Brexit’s in the new Football Manager and it’s here to f**k up your season

Boris Johnson never saw this coming.

Neither did Michael Gove or Nigel Farage. But here we are: Brexit is not only coming to Britain, now it’s infiltrating our favourite computer games.

Yes, there is a new version of the time-stealing Football Manager series out in early November (the 4th to be exact) and this year it will be more realistic than ever.

Not only will it feature an improved match engine, enhanced levels of realism, social media and all the usual advances we’ve come to expect from this wildly popular series, but this time you will also have to deal with Brexit, as you navigate your way through the game.

“As far as I know this is the first time a computer game has tried to predict the future of a country,” says Miles Jacobson, head honcho at Sports Interactive, which makes the game.

#FM17 | The various scenarios of #Brexit will be simulated in Football Manager 2017 https://t.co/qOWoDc0wUy pic.twitter.com/g3t8o8KrSg

— Football Manager (@FootballManager) October 18, 2016

“We were left with an interesting situation this year when the people of Britain voted to leave the EU and it wouldn’t have felt right to leave that out. It’s something we had to reflect in the game,” Miles told the Telegraph.

“So we sat down with the research guys and started to plan how we might put it in.”

Given that not even the British Prime Minister seems to know what Brexit will actually look like in real life, Miles and co. had a tough job deciding how to reflect it in the game.

In the end they have plumped for a series of different scenarios, ranging from soft to hard, and each save of the game could throw up a different one.

It means you may have to deal with the fact that you may no longer be able to snap up those bargain left-backs from Poland, or sneak in a youth player from Spain, if all European players suddenly require a work permit.

“If we already had these rules in place, players such as N’Golo Kante and Dimitri Payet would not have been able to gain work permits to move to the Premier League,” Jacobson points out. “That’s two of last season’s three best players.”

So this could have a big impact on whether you can finally lead Huddersfield to the Premier League title.
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