Last year, when Leicester City were searching for a new manager, ‘The Fox’ fanzine asked readers to suggest suitable candidates.

On the basis of my twenty years’ experience managing City in football management simulations, I put my own name forward. It was funny enough to publish, but Rob Kelly was employed instead. Now he’s gone as well, perhaps they are seeing the error of their ways.

I recently realised that I have been managing Leicester City in computer games for longer than I have been going to watch the team live in the stadium, and so perhaps I should not underestimate the role that the games have played in my life as a supporter. And it’s not only me. A former colleague of mine told me of how he spent hours as a teenager, ‘locked in the house in the summer, trying to get Bradford City promoted’; another told me of how he was able to complete an entire season in a day if he got up early enough: ‘I can be finished by six usually’. The same colleague defended his actions, insisting that he wasn’t addicted, and telling me of a friend who had been playing one game of Championship Manager for so long that he was well into the middle of the century. Apparently the players begin to reincarnate at that point.

The first game in which I managed Leicester was called ‘League Challenge’, which seems not to have made a single dent on the World Wide Web (if anyone knows of a website where I can find it, please let me know). There wasn’t a lot of depth, and it was a tad unrealistic. Forced to start in Division Four, I struggled to get Leicester promoted, despite a team consisting entirely of England internationals. Later on I got addicted to ‘Tracksuit Manager’, which had more depth, but never quite satisfied this customer. I won the World Cup with England, and expected some kind of celebratory screen having done this, or at least a monochrome ‘well done’. What actually happened as I pressed ‘enter’ to continue was absolutely nothing; it was simply time to start preparing for the European Championships. Perhaps that’s what it was really like when you managed an international side in the late eighties – Bobby Robson certainly never seemed to get the praise he deserved.

My fascination has continued on with more advanced versions of basically the same games, in which you can search for potential new players across the world, setting up some bizarre scouting missions as you do so (I never did get anything from my expensive search of New Zealand), praise/criticise your players in the press, and even put a rocket up them at half-time when they’re being drubbed 3-0. But why is all of this so interesting? Why have I not got interested in other games, like normal people, rather than these text-based, number-crunching monsters?

Part of the reason, I think, is that the impossible is possible in football management games. In what other scenario would I be able to sign John Wark on a free from the Soccer AM Badgers as player-coach of Zenit St. Petersburg, have him play an integral part in our UEFA Cup run, learn basic Russian and claim to be ‘enjoying his time at the club’. Only in a game like Football Manager 2007, I’m afraid. Similarly, would (former) Brazil Coach Vanderlei Luxemburgo ‘take time out from his busy schedule’ to praise the job that Hinckley boss Saul Pope is doing in real life? Unlikely, but he has done in FM 2007. I tried the same trick on Jose Mourinho, praising him in the hope that he would return the favour – he just scoffed at me, the cad.

I also feel that, in the case of the more advanced management simulations, these games have played an important part in my education. I never knew where Košice was until playing them in a UEFA Cup match, but I now know that it’s the second largest city in Slovakia. Did you know that most people in the Faeroes speak Danish as a first language? I didn’t until I’d played FM 2006. I am also on first name terms with Husqvarna, Kristianstads and Landskrona, thanks to a specific interest in the Swedish lower leagues (there was also a team called Café Opera I once got the sack from, which seems to be named after a trendy bar. Can anyone shed any light on this?). I can also tell, thanks to the same fascination, that there must have been a lot of immigration into Sweden from Asian and African countries a number of years ago, judging by the number of twenty-somethings in the player database with Muslim names. Further research led me to find out that Sweden is a country with a high percentage of inter-marriages involving Africans and Asians. The things some computer games help you to discover about the world.

It’s not all unbounded playability and education, though. Football management games are undoubtedly frustrating. Why, I wondered a couple of years ago, could Micky Adams not get Leicester City promoted from the Championship, when I managed it with the same players at the first attempt and with no money? Conversely, how did Martin O’Neill manage to get City to finish consistently in the top ten during the nineties, whilst my Championship Manager side of the same period could never get off the bottom of the table (even though I copied his tactics exactly)? In that particular game I ended up sacked and, some twelve months later, sacked again, this time by Forest Green Rovers. Perhaps luck just wasn’t on my side.

It is this frustration that makes the game so addictive though – it’s not easy to win, even when you get the cheats from the internet. And as my wife often complains, and as the man playing well into the middle of the century seems to have discovered, there’s no end to most of the games. It’s almost impossible to get bored.

It was a shame that it was raining last Bank Holiday, but perhaps not that much of a shame. I found a Spectrum 48k Emulator and downloaded ‘Tracksuit Manager’. Perhaps I’ll have a game. Just a quick one though, I promise...