I’ve been a sports game fanatic as long as I’ve played video games. My very first favorite video game was Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest for the Nintendo 64, and the game franchise I’ve logged the most hours in (by far) is the Football Manager series, with nearly 5,000 combined hours over about 10 years of titles. But recently, the design decisions around the industry’s biggest sports titles have put me off, and it’s left me looking for new ways to play the genre I love.
While I have occasional fun playing the new wave of card-collecting, microtransaction-based game modes that dominate the current AAA sports game landscape, I often come away feeling like I’ve just spent a lot of empty time. Nothing carries over from year to year, and there are no real narratives that develop, especially when every player’s squad ends up with variations on the same high-powered roster by the end of the season.
My heart instead lies in franchise modes. They allow you to take on the role of roster building and management, building a team of players you choose while implementing a strategy you decide on. It’s basically my childhood dream job (running the Dodgers) in video game mode, and it’s where management sim franchises like Football Manager, Out of the Park Baseball, and Pro Cycling Manager have thrived, especially as AAA franchises like Madden and NBA 2K have shifted their focus to the newer, more lucrative online game modes.
Pro Cycling Manager 2024 is the sim game that has most recently scratched that itch for me — Football Manager 2024 has too many issues, and I just haven’t had fun with it this year — but cycling season is in the summer. With the NFL season wrapping up and the NBA season in full swing, I wanted to mess around with some football and basketball games. The management sims on offer for those sports are not as enticing, so I decided to dive back into the latest AAA titles to see what it looks like for me to have fun in those games in 2025.
The answer: I’ve been simulating and spectating my teams’ games instead of actually playing them. And it might just have rescued what’s been a dying genre for me.
Image: EA Tiburon/Electronic Arts
This approach has combined the best of both worlds for me: I’ve been playing the franchise modes in NBA 2K25, Madden NFL 25, and EA Sports College Football 25, but I’ve been simulating and spectating my games, rather than playing them. In management sims like the Football Manager franchise, that’s the only option you have: You build the team and make strategic decisions, and then all you can do is watch as your players (hopefully don’t) mess it all up. For the AAA titles, the games are built to be played, but that experience can be underwhelming: They focus so much on fealty to the real thing that any deviations from reality (and there will always be some) can instantly break your immersion in the simulation. So instead, I’ve taken myself as the player out of the equation, and treated these as management sim, roster-builder games. It’s been a blast, and has allowed me to focus on the bigger-picture narratives that have always made sports interesting.
In NBA 2K25, I’m playing the “MyEras” game mode, where you can start a franchise at one of a few fixed points in NBA history. I started in 1983, and then simulated one season so I could add a pair of expansion teams (the Honolulu Breeze and the Baltimore Barons) and take control of one of them (the Breeze, naturally). That means my first season managing the Breeze, 1984, was also the season Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon came into the NBA. The two expansion teams split those future superstars (I ended up with Olajuwon), and as I simulated through the years, that became a fun narrative to follow. The Barons and Michael Jordan won two early titles before I responded with two of my own after drafting Patrick Ewing to team up with Olajuwon for an unbelievably dominant front court. I’m now many years later in my sim, and my team is entirely comprised of guys I drafted: Steve Francis, Michael Redd, Shawn Marion, Rashard Lewis, Elton Brand, Cuttino Mobley, Caron Butler, and Andrei Kirilenko. It’s a who’s who of guys I enjoyed watching when I was a kid, and because I picked each of them to be on my team, it was all the more satisfying to watch that group come together to win the Breeze’s third-ever NBA championship in fictional 2000.
Image: Visual Concepts/2K
In Madden, I’ve started an online league with my colleague Austen Goslin, where we each took control of an NFC North team (him the Lions, me the Vikings) and ran a fantasy draft, resulting in brand-new rosters for every team. I ended up getting the second overall pick and landed Lamar Jackson, setting me up to build the rest of my roster entirely around his unique skill set. I ended up winning the Super Bowl in my first season — a game Austen and I had a great time watching on a Discord call together, without the pressure of me having to worry about Madden’s glitchy pass defense.
After having a lot of fun with my sims in these other games, I decided to resurrect my dormant save file in EA Sports College Football 25, hoping that this new approach would motivate me to stay with it. It worked! In previous attempts, I found myself repeatedly getting frustrated with how bad I was at the game’s passing offense system, rage quitting after throwing my third consecutive interception to a teleporting defensive back. By spectating the simulated games and just focusing on my roster building, recruiting, and schemes, that is no longer a concern, and I’ve quickly been able to advance through most of my first season with the school while still maintaining a connection to the players and what they’ve been doing in the games.
It does sometimes feel like I’m wrestling with these games to make them into something they aren’t. Games designed to be management sims allow you to make mid-game adjustments, but these don’t, so it feels more like you’re simulating being a general manager than a coach. In the football games, for some reason, you can’t set both teams to being AI-controlled, so you have to use the game’s “SuperSim” feature and set the speed to slow in order to actually watch the games. And it’s actually really difficult to figure out spectating when both teams are user-controlled (Austen and I had to toggle the “autopilot” setting for one of the teams to make that work in Madden). Plus, the simulations themselves can have their own issues, whether it’s difficulties running the ball or aggravating CPU player decisions. But when I’m not behind the wheel and just observing the simulation, it’s easier for me to dismiss that kind of stuff as “both teams playing under the same (bizarre) conditions,” especially because as a human player recognizing these patterns, you will naturally try to exploit these issues, warping your gameplay decisions around the game’s shortcomings.
The experiment has been extremely worth it, and has reignited my love for AAA sports games. Playing this way makes the sims feel more legitimate (my immersion breaks far too easily otherwise), and like a test of my roster building rather than my ability to navigate EA’s passing offense system, or identify the right gimmicks that will beat the CPU every time. The games can go at your pace, and make for a great second-screen activity. And the much bigger budgets of the AAA sports franchises means more realistic graphics engines, and gameplay that looks like a real television broadcast of the game. All of that means I don’t have to worry about my own inputs or my performance as a player, and can just lean on what made me fall in love with these games in the first place: building my own roster and watching the narratives unfold.
