The year is 2049.

My avatar, managing Tottenham Hotspur, is 67. Harry Redknapp is long dead. Chris Smalling is my assistant manager.

Now, as I finally wind down my Football Manager 2012 playthrough through an unholy combination of bugs and, well, having won everything, the future beckons. I’m having an existential crisis and the line between real and fictional is melting.

But let’s start at the beginning.

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You foot-to-ball chaps sure don't get bored easily. I'd get fed up of any game after 2012 years - why, I'd even be willing to bet my ardour for X-COM would have cooled by just the 819th sequel. There's no stopping plucky Brit studio Sports Interactive though: they've just announced Foot-to-Ball Manager 2012, which as is the custom contains a raft of new features, improved graphicsability, a whole lot more foot, and much more ball.

In the years to come, 50% of men will only buy one game each year - whatever the new Call of Duty is. The other 50% will only buy Football Manager. By 2018, the two will combine into Weapon Unlock Manager, and no other game will ever be required.

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The RPS Hivemind does not know this "foot-to-ball", nor the management thereof. It has therefore called in an expert - Los Campesinos! singer, Gareth Campesinos! - to review Football Manager 2011 on its behalf. Other websites get the work experience kid to do it, we turn to pop stars. A lesson, there.

Is it wrong to think that Rock, Paper, Shotgun's readership would be anything like those who steer the ship? Other than intelligent and attractive, I specifically mean completely bemused by the concept of "foot-to-ball". Perhaps more bemused that this popular series of Football Management Sims offer no control as such, and is perhaps as visually stimulating as a GNVQ IT student's final project on Microsoft Access. Present me your heartstrings...

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There's appears to be a widely-held misconception that RPS knows very little about football. This is a lie, spread by ourselves for comic effect. For instance, I know that my own country, England, has a dependably underwhelming team whose fans endlessly hark on about a match that they won by mistake 44 years ago, that an increasing number of the major UK clubs are owned by horrifyingly rich foreign businessmen, and that Manchester United have today announced the rather mysterious decision to sign a new five-year contract with the headmaster from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

I also know that a demo version of the latest Football Manager is huge news for an awful lot of PC gamers, and that 2011-era jokes about the game being a series of spreadsheets are enormously ignorant.

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It's been RPS' best-ever day for pictures of football games on the front-page! Nonetheless, you may have observed subtle clues over the years that this website's staff are just a little bit shy of football nous. Subtle, subtle clues. This does not mean we sneer at those who do have said nous, or indeed at games based upon it. No! We revere them as much as we do all other games. Just slightly confusedly so.

Take Football Manager, for instance, the two thousand and eleventh installment of which was confirmed today.

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