Football Manager × Rising Ballers
Football Manager, 2025
Working with Rising Ballers to make Football Manager part of how its community discovers and debates players.
MY ROLE
Led the partnership strategy and rollout, shaping an eight-week series across Rising Ballers’ channels.
CONTEXT
Football Manager has long influenced how football fans talk about young players: wonderkids, potential, attributes and ‘who’s next’. Those same debates were already happening across channels like Rising Ballers, but FM itself wasn’t really part of them.
Rising Ballers sits at the centre of that culture, spotting young talent early and building narratives around them. That shared focus on discovering wonderkids made Rising Ballers a natural fit for FM.
STRATEGY
FM was brought into the Rising Ballers world in a way that felt native to it.
We built around Rising Ballers’ existing formats and how its community already interacted with the channel. That meant avoiding standalone branded posts and working FM’s core ideas into formats already established on the channel.
Alexa Play, Wonderkids
Debate-led series across eight leagues, highlighting emerging talent across Rising Ballers’ network.
Attributes - Higher or Lower?
Stadium vox pops asking fans to guess Football Manager player attributes
Decisions - You, The Manager
Polls putting fans in the managers’ seat and asking them to make the big decisions
These formats ran across an eight-week takeover, allowing ideas, players and debates to build over time.
WHAT CHANGED
Football Manager's biggest World Cup campaign in series history.
The FIFA licence became a tournament-long content platform, keeping Football Manager present across creator content, partner channels and UGC throughout the summer.
8.9M
impressions
302,000
engagements
LONGEST-RUNNING
FM content partnership to date
Images: Rising Ballers