Football Manager player becomes football manager

A 21-year-old will take over as the new manager of an Azerbaijani football team because of his Football Manager credentials.

With a Business Management degree from Boston University, Azerbaijan-born student Vugar Huseynzade was hired by his country’s premier league team FK Baku as an assistant in February, but has now been fast-tracked to management partly due to his skill and Football Manager track-record.

“I’ve always wanted to work in football and have played Football Manager since 2002,” he told Scandinavian newspaper Aftonbladet.

This isn’t the first time a young hopeful has attempted to use Football Manager as a legitimate qualification. A 25-year-old applied for the boss’s job at Middlesbrough back in 2006, although that application.

Admittedly Huseynzade also has experience working for a brief period at a sports agency in the US, so it’s perhaps not entirely video game-based. It’s still a pretty cool story though.

It also helps that FK Baku has been without a manager for the last two years, as former manager Kamran Ismayilov resigned from the role and was never replaced.

It has even been reported by various news organisations that the young Azerbaijani man managed to beat some serious competition for the role, including Marseille and France legend Jean-Pierre Papin.

And the moral of the story is? If you dedicate your life to playing far too much video games, good things will happen to you. I’ve been living by that motto for years, but here is proof.