Football Manager Live: The Reboot

Yeah, and there's a good reason for it. We've got 400,000 players in the Football Manager database, but in FML we only load in around 50,000. We take out a number of the lesser players and make sure when you start the game you have a squad probably comparable to a Championship side. You won't have a load of old duffs in there.

If we loaded in too many players the game would be slower and there'd be loads and loads of rubbish players floating about that no one would bother buying.

They'd be a lot like Brighton! A hell of a lot like Brighton.

Realistically, if we're at a stage where we have to reboot Football Manager Live again, then we're seriously looking at whether the game exists. This is a one and only reboot for us. We can't think about doing it again.

There are reasons why certain things like the stadiums can't come over. If we gave James a new stadium of similar worth or a compensatory sum, we'd immediately imbalance the new game world. The same with his squad of youth players.

With them keeping their skill points, they'll immediately have enough to specialise 100 per cent in one area and pretty much all the way in another. You could argue that that's their advantage over newbies. Although we can't do as much as people like, we've done as much as we can.

Arsenal winning the Premier League? I think you're delusional. Arsenal have absolutely no chance of ever... well, not ever winning the league, but they have no chance of winning the league this season. And I personally couldn't see them beating Barcelona.

The league, I think, is Manchester United's.

You could, yeah. An accusation levelled at the game that had been true, previously, was that FML was too hard and favoured people who logged in a lot more. With the reboot it's a lot less like that. We've added skill-queuing deliberately for people playing on lunch breaks.

I would go along with what you said: FML is very much aimed at fantasy football, football fans, that don't want to put the time and the effort in to playing Football Manager but who like the thought of competing online against other human managers.