Brexit is simulated in Football Manager 17

One of the new features in Football Manager 17 is Brexit, which can make life unbelievably hard if you are unlucky.

Deciding to take the reigns of a British club opens you up to the possibility of having to deal with Brexit. There will be three types of Brexit that can pop up in your game, each of which has its own type of issues.

A soft Brexit won’t have all that much of an impact, as workers will still be allowed free movement and won’t need to apply for new work permits. The second option is somewhat of a middle ground, where players will need to apply for work permits, but will be classed as entertainers, making the process almost trivial.

However a hard Brexit is the worst case scenario, this would mean that players from the EU are treated the same as non EU players. Players would only be allowed in if they meet the requirements of the points system, which could see some players fail to make the move to the Premier League.

If we already had these rules in place, players such as N’Golo Kante and Dimitri Payet would not have been able to gain work permits to move to the Premier League,” said Miles Jacobson, studio director at Sports Interactive, when speaking to the Telegraph. That’s two of last season’s three best players.”

Football Manager has always prided itself on being a realistic simulation, so the inclusion of Brexit is no surprise. However we still don’t really know what will happen when, or if, we leave the EU so the Sports Interactive team had no choice but to add in a multitude of possible outcomes.

The first option for the game was to have just one scenario and that would be it, Brexit done, but it’s not possible to come out with one outcome and it won’t be until all the negotiations are done,” said Jacobson. As a result we’ve decided to go down another route, and have included every possible outcome in the game, using artificial intelligence and percentage chances to make every game different.”