Dear Football Manager, thank you for teaching a generation how to build a squad.
In March 2024, the technical director of a club in Eliteserien told me something I still think about.
"Football Manager is still state-of-the-art for running a club."
He was not joking, and he had a point. In the game, contracts, transfer targets, the academy and squad plans live in one place. Clubs already use digital platforms for most of their work, but most of the clubs I met had nothing like it for squad management.
Nice and easy, but not the real world
In Football Manager, a player costs one number. Bukayo Saka earns £250K a week, and that is it.
The budget is just as simple. A slider sits between wages and transfers. One click on "Got it", and the board agrees.
For a game, that is exactly right. It keeps things fast and fun. But it does not capture the complexity real clubs deal with every day, and in 2024 no other platform did either. A platform that covers 90% of what a club needs is not good enough. Putting a system like that in place generally creates more manual work, because the club still has to double-check the figures.
Club professionals don't get a magical slider
In a real club, squad costs are spread across many elements: salary, benefits, loyalty bonuses, conditional bonuses, agent fees and buying fees.
They sit in different contracts, and they are paid at different times. Most clubs I talk to still put this together by hand, often the night before a board meeting.
The gap is bigger than most people think. In our demo data, Patrick Berg has a salary of 2.6M NOK. With bonuses and the amortized transfer fee, his real cost this season is 17.2M NOK.
So we built Fokus Finance
After hearing the same frustration from several executives, we set out to solve one of the most important problems clubs face. At first we only helped track bonuses on transfer agreements. A year ago we launched Fokus Finance, a complete overview of the cash flow and costs of every player, agent and club contract. All of that information sits in one place, and it stays up to date.
One of the most time-consuming tasks is entering the right numbers and tracking dynamic bonuses every week. So we made that step automatic.
The club uploads the player, agent and transfer contracts. Our AI reads them and maps every expense and cost onto one timeline.
For Berg, the 37.5M transfer fee is spread over his 61-month contract, about 7.4M a year. Salary, bonuses and taxes follow the contract, year by year. Conditional bonuses are included as they are triggered.
Over the full contract, he costs 82.1M.
The whole squad, instantly
The same logic runs across the whole squad. Every bonus is tracked live from match data and the club's own projections.
In our demo squad, salaries add up to 33.4M. The real cost in 2026 is 95.4M. Salaries are only a third of the real cost.
Then plan the next window
With every cost in place, a club can finally plan ahead. Keep the player or sell him, promote a youth player or extend a veteran. The club can build several scenarios and compare what each plan costs, and what each plan does to the squad, year by year.
Every move now shows up in the same view. A club can sign, extend or sell, and see the implications straight away.
Thank you, Football Manager, for educating a generation. And finally, clubs get the experience they need.
All Fokus numbers and screenshots use demo data in NOK with fictional numbers.
