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The Football Manager series is a complicated one. Technically, the series began with Kevin Toms’ original 1982 Football Manager, the game that created the genre that inspired the Collyer Brothers’ 1992 Championship Manager which eventually morphed into the now-new Football Manager series we now today. Yes, it’s quite confusing, but I’m sure there’s a transfer joke in there somewhere.
Today, the Football Manager IP is owned and used by Sports Interactive, the team hard at work on the upcoming 2026 incarnation of its typically annual series. On the other hand, the genre’s original creator is back with a reimagining of the 1982 game coming to Steam as Kevin Toms Football Star Manager.
But does the creator of the amazing genre actually play the newer Football Manager series, the one with the name he failed to trademark so many decades ago? As it turns out, he’s dabbled, but the genre creator simply doesn’t vibe with the complexity of the modern series.
Kevin Toms explains why he doesn’t play new Football Manager
Speaking on an upcoming episode of the VideoGamer Podcast, our ongoing developer interview series available on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and more, Toms explained that he has played the newer Football Manager games, but he wants something “quicker” than what those titles offer.
“I have played it, yeah,” Toms explained in our hour-long chat. “And there’s nothing against it, but it is a genre, and it’s not the kind of game I want to play. That’s why I wrote something different [the Football Star Manager re-release], you know? It’s more detailed and complex, and I don’t have the patience for it. I never did.”
While Toms isn’t necessarily a fan of the more in-depth modern series, he’s also not surprised at just how popular the Football Manager series, and indeed its genre, has become over the four decades since the original game came to the slew of emerging home computers.
“I don’t think so,” he replied when asked if the scale of the series is surprising. “I think the scale of the market is growing, and, I mean, if there’s one thing that’s interesting about the games industry now is there are so many niches. I mean, there’s plenty of people who play just one game. That’s their game and they play the latest one… it’s so diverse. There’s something for everyone, really.”
As for the return of Kevin Toms’ version of Football Manager, now called Football Star Manager, bringing that particular title back was a unique project. While the developer saw numerous requests for new features, bringing back the “raw simplicity” of the original was more important, but just what is it that drives players to FM?
“One of the reasons why that game works so well, the original, is because you make decisions, you think and strategize, [and] you can take as long as you like to make those decisions,” Toms explained. “It’s not pushing you along. Like, when you play an arcade game you’re having to move fast, think fast, and it’s quite tiring… but the pacing of my game is deliberately it doesn’t do that, there’s sort of a relaxed period of making plans and then the excitement of excitement occurring quite regularly, quite quickly, but a lot of it is to do with your thinking and decisions.”
Kevin Toms’ Football Star Manager releases on August 14, 2025 on Steam. The full episode of the VideoGamer Podcast should release sometime that weekend.
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