Since our scouting network is the biggest in the world, our data is used by a host of world famous premiership clubs. Not only that, but leading journalists employ expert FM players to simulate upcoming and past real matches to predict or alter the outcome.

Sky is the undisputed home of football (soccer) coverage in the UK and is by far the most trusted and most visited site for football fans with over 3.6m unique visitors a month. What if we helped them improve their punditry even more, by giving them access to our database for them to use on TV?

Not only would this make their commentary more robust, but it would simultaneously educate Sky’s audience about how much you can trust the FM database and how close to real life our game is.

Shown on TV channel Sky Sports News HQ within a new segment called the ‘Transfer Zone’, the content ranged from presenters judging individual player stats, to former pros comparing current players with rumoured replacements.

As well as allowing us to illustrate the level of detail in FM via the presenters and engaging visuals created by Sky, our involvement also allowed them to use real data, providing context to transfer rumours with accurate figures, rather than relying heavily on human opinion. ‘Data source: Football Manager’ was up on screen whenever our data was being used and the placement ranged from 30” to 3 minutes in length, across all times of the day, every weekday in August 2015 – with over 79 mentions in total.

Sky included added value tweets and Facebook posts from their Sky Sports and Sky Sports News HQ accounts, to further increase the coverage of their use of FM data. Each would focus on a specific story or transfer question which our data was providing context for. Two of the tweets gained over 525,000 impressions, with 60,000 engagements apiece.

A key KPI of FM campaigns is sales and FM16 sold 110,000 digital and physical units in its first week in the UK alone. The game would have been No.3 in the Chart-Track All Formats charts had digital sales been included, which is incredible for a PC-only title. Best of all, 2015 saw the highest day one global sales in FM history!

This campaign required no creative, purely the FM name, logo and the data itself, proving you don’t always need a flashy execution when the environment is perfect.