‘Football Manager’ Gets Simmed for 1,000 Years; Everton and Villa Fans, Look Away Now

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A chap—well, we're assuming it's a chap—posting on Reddit under the user name Lorf_Yizmo has left a game of Football Manager 2015 running for 58 days, the computer simulating every result, resulting in 1,000 years of stats and facts for people who obsess over this sort of stuff. Which might well be you, if you're reading this.

In the Reddit post "THE MILLENIAL SIM IS HERE. 1000 years of simming the English Football Pyramid," which you'll find here, Lorf summarizes each century, outlining the best performers—and it's far from all Chelsea and (Manchester) City. Derby County won the Premier League for the first time in 2021, before Stoke enjoyed a period of dominance and both Burnley and Blackburn were crowned champions before 2100.

Southend became a force to be reckoned with in the 2300s, and Bromley were a footballing superpower by the beginning of the year 3000. By which time, if the melodic scriptures of Busted are to be believed, they were playing in specialist footballing domes built several hundred feet underwater. Don't sweat about your great-great-great granddaughter, please. She's pretty fine.

Lorf's put together a massive spreadsheet that ranks every football team in England based on their results over the 1,000 years—six points for a Champions League title, five for a Premier League first-place finish or FA Cup win, down to a single point for being the losing finalist in the League Cup. You can look at it here. If you're a fan of Burnley, Barnsley, or Sheffield United, no doubt you're feeling pretty smug right now.

The money of Manchester City keeps them in the top ten for the next 1,000 years, while Bromley rank higher at 22 than Newcastle (41), (my team of) Southampton (43), and Chelsea. The so-called Pride of London can only place at 48, with a single Premier League win and no triumphant finishes in the Champions League.

It's worse news for fans of Aston Villa and Everton, though. Both might be Premier League old-boys right now, albeit rarely challenging for the top positions, but Lorf's simulated millennium awards both teams zero league titles, although Villa do claim a solitary FA Cup.

The most successful club across the 1,000 years was Sheffield United, and the most consistent, registering 982 seasons in the top flight, was Burnley. At no point across the 1,000 years was Dimitar Berbatov's Premier League record of five goals in a single match, which he set in 2010, beaten, and neither was the biggest top-division victory, which remained Manchester United's 9-0 win against Ipswich in 1995. Check all the Premier League stats here. In the Champions League, Real Madrid won the most titles with 108, and Slovakian midfielder Filip Lesniak (he exists) scored the fastest-ever goal in the competition, for Celtic, in November 2017. Nine seconds, bang, nothing but net. Maybe go put some money on that, now.

If you want to swim around in all of this entirely simulated statistical goodness, once again, here's the Reddit thread in question. Enjoy.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.