Football Manager is a series of football management simulation video games based on real-life events. The game is more than addictive, and while some football-based games require non-stop commitment, Football Manager isn’t anything like that. That probably explains why a big part of the community might not touch the game for 10 months straight yet dedicate all of their spare time in hope of realising the potential of the 17-year-old regen who has come from the last year’s youth intake.
The game has been the reason for so many good stories and unexpected situations to happen- who could forget when a father-to-be was desperate to name his child after a regen on the game who goes by the name of Elkan. Andrej Pavlović, who gave a special interview to the website, is also familiar to the Football Manager community as he became a data analyst at a Serbian team thanks to an FM save of his. The narrative which we are going to present to you today is about Tim Pyke and his obsession with a Bulgarian team in the second division: FC Nesebar. The FM addict did everything in his power to visit his beloved club, including sacrificing his honeymoon.
"It was 2007 and my future wife and I had set a date for our wedding – 08.08.2008. A month later, we would go on our honeymoon. She had been looking at holidays in Spain, Greece or Portugal and I was all for it. But then came the fateful day I started beta-testing the Bulgarian league for Football Manager. I picked a random team. That team changed the whole concept of holidaying. That team was Nesebar, in the Bulgarian Second Division West. I grew fond of them and followed their real-life progress. Then I got curious and looked at costs for holidays in Bulgaria. I found out about the holiday resort of Sunny Beach, right next to Nesebar’s football stadium and the prices were excellent. Could I convince the wife-to-be? Yes, I could. Two weeks all-inclusive was cheaper than one-week half-board at any of the other locations, so it was set. September 5 2008, I was flying out to Bulgaria. Now I needed to figure out a way to go and see Nesebar in action. A week into the honeymoon the opportunity arrived. We made some new friends out there and the girls wanted to split off to have some girlie time. I convinced the lads to go see the football. Although the wife knew I went to the football match, to this day she doesn’t know I chose Bulgaria because of the team I saw play out there."
Sadly, there wasn’t any response from the club but better late than never- we hope to see a reply from Nesebar, which could hit the headlines!
