Football Manager is an enormously complex simulation. On a global level, the game tracks thousands of careers, ambitions and relationships, and on any given match day, weather, morale, skills and individual personal issues can contribute to moments of brilliance or abject failure. Talking to Sports Interactive’s director Miles Jacobson, I found that the simulation model is even more elaborate in some areas than I’d expected. Read on to find out about the game’s expanding narrative engine, how climate change is forcing the team to update the code that generates weather patterns, why the ugliest aspects of football have no place in FM and how a non-contract player’s family situation might prevent him from playing for your club.

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