Brexit, a waking political nightmare for the United Kingdom, isn’t all bad news. After all, it’s managed to spice up this year’s version of Football Manager, low-key one of the biggest game series on the planet.
As The Telegraph reports, while the actual details of Britain’s exit from the European Union are being worked out, the upcoming game—which simulates the running of a big European football team, including the hiring and firing of players and personnel across borders—has hashed out three possible scenarios, and determined how they’re going to affect players who choose to manage a club based in Britain:
- Soft Brexit - free movement of workers remains.
- Footballers are granted the same special exemptions that are currently given to ‘entertainers’. This means it is easier for them to obtain work permits than other people, and it will not have a huge impact on player movement from the EU.
- Hard Brexit: similar rules to those which currently apply to non-EU players are adopted for all non-UK players.
Depending on which of the three you run into while playing the game (Brexit will trigger after a couple of years), you’ll either be fine:
Or, since your job involves dealing with personnel across European borders, not fine:
This is very, very cool. You always hear shitheads saying “get your politics out of my video games”, but here’s an instance where it’s not only an interesting implementation, but one that should provide a unique challenge to managers.
Things of course get marginally easier if you manage on the continent, as it’ll be mostly business as usual, but then the inverse will apply to players from Britain. Not that many Spanish or Italian managers would be losing much sleep over that prospect in 2016.