A Game of Thrones Meets Football Manager 2013 – Part One

A Game of Thrones Meets Football Manager 2013 – Part One

Every copy of Football Manager 2013 includes the game Editor, a powerful tool that you can use to heavily modify the database which drives the game. I recently had the hair-brained idea to try and re-create a tiny bit of the Game of Thrones universe within Football Manager. This is a tale of my adventure.

A bit of background first, I am a keen Football Manager player, regularly clocking in well over 100 hours in the majority of the games in the series. I am also a massive fan of the A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) world created by George R. R. Martin. After playing quite a few seasons with my TNS team in the Welsh Premier, I had the aforementioned idea to try and create a small slice of Game of Thrones to play around with.

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First things first, I loaded up the Editor and decided on a country to remove from the game and replace with the land of Westeros where the majority of the story in A Game of Thrones takes place. At a later date I might just look to create Essos, the land where Daenerys Targaryen’s story takes place.

Out of some misguided sense of national loyalty I decided that Wales was the perfect foil for my Westeros. Out went the name Wales, and in its place was Westeros, a nickname of The Seven Kingdoms and a change to the capitol city. Cardiff turned into King’s Landing.

Unfortunately I am unable to change around with Regions or Currencies, so Westeros remains part of the UK & Ireland region to keep the Football Manager database working.

I made some slight improvements to the reputation of Westeros and removed all staff members and player records. This will be something of a clean slate.

From here I decided that I had to make some superficial changes to the league, it wouldn’t be good for the Welsh Premier to remain when in my vision of Football Manager, Wales doesn’t even exist anymore.

The name was smoothly changed to the Westerosian Premier League, along with a slight reputation increase. I don’t want my teams to be struggling to sign decent players. I envision Westerosian teams one day dominating the Champions League. I also cleared the winners history, clean slate and all that.

Of course, a change to the name of the league isn’t enough if all the teams are stuck with the names of the original Welsh Premier teams. Out came one of the numerous Game of Thrones wiki’s and some hasty re-naming of the teams took place.Names like Airbus UK FC and Rhyl disappered, in came Castle Black and Oldtown. I tried to cover some of the major locations from the story along with a bit of geographical variety.

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Indeed, I even went so far as to re-name the Welsh regions for those of Westeros. My long-term aim is to change all the cities of these regions to accurately reflect the fictional continent. At the moment I have only changed the names of the cities in The North. I haven’t yet go into changing the number of inhabitants, attraction or anything. That would have to occur in the long-term to fully realise the world created by Martin, but for now that is very much on the back-burner.

Other things currently on the backburner include club logos, I have limited skills with Photoshop or other image editing software. It is certainly immersion breaking when upon starting the game in Westeros, I saw the logos of the original Welsh clubs.

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My next step is to try and get a second division set-up and working smoothly. The lack of relegation and promotion in the original Football Manager database certainly limits the amount of fun you can have in the league. Of course I would then have to change team names in the lower league to make things complete. I might also look into changing the names of some backroom staff such as Chairmen in order to create the true Game of Thrones vibe with the various family Houses.

Game of Thrones in Football Manger, most certainly underway.

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