Blue Lock has Infiltrated all my Football Manager Saves

Over the pandemic, I acquired a taste for the storylines behind sports and esports. Part of this was thanks to finally breaking down and watching Haikyuu; part of it developed from days spent working as an editor for an esports website. Though if we’re being entirely honest, I think the original seed was planted in 2018 by listening to Austin Walker, Rob Zacny and Patrick Klepek talk about the NFL docu-series Hard Knocks over on Waypoint. At any rate, I’ve come to appreciate the narrative arcs within both physical and virtual sports, which has steadily built up my appetite for games that can simulate them. 

That’s what led to me picking up Football Manager 23 at the end of last year. I originally wasn’t sure about how much I’d like it with all of the nitty gritty statistical info, but the game gives enough of a human element to your AI team members and coaching staff to function as a solid role-playing engine to create stories in worldwide soccer leagues. Perhaps fittingly, as I’ve been playing through different runs with various teams, I’ve noticed that anime has started to influence the way I play.

Blue Lock is the latest shonen manga anime adaptation taking viewers by storm, and it’s not surprising that it has already garnered plenty of fans. The manga is written by Muneyuki Kaneshiro, whose debut series was As the Gods Will – a death game story where high school students are forced to play children’s games with deadly stakes. Tetsuaki Watanabe is the show’s director, which makes sense, given his past as an episode director for Haikyuu. Blue Lock adapts the notion of a death game to fit within the confines of professional soccer, pitting 300 high school forwards against each other in a brutal gauntlet of training and competition to forge one ultimate striker who can lead Japan to the World Cup trophy. 

Jinpachi Ego, operator of the Blue Lock facility, is obsessed with the notion of creating a striker who is a complete egoist that only takes pleasure in their own goals. The players within Blue Lock are judged in a series of selection tests that will ultimately lead to five of them being chosen for the U18 Japanese World Cup team. The first of these tests is judged entirely on how many points each player can score, with later ones assessing how well each player can leverage their individual strengths to create goals with their teammates. In typical anime fashion, the players who go through Blue Lock are able to learn new skills and mindsets rapidly, and quickly start evolving into soccer monsters. 

As a 1-to-1 simulation game, Football Manager 23 is significantly more rooted in reality than Blue Lock. The virtual players on your team probably won’t suddenly have a breakthrough and be able to score in a way that leaves defenders in the dust, and having a team completely made up of strikers is guaranteed to have disastrous results. That said, I can’t deny the influence Blue Lock has had on my mentality as I play. 

I’ve managed four teams since I first picked up Football Manager 23. The thing they’ve all had in common? High-level, aggressive offense with a defensive line that’s mediocre at best. I didn’t set out with that plan in mind for each of these teams, it just kind of…happened. My first run at the game was disastrous and ended with me being fired. But my second try as a manager of the Los Angeles Football Club, I had a team that was almost purely offense that revolved around my incredible striker, Cristian Arango (a real man who plays for the real LAFC). Combined with the team’s stellar goalkeeper and a group of midfielders and wingers who were also hungry to score, they were damn near unstoppable.

Starting new files in Football Manager, I wanted to try building teams that had different strengths and were based around alternate tactics, like heavy pressing defense or extended wing play. Without realizing it, each team became offense focused. The counter-attacking style I’ve come to love is fairly easy to read once the opposition gets used to it, and doesn’t have much heft to it defensively. And yet, every time a player manages to cut in behind enemy lines and make a killer shot my heart races. I understand the value of a balanced soccer team that works well together, and logically I know that a strong defense is probably a more solid foundation. But Blue Lock has shown me the thrill of scoring goals, and I can’t help but chase it every time I play Football Manager.

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