A hard working Football Manager player went from helping out at youth level to landing a professional job as a scout and being added to the game.
Football Manager isn’t just a simulator praised for its realism, it’s evidently a springboard for fans who want to work in the football industry in real life too.
One example was when Bromley FC posted a job advert actively seeking people who play Football Manager for a tactician role at the club back in November.
More recently, though, someone inspired by the Football Manager series told how he managed to become a professional scout – and even ended up in the game itself.
A Serbian 20-year-old named Uroš Marković told the Football Manager subreddit how he went from volunteering as a scout at youth level to being headhunted for a professional scouting role.
For Marković, it all started by posting transfer suggestions for his favourite club, Partizan, in Serbia.
‘I started as a complete amateur in that job, just did it for the love, which I gained from playing Soccer Manager and Football Manager,’ he said.
Football Manager is a game about building teams by recruiting and selling players within the financial boundaries of your club, so if you love the game you’d probably love being a scout looking for the next gem too.
He then caught a lucky break and went on to help with scouting youth players at Partizan, where he helped identify young defender Kosta Nedeljković.
‘He [Youth Scout Nenad Marinković] gave me chance because of my devotion to football and scouting, I gained big experience. I was just his assistant there and discovered dozens of talents, like a Kosta Nedeljković.’
Marković says he later started scouting players for a small Serbian club called Radnik Surdulica, still without pay, where he helped scout Sadick Aboubakar before the club recruited him.
The 20-year-old continued to post his work on social media, though, and eventually decided to focus on Africa, when he says a sports director gave him his first paying job as the scout for West Africa at ‘FK Auda/FK Riga/Paphos club group’.
‘Now, after months here, I’ve expanded my knowledge a lot. My player database count is over 5000 African players and I’m getting a wage from watching football, which always was my dream,’ he says.
Africa might sound like an odd choice, but it has its pros and cons. Marković says that he believes Africa is the most promising football region in the world, but that it’s a challenge scouting players as videos aren’t always readily available.
He was added as a scout in Football Manager 2024 and boasts some impressive stats for such a young scout, like 15 out of 20 for Judging Player Potential and 13 for Judging Player Ability – though he hasn’t actually been to Africa yet.
‘I think this story can be inspiration and motivation for many talented young people around. It’s proof that work, persistence, and dedication always pays off and that everything is possible.’
