There's a decent argument that football management simulations are the most effective tactical education tool the sport has produced. Not coaching courses, not analysis videos, not books. A spreadsheet game with two-dimensional dots.
That's a slightly absurd claim on its face, and I think it holds up. The reasons are instructive about how people actually learn systems.
The abstraction is the feature
The obvious criticism of these games is that they don't look like football. There's no ball physics, no player animation worth mentioning, and the match engine renders as coloured circles moving around a green rectangle.
That's precisely why they work as a teaching tool. Stripping away the visual richness leaves the structure exposed.
Watching a real match, the eye follows the ball, because the ball is where the action is and where the camera points. Watching a top-down abstraction, you see shape. You see the gap between the midfield and defensive lines. You see one full-back permanently higher than the other. You see the whole thing at once, which is exactly the view that broadcast coverage denies you.
A lot of tactical concepts that are genuinely hard to perceive in live football are obvious in an overhead abstraction. Compactness, width, the space between units, defensive line height. These aren't subtle when you can see all twenty-two positions simultaneously.
Consequences arrive fast
The second reason is feedback speed, and this is where the games beat every other learning method.
Make a tactical decision in real coaching and you find out whether it worked in a week. Make one in a simulation and you find out in ten minutes, and you can make forty more decisions that evening.
That compression means a player can develop an intuition for cause and effect — push the defensive line higher and you concede more balls in behind, narrow the shape and you get overloaded in wide areas — through direct experience rather than being told.
Experiential learning of that kind produces much more durable understanding than instruction. It's the same reason coaches favour game-based practice over walkthroughs.
What the games get wrong
Important to be clear about the limits, because there's a version of this that produces overconfidence.
Attributes as fixed numbers. Players in these games have numeric ratings for discrete skills. Real footballers don't have a passing number — they have a range of passing behaviours that vary by context, pressure, and confidence. The numeric model is a simplification that leaks into how people discuss real players.
Instructions as switches. A tactical instruction in a game applies uniformly and immediately. In reality, changing how a team plays takes weeks of training, and the change is partial and inconsistent. Games radically understate the implementation gap.
The human layer is thin. Man management exists in these games as a set of dialogue options with numeric effects on morale. Actual man management is the majority of a coach's job and it's not representable this way.
Roles are more rigid than reality. Assigning a player a role from a menu suggests roles are discrete categories. In practice they're continuous and overlapping, and the interesting ones are hybrids that no menu contains.
What transfers and what doesn't
From what I've seen, the transfer is real but specific.
Structural understanding transfers well. People who've played these games extensively have a genuinely better grasp of formation logic, the trade-offs between shapes, and why certain systems struggle against certain others. That knowledge is real and it holds up in conversation with actual coaches.
Vocabulary transfers well, occasionally too well — a certain amount of game terminology has entered football discussion and some of it doesn't correspond to how coaches actually talk.
What doesn't transfer is anything involving execution, players as people, or the enormous gap between designing a system and getting eleven humans to perform it. Those are the hardest parts of coaching and the games are silent on all of them.
The unexpected legacy
One genuinely interesting consequence: several people working in professional football have talked publicly about these games being part of how they got interested and how they learned. Scouts, analysts, and a small number of coaches.
The databases behind the games are also, by some accounts, comprehensive enough that clubs have occasionally used them as a reference — not for evaluation, but as a starting point for finding players in obscure leagues, which is a slightly remarkable thing for a consumer product to be good enough for.
Whether any of that makes it a good tactical education is a matter of definition. What it clearly is, is an accessible one. Coaching qualifications cost money and time and require you to already be in the game. A simulation costs the price of a game and teaches you to see shape.
For a sport that talks constantly about being open to everyone, that's not nothing.