About World Sport

World Sport is the sports pages of a world that does not exist. Every club, player, match and transfer here comes from one long game of Football Manager 2024.

The world so far

How it works

1. The game is played. A manager plays the save in Football Manager as usual and keeps a saved game every so often.
2. The save is read. A save file is not made to be read by other programs. The app decodes it directly and takes out the whole world: every league and cup, every fixture and goal, every player's season, the transfers, the injuries, the awards, the club finances, the press conferences and the dressing-room moods.
3. The facts are kept. Each save adds to one database. An older save can fill in what a newer save has forgotten, so the record goes back further than any one save.
4. The news is found. The app compares the world with the last edition and looks for stories: a title race, an upset, a long unbeaten run, a record broken, a record transfer, a young player breaking through, a manager under pressure, a legend retiring.
5. The stories are written. An AI language model writes each story from a short file of facts about it, and from nothing else. There are 10 papers, each with its own country, voice and beat, so one result can read very differently in two of them.
6. The stories are checked. Before a story is kept, the app checks its scores, years and numbers against the facts. A story with a mistake goes back once with the mistakes listed; a second wrong draft is thrown away.
7. The paper goes to print. The new edition is published, and the site is turned into plain pages and put online, so it stays up when the Mac is asleep.

What the paper knows

Every result, and how it happened

• Every fixture the world has played since the game began, in every country, with every goal and who scored it, the penalties and the own goals, extra time and shoot-outs, crowds and away fans.
• For the games the save still keeps in full: the game's own match report, every player's rating, shots and expected goals (xG). The league xG tables agree with the game's own to the decimal, so the paper can tell a lucky team from a good one, and a misfiring striker from a clinical one.
• The team sheets: who started where, the formation, the tactic's mentality and style. That is how the paper notices a team leaving its usual system, a star left on the bench while fit, or a teenager taking a regular's place.

The players, down to their character

• Every attribute of every player on the game's 1 to 20 scale, his positions, his better foot, his height, his career season by season, his injuries by name, his contract, his wages and how tired he is after weeks of games.
• The hidden personality the game never shows you: ambition, loyalty, professionalism, temperament, how he handles pressure, how he plays in big games, how consistent he is, and more. Only the extremes reach the writers, in plain words, as a club would know them: "a big-game player", "a model professional", "a short fuse", "goes missing in big games".
• The dressing room: morale and happiness, what a player is unhappy about and since when, whether he has told his team-mates, which team-mates have taken his side, and who sticks together. A player sulking about his playing time in the game becomes a story here.

The managers, the boards and the press room

• Every manager's career, matched to his results. The game does not say which team a career list belongs to, so the app finds it by the record: 190 of 199 lists agree with the managers' own records.
• Each coach's preferred formations, mentality and pressing; the board losing patience; sackings, vacancies and appointments.
• Every answer given in a press conference. When two managers have a go at each other, the paper calls it a war of words and looks ahead to the game between them.

The clubs, the money and the market

• Every transfer and fee, the bids and the interest that never became a deal (the rumour mill), wages, and contracts running down.
• Club finances and debts, stadiums, reputations, rivalries, and the people a club's fans love or loathe.

History

• The roll of honour of every competition, back to the 1870s for the oldest cups; every award winner, every team of the season, every record.
• Saves add up, so a player who retired years ago is still here. That is where the legends, the dynasties, the great finals, the milestones and the "where are they now" pieces come from.

How the scouts work

How the writers stay honest

• Each story starts from a notebook: the facts of that story, with names, seasons and scores already written out, so the writer never has to look anything up or guess.
• When a writer wants a fact the notebook lacks, it asks the archive, the way a reporter rings the statistician. The answer goes into the notebook, so the fact check counts it.
• Every score, year and big number in the draft must be in the notebook. If one is not, the draft goes back once; a second wrong draft is thrown away.
• The papers have staff: invented journalists, each with a persona, a style and some quirks, writing for papers with their own country and loyalties. A writer's voice can change how a story reads, never what it says.

The pictures

The code

What it is not

• It is not real football news. Treat it as you would a novel set in a football world.
• It is not perfect. The game keeps less about its early years, and an AI writer can still slip. When a mistake is found, the edition is corrected and printed again.
• It is not made by, or connected with, Sports Interactive, SEGA or any club.

The newest save read is from 8 March 2064, in the game's calendar.