The contemporary football landscape has one thing in greater abundance than ever before: scrutiny. The sport is now covered 24 hours a day, every nugget of news sliced-and-diced across every platform there is, while things like the recent transfer deadline are the subject of countless live blogs and breathless studio coverage that often amounts to praise, criticism and will he, won't he—who knows!
Then there's the actual matches, swarmed with statistics, and the players themselves, whose performances are broken down Moneyball-style. But well before Moneyball grew notoriety, videogames had been reducing sports to their starkest numbers: and in 1992, developers Paul and Oliver Collyer released their calculating, statistic-obsessed vision of the beautiful game.
