Have you ever been playing a sports game like Madden or FIFA or Football Manager and led a team from the bottom of the league to the top by dedicating a keen eye to watching prospects and the trade market, signing the best players at the best prices and forming a super team to beat all the others? Apparently those at Prozone Sports, a sport performance analysis company, has dreams of helping teams do the same in real life, using information gathered by Sports Interactive, the developers of the popular Football Manager series.
For those not familiar with the series, Football Manager places you in the shoes of the general manager of a soccer team. You a responsible for all the day to day operations of the team, scouting players, creating tactics, scheduling friendlies, deciding on the day’s roster, changing tactics on the fly during a match, and more. The game is incredibly in depth, and that is putting it lightly.
One thing that makes the series so popular, beyond the depth of gameplay, is the fact that you can choose from hundreds upon hundreds of teams to head, ranging from members of the Premier League in the UK to the French fourth division. To make sure that the rosters in the games (and the attributes of the players) is are accurate, Sports Interactive employs over 1,300 scouts and has collected information on over 80,000 players across the world.
Prozone, seeing the value in such a wide database has officially partnered with Sports Interactive and hopes to assist professional teams with finding promising young players or well valued trades that they can use on their squads.
As a fan of both sports and gaming I’ve enjoyed sports games since I played NHL Hitz when I was a kid. It’s cool to see the two worlds coming together in a way that shows that games can be useful for more than just entertainment.
You can see Prozone’s press release on the matter here.