I, Thomas Sherman, am a 19-year-old college student who looks to spend my free time in different worlds. while many look to video games movies and shows about magical fantasies and new unfamiliar worlds, the different worlds I like to spend my time in are identical to this one, however, I am a football manager. being a football manager isn’t exactly an easy job and is very stressful, but the game series football manager, or FM, replaces my constant real-world boring responsibilities with a whole different set of more fun to fulfill responsibilities. after all, looking through second-division Bolivian teams for a new striker is much more enjoyable than doing laundry or feeding myself… ok maybe it doesn’t go that far, I still have things to do outside of playing video games but it is my main escape. 7 or 8 years ago I was an energetic child unable to sit still to have a conversation let alone read, knowing one of my main forms of enjoyment in the future was playing a spreadsheet game about soccer, my second favorite sport in soccer, and my least favorite (but not worst) subject in math, I might have made some major life changes to alter that outcome. but now living that reality I wouldn’t want it any other way. Football Manager can be played as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. you can play starting as the best team in the world just buying players and playing games and everything can turn out exactly how you want it to. Or you can play how I and many others play the game, diving into the tactics, player roles, player ratings, training schedules, and loan farms, and diving into customized stats as niche as times blinked per 90 minutes for each of our players. this may make the game much more difficult but that’s what I love about it, the difficulty and responsibility overtake every thought in your mind. this along with the bizarre match and season outcomes, player names, position, and stat combinations, creates a whole new world with incredible storytelling potential, yet leaves me with nowhere to share the wild stories of my career.