Xbox Game Pass Receive tons of high-quality new games on a regular basis. In some cases, it’s a bit like that Christmas, I got a bag of bootleg PlayStation games. My kid’s brain can barely handle the amount of goodness. I can switch between games faster than I can drink Coca-Cola (very quickly), and I’m desperate to try them all. Then I picked Brian Lara Cricket and was hooked. I played for several months. Football Manager 2023 and Football Manager 2023 Console Yes Game Pass is the Brian Lara Cricket I bootleg on PlayStation. Other games may also not exist.
I have a long and rich history with Football Manager and before that Championship Manager…and Premier Manager before that – Premier Manager, the game I played when I was very young and I was stupid enough to get it from a floppy Erase data is coming. Thankfully, my mom was able to convince the store that they were offering blanks. thanks Mom!
Championship Manager is really my gateway into the dark world of football management sims (I often play late into the night without the lights on). It was the predecessor to Football Manager, and I first played it with a friend at home. My parents were there doing what parents do (buffet, chatting), so my brother and I were upstairs at the computer. Time flies, we adjust our formation and try to sign players that Tottenham will never be able to afford.
Shortly thereafter, we bought Championship Manager for our home PC, and that’s it. My life has changed forever. I’ll go on to spend hundreds (perhaps thousands?) of hours trying to win some trophies for my beloved Spurs. Inevitably, I would end up leaving the Spurs to try my hand at other places, but it was never the same and always resulted in regret. Life imitates art, and so on.
I even ventured into the world of the ill-fated Football Manager Live, an online version of the game that only plays against real people, with a completely fictitious database of players and teams. What a great time it was, and a great community built around admiration for the best managers and certain star players on each server. Absolutely brilliant, but it never reached the heights it should have, and sadly faded away, as Pozzi did with the Spurs.
Football Manager 2023 is undoubtedly the latest iteration of one of the most immersive games ever created. Absolutely great if you love football and have some time to kill managing virtual teams. The fact that you can play the full PC version or the stripped-down console version as part of a Game Pass sub is pretty outrageous. It’s a shame other games won’t get as much attention.
My most memorable Football Manager moment? Probably sitting on the couch at my mother-in-law’s house on Christmas Eve, with my laptop open, and Spurs in the Champions League final. I rediscovered my love for the game thanks to my wise decision to play 30 minutes a day during my lunch break, so I was fully committed to the team at Christmas. I wish this happened to other FM players, but at various points in my game I would be so “in” the world that I would confuse game events with real life events. So I’m really confused because Tottenham are not top of the league and they don’t have Messi.
Essentially, it’s easy to get sucked into the world of Football Manager, so I was that cold winter night. As the game progressed, the room kind of melted.
I won 1-1 when the game went into stoppage time and extra time seemed to be a foregone conclusion. Then, the horror of horrors, Barcelona scored.
“Fuck!” I yelled. “For his sake!” I added, “FUCKER!”
As my mother-in-law turned away to call the midwife, her neck jerked back and panic appeared on her face. “Are you all right, Tom?” she asked.
“Yes, everything is fine. Sorry. Sorry. It doesn’t matter. Neymar scored in the 92nd minute. That’s it.”
“Oh,” she said.
Christmas feels a little different after that.
