Football Manager 2013 was the fastest selling and one of the best reviewed iteration in the series' 21-year run. What's next for the critically acclaimed franchise?

Operation Sports recently caught up with SI Games (the studio that produces Football Manager) director Miles Jacobson to chat about, amongst other things, the role of mobile gaming, the importance of community feedback and the future for FM Classic.

It's been three months since FM 2013's release. How do you feel about the game?

Miles: Pretty good – it’s our fastest selling, best reviewed and most played (by average hours per player) FM game to date, which is nice. We’ve just released a new match engine update which is probably the last, and have a data update due once all the global transfer windows are closed.

One of the big features this year is FM Classic, what is the feedback from gamers? You've mentioned in interviews that the mode's aim was to get some of the game's audience - those who may not have as much time today as they had five years ago - back. Did it work?

Miles: It took a lot of time and effort to get it right, but it seems to have worked and FM Classic is now a fourth strand for our titles, alongside FM, FM Handheld and FM Online, our forthcoming free-to-play management game for the Korean market. Obviously there’s no way to be sure, but we have lots of people playing the mode and they certainly seem to be enjoying it. The “extra money” purchases are doing way better than we expected, so we’ve learnt that people really do like to accelerate their progress in this mode too.

Now that FM Classic is included in the Football Manager experience, does it, in a way, "liberate" your team in expanding the experience of the main career mode?

Miles: Not really. The path for FM hasn’t changed, which is to make the ultimate football management simulation. It’s something we try and raise the bar for each year which I think we do pretty successfully.

Going forward, will FM Classic pretty much stay the same, in terms of the amount of features? After all, it is supposed to be a more streamlined experience, right? Or is it more the case of one or two additions (the "best of", so to speak) from each year's game making it in?

Miles: We certainly won’t be flooding it with more complicated features, but there are things we want to do – some brand new, and some tweaks – to the game.

Will there be any improvements to the strange beast that is the MLS, in FM 2014?

Miles: Of course. The MLS & A-League (Australian league that has some similarities with the MLS) have their own dedicated coder at the studio.

With more and more fans of the game really taking notice of tactics, thanks to analysts like Jonathan Wilson and Michael Cox, will FM's match engine be able to keep up and reproduce the various nuances of different tactical systems?

Miles: Well, the question there is are we learning from them, or are they learning from us? We already do lots of tactical analysis in-house, and externally, using the same tools that real life managers and data analysts use.

I really enjoy both Jonathan and Michael’s writing and they’ve both been guests on the podcast. Their insight into the game is great and they’re certainly more geeky about the tactical side than I am personally. But I still think our match engine is one step ahead – albeit it in more controlled ways. The player roles that were added to the engine are a lot more revolutionary than people might realize, and we’ll continue to slowly show their importance to the game.

You've mentioned that FM has a network of more than 1000 scouts around the world, which is more than any football club can have. Is SI still in partnership with Everton to let the Toffees use the game's database? Have other clubs expressed interest in using it? Says a lot about the game's reputation for realism when real life clubs use it to scout players, doesn't it?

Miles: Everton still have the rights, yes. There is one other club using it directly from us. And lots of clubs admit to using the games database, rather than the main one, to assist them.

We’re working on something very big in this area at the moment. So watch this space!

Do you ever see real-life transfers and get a sneaky suspicion that maybe they were "influenced" by Football Manager?

Miles: Often. Occasionally it’s admitted to… You’d be surprised how many calls I get from agents and scout.

Changing gears, do you see handheld gaming playing a bigger role in the FM series in years to come?

Miles: Very much so. FM Handheld for mobile was originally an experiment for a couple of people in the studio during some downtime after we cancelled another project they were working on. It’s done phenomenally well, and continues to increase each year.

How important is the fan community to FM? It's quite amazing to see the forum members' dedication to write up incredibly detailed tactic guides and player scouting reports. Also, the presence that many of the game's staff have in the forums: for example, I have no idea what a soak test is until I saw Riz Remes (one of the game's developers) discussing it with members who were running simulations into the future to look at the players' attribute balance.

Miles: It’s absolutely imperative, and not just on the forums but on Twitter, Facebook and all the affiliate sites as well. What better way to get feedback than from the people actually playing the game? The different forms that we interact with the players seem to have different groups of people too, which helps us filter, but I reckon 20%+ of new features that make it into the game come directly from our communities.

Different people in the studio use the different ways to communicate too – Riz & Paul Collyer (Ed. note: one half of the Collyer brothers, the original creators who started it all) tend to use the forums more, whereas I’ve sent 50k+ tweets, the vast majority are replying to people asking about the game.

Football teams using FM to scout players, you speaking at the Leaders in Football conference last year, a student in Baku landing a job as reserves manager with no previous experience except in FM (and reportedly beating out Papin for the job)... How does it feel that the football community is treating FM seriously?

Miles: Internally the aim for a while has been to be seen as a football product rather than a computer game, so it’s great starting to see that coming to fruition. It’s not really something that we can steer directly though – as people who have grown up with our games are getting into higher positions at clubs, and as others seem to open up their minds a bit to the way technology and crowd sourcing can help them achieve their goals, it’s become a lot more prevalent. Very organic – which is just how we like it.

Our thanks again to Miles Jacobson for taking the time to answer our questions!