Over the past few years, the Football Manager series has seen an incredible rise in international players around the world. I began playing the game in 2010; I'd heard whispers of it a decade before, back when it was called Championship Manager, but I'd never jumped into it because it seemed a bit too draining and tactical. But once I jumped into Football Manager 2010, I discovered that my knowledge of the game grew by leaps and bounds.
No longer was I simply familiar with Everton's starting squad. I could tell you which players you needed to keep an eye on in the Everton youth system, like Ross Barkley. I could give you the names of five or 10 players from what was then called the Coca Cola Championship League. I could even name teams from what is now called the Skrill Premier League, which is the fifth level of English football.
I changed from a casual observer of the game into a hardcore fan—and not just in the little world created and curated by Football Manager. I watched any kind of football I could find on TV, from the Championship to Major League Soccer. And all of that fandom came about because of this video game.
I wasn't alone. Jacobson says that the average amount of time spent on each yearly release of Football Manager hovers somewhere around 240 hours. That is 10 days worth of time, each year, devoted to a video game.
This seems ridiculous, but I can vouch that it is true. My copy of Steam, which tracks hours spent on each game purchased in its online store, told me that I had spent roughly 600 hours playing Football Manager editions from 2011, 2012 and 2013.
Six hundred hours. On a game.