Everton to Scout the New Wayne Rooney Through a Computer Game

The computer game series "Football Manager" is considered to be one of the most realistic football-management simulations ever by many fans. The in-game database comprises the data of over 370,000 players, scattered all over the world. Most of the data is gathered by local fans, who send their findings to a main researcher for a specific area. He filters out the unrealistic entries before mailing his research to London, to the headquarters of the developing firm: Sports Interactive Games. Over the past decade or so, Football Manager (FM from here on), it's predecessor Championship Manager, and developing firm Sports Interactive Games (SI Games from here on) have built up an excellent reputation for scouting talent at a very early age. Many talents that have exploded onto the world stage were recognised by gamers worldwide as being FM talents of two or three years ago. Just to give you an example, a player like Javier Saviola moved to Europe in 2001, but he's been a big hit with FM-fanatics ... (link)