuguese research team have been invited to work at professional clubs. "We have people who are at Primeira Liga and Segunda Liga clubs, and those invitations came about after they joined the FM team. Feeling that, even though this is pro-bono work, whoever does their part to help grow this database ends up, further down the line, working with professional clubs, is one of the biggest rewards we could ask for," he says, with a grin from ear to ear.

Text originally published in Maisfutebol