Football Manager player numbers are through the roof thanks to subscription platforms like Game Pass and Netflix – series boss Miles Jacobson explains how

“It was five, six years ago we celebrated two million players for the first time,” Miles Jacobson tells me, during our lengthy interview with the studio head at Football Manager developer Sports Interactive’s office earlier this summer. Checking that reference, it was indeed 2020 when the studio first announced that figure, with some pride. “And then we’ve really embraced the subscription platforms…”

Those platforms – Xbox Game Pass, PS Plus, Apple Arcade, Netflix and more – have had a marked effect on the series. From 2 million players in 2020, the series’ playerbase has skyrocketed. “As I sit here today,” Jacobson says, in the late summer, “and because I haven’t been on social media these numbers haven’t been [publicly] updated for a long time, so I’m glad you’re sitting down – as of when I last checked, we’re at 19.09 million players. Of which, 7.5 million have played for more than five hours. If you play a game for more than five hours, you tend to play for a lot longer.”

Of those, 2 million people played the game in the month of June alone, Jacobson goes on. “That’s for a game that has been out since November 2023.”

While going through the figures, Jacobson brings up a dashboard on the giant screen he has in his office. Total playtime: 1.7bn hours, for FM24 alone. Average playtime: 118.8 hours, “including all the people that have subscribed and played for an hour and then not come back.” Without those, that figure’s in the many hundreds.