Sports Interactive is to release a new Football Manager title that lets gamers do battle with other players online. Football Manager Live will hit the market in March next year, and will allow up to 1,000 managers to play each other in a single ‘game world’.

The title has been dubbed as a ‘cross between Football Manager, a fantasy sports league and an auction room’ by the London-based developer. It will be published by Sega and will run on a subscription system similar to that seen in World Of Warcraft.

Gamers will create their own team name and sign a squad of real life players, restricted by a wage budget. They can then ‘bid’ for new players from opposition managers throughout the season, in a system similar to that used by auction sites such as eBay. Players can also chat via a messenger system.

“Football Manager Live should attract a more mainstream audience than we’ve seen before – the kind of people who play Fantasy Football in national newspapers,” Sports Interactive MD Miles Jacobson told MCV.

“Community is a core to FML. People will become friends or have an arch nemesis – it’s vital to the replayability. Football Manager is the most popular cult product I can think of. FML is an extension of that, whilst being able to appeal to those people that we aren’t currently entertaining.”