MLS side Colorado Rapids have admitted that they use popular football management simulator “Football Manager” in an attempt to find players before their rivals do.
The Football Manager database features approximately 600,000 entries, and the player profiles contain more than 250 attributes each.
The club’s sporting director Padraig Smith told interviews that the club uses the game in two ways – they’ll either submit an enquiry to developers Sports Interactive in order to do due diligence on a player, or they’ll just fire them game up themselves.
“The number of leagues that are covered, the number of players that are covered, it really gives us a lot of information that can be slightly trickier to come by, and works as a nice starting point”, Smith said.
“One of the great things about the Football Manager database is the sheer breadth of the information that’s in there”.
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Everton were the first English club to openly admit using the game for their own research, and since then several other clubs in the UK have followed suit.