The Shakhtar Identity

Editorials · By: Fantastic · Jan 17 2010 01:45 AM

I'm writing this explicitly on the pretence you know the club Shakhtar Donetsk (they're a really fucking rich club in the former Soviet Bloc).

Shakhtar are a huge club. Fucking massive. They're rich too, indeed the arms dealing, smuggling and prostitution games all need places to launder money, in recent years various eastern European clubs have received huge influxes of cold hard cash (FC Sheriff Tiraspol, Bunyodkor Toshkent and Shakhtar being prime examples) with the only pre-requisite being no questions asked. Of course this money is put to use forming fabulous squads of Brazillians, overpaid and underplayed. But how is this being transferred into the game?

Well it seems, with Shakhtar Donetsk in mind, the game hasn't quite managed to understand the concept of adhering to the limitations on the number of foreign players allowed in a club's starting line-up (a shrewd but nonetheless sensible ruling adopted by leagues ravaged by unscrupulous chairmen looking for gold). Take a look at this:

Posted Image

What's even more shocking is that in the previous season there was but the sole Ukrainian player in that first team squad. Year upon year they buy glamour players, only to let them squander in their ranks, neither focusing on local talent nor even making attempts to sign them.

For me, this is but another facet of the game, when stripped away, that reveals the fragile nature underneath the shell so finely crafted out of smoke and mirrors.

This isn't an anomaly, consistently non playing personnel are so overtly wrong with their judgements it can only be tasked as a flaw in the game, not a representation of their overall ineptitude (although the frequency of morons is accurately proportionate to real life). From the simple, such as staff members suggesting the top goalscorer in the league is not good enough to play for the club, to the obscure, opposition managers saying your side is not ready to win a competition (but maybe next year with experience) even though you've won the thing four times in a row, to the downright idiotic, like the above example. It all keeps breaking the pace of the game, but not only that, more importantly it destroys the already fragile level of immersion we receive from the game.

It's important to dwell on that word for a paragraph. Immersion, it's the pinnacle of any artistic medium, to engross the participant to the level where they forget that they're lying face down in a cardboard box drinking lighter fluid, if only for a few unbroken minutes, before a dog steals their shoes, is something that this game is supposed to thrive upon. Immersion isn't being told you're a manager, go out and win, it's walking down the street and wondering whether Olexander Shershen should be promoted to the senior squad because Jose Caceres has left on a free transfer to Werder Bremen. But every moment I have like that is spoiled by the reality that I'm just clicking buttons and nothing will ever really happen. I sit in a press conference and for the thirty third time I'm asked whether this is my dream job, how I plan to manage my players or what flavour condoms my wife likes.

I get the feeling sometimes that improvements to the game are being staggered on purpose, the realisation being that whilst this is a relatively in depth game, the only real improvements that can be made are on a sophistication level, but taking the time and effort to craft the game how it should be would not be beneficial on a cost basis.

Of course my cynicism is probably unfounded, but the fact I feel that way suggests a certain degree of naivety on the part of Sports Interactive. They've almost completely forgotten that the game is a simulation, they're moving in the same direction as Electronic Arts, trying to please the crowd, hold hands, thrust the continue button in the faces of the great unwashed and tell them that's all that's needed, assuming, quite correctly, that the vast majority will eat it up in all its shiny glory because their love of football will overwhelm the wooden nature of the product. I mean that has to be said doesn't it, the amount of money generated from football is directly correlated to the growth in children and general idiots who now follow football, buying all manner of shit to feel attached.

The amusing thing was that if the game didn't use real players or teams, very few people would play it, because that's the only reason they do so, they only want to have another channel of self worth. The sad situation is that there is no viable challenger to this throne, no real contender that would make Sports Interactive work. One only has to look at the leaps and bounds Pro Evolution Soccer made in quickly surpassing the lazy developers at Electronic Arts to see that it is possible. But not only that, the overhaul and regenerated enthusiasm of the FIFA team has led to a vastly superior football playing simulation from the previous five years.

Compare that with the development of Football Manager and it is quite appalling. We've got a wooden media system, a redundant 3d match engine, a tactics creator and a slightly simpler training system. But it is accepted because there is no alternative. There's nothing we can do, but wait, hope and pray that Championship Manager beats Football Manager, causes the necessary shake up that the series demands. Immersion.

I'll say it again, Immersion. I want to feel as though I exist in a living football world. I want to be thought of as a cog in a world I can not control. Clubs have politics, fans have influence, the media ruins and makes me. Matches feel visceral, the implications of defeat more damning, the ecstasy of victory more ethereal. I don't want to feel as I do now, a puppet master pulling the strings, vaguely grasping to those fleeting moments where I can pretend to be a real boy.

That's what Football Manager has become now. Like Shakhtar Donetsk it doesn't know if it is a Football Club or a showcase. It doesn't seem to care either because like Shakhtar Donetsk it has the money and as long as sales are strong, what need is there to change. Being the fastest sprinter at the special olympics is not an achievement, for some people it is, but I aspire to a higher level of quality.

My dream for 2010 is for Championship Manager 2011 to be better than Football Manager 2011, for the sake of the future of the series and for the future of football management simulation as a whole. Unlike Shakhtar they have no Dinamo Kiev and that's what they need.

Go to our discussion forum to comment on this article!

Share this article: