‘I’m sorry’: Football Manager creator says he completely misjudged one Tottenham player’s ability

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The Football Manager series is not just a video game these days, it’s a scouting tool used by many top clubs to help uncover the next top talent.

The likes of Erling Haaland, Vinicius Jr and Martin Odegaard were all stars on FM years before they became household names, but for all of the good scouting work Football Manager has done over the years, they have misjudged a few players.

Speaking on the What The Footie? Podcast, the series’ creator, Miles Jacobson, has stated that one player he and his team misjudged was Harry Kane, retelling the story of how he apologised to Kane for rating him so lowly before he burst onto the scene.

Football Manager got Kane wrong

Jacobson discussed how he misjudged Kane.

“Poor old Harry. I was at the London Football Awards, and I’ve known Harry’s agent for a while and he came over to me and said that Harry would like to say hello. My opening gambit was ‘I’m sorry our researchers didn’t think you’d become as good as you have done, so you had one of the biggest leaps in the history of the game in the last update’,” Jacobson said.

“He was understanding he said that he didn’t blame me because he wasn’t great when he was on loan at Leicester. We don’t get it right every time, we didn’t get it right with Jamie Vardy too, but we did better with Harry Maguire when he was at Sheffield United and Andy Robertson,” Jacobson said.

Who saw it coming?

Of course, Kane is now widely known as one of the greatest strikers of all-time, but when he was coming through, he wasn’t tipped to have this career.

Indeed, there was very little hype around Harry Kane when he was a teenager. Nobody had him earmarked as England’s next great centre-forward, so it stands to reason that he wasn’t rated in such a way on Football Manager.

Since then, as anyone who plays the game will know, Kane has become one of the most highly-rated players in Football Manager, and he remains one of the most frightening strikers in the Premier League.

Kane’s rise was unorthodox to say the least.