In FM2007 my best keeper was Mikel Arteta. For some reason the game had decided he could play in any position on the field and turns out he’s an amazing goalkeeper that I could throw into midfield if I needed to change things. I did feel a bit guilty because that was clearly a bug that had formed when it created the database.

But yeah, the overwhelming tale of my forty-odd seasons there was a sort of gradual, iterative improvement. The games weren’t the point, really, it was what went between them, building up a trustworthy, non primadona squad that could claw me up from the conference to the champions league, for more or less free. Cutting loose the expensive guys who would doom me financially, or destroy my morale, and trying to desperately to hold off the much-better funded Man City, Newcastle (?) and Southampton (???) who were continually trying to steal my players or take my targets. You spend a lot of time watching those matches so you get quite a connection to the ones that do well for you, that you brought up from the youth squad. The piece that made my Gateshead team work was an Irish midfielder called Larry Brennan who I bought on a hunch for about 30k from some backwater Irish team when he was 16. Twenty seasons later and he was still team captain, had been to World Cup Finals, won a dozen league titles and single-handedly won two champions league finals. He was now old and slow, not much actual use compared to the collection of young bucks I had phased in, but I kept him on a token wage, giving him token appearances, because he meant so much to the club. No game has ever made me feel like that about some randomly-generated NPC.