James Buckley on Football Manager: 'I was playing when my child was born'
"You can't complete it."
In a case of life imitating art (or perhaps the other way around), it turns out that actor James Buckley is a huge fan of Football Manager.
Buckley's character from The Inbetweeners, Jay, once claimed on the beloved sitcom to have "completed" Championship Manager, the never-ending footy simulator franchise that is now known as Football Manager.
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Speaking to RadioTimes.com at the BAFTA Games Awards, where he presented the award for Best Multiplayer, Buckley revealed that Football Manager is "easily" the game he has poured the most hours of his life into. Watch the video above to see him talking about it!
"I've put some hours in that," Buckley revealed, as well as joking that "you can't complete it", before remembering one particularly life-changing moment... during which he bashed through a whole season of Football Manager and a summer transfer window.
He said: "I was playing Football Manager when my first child was being born. Yeah, I took my laptop with me. There wasn't much I could do. Like, you know, I felt a bit useless being there. I'm not a doctor or anything, so I just brought my laptop with me. Sat on a chair, next to my wife, and stuck on some Football Manager."
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As for who he chooses to play as: "It depends on how ambitious I'm feeling. Sometimes it's nice to go with a Real Madrid or Man City or something like that, where you know there's a chance to get some success.
"But then, I'm a Crystal Palace fan as well. So sometimes I torture myself and see, 'Oh, what if I was in charge of Crystal Palace? Could I do a better job?' Turns out, I can't. So it's fine."
The developers at Sega's Sports Interactive will be pleased to hear that Buckley has not been put off by the game's shift towards deeper levels of realism over the years.
He said: "I'm alright with the level of depth because they always add new stuff, every year is always improved. And I don't know how they do that. Every year, they build on an already brilliant game and make it better."
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And does Buckley have any top tips for aspiring managers out there? Buckley told us: "Not sure I should be saying this, but there's a couple of like third-party apps that you can get, right? Don't come at me. But I get this one, it's called FM Scout, and you can really find out what the wonderkids are in the game and stuff like that.
"And if you are a big team, then there's a chance that you might be able to get, you know, at the age of 15, trying to attract them... buy him for peanuts to sell him for about 80 million. That's always good fun."
Read more: James Buckley says Inbetweeners return would be "sad and pathetic"
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