New Waters for the (virtual) Beautiful Game: How Zealand is changing the face of Football Manager content
Speaking with Football Manager content creator Zealand about his approach to content, his love of American soccer, and his storied journey through sports media
The first thing that hits you about a Zealand stream is the energy. If you join early enough, you are met with some upbeat house music over a simple ‘Starting Soon’ screen. This is followed by a cinematic title sequence which shows Zealand getting ready to stream. Join any later than that, you are met with an energetic Floridian playing Football Manager. This is the Zealand brand.
Football Manager Content Creation 101
So let’s start with the world of Football Manager content before we get into Zealand himself.
Football Manager is a long-running soccer management video game developed by Sports Interactive. The series began as Championship Manager back in 1992, becoming Football Manager in 2004 after a change in publisher from Eidos Interactive to Sega (Sega would later acquire Sports Interactive in 2006).
Football Manager boasts a very healthy content creator community, both within in the game and on external platforms. Overwhelmingly, the content for the game on YouTube is based around ‘save series’, where a creator takes control of a team and take their viewers through the journey of managing the team. These series can run for 100s of episodes with daily uploads.
Doing things different
However, Zealand’s YouTube content isn’t like this. Zealand’s content, on YouTube at the very least, is much more about teaching people how to play the game. Videos break down specific mechanics or delve into common mistakes people make.
Part of this comes from how his channel started:
“Originally, I took over the FMBase [FMBase is a popular Football Manager resource website] YouTube channel and there was basically nothing on it. But the content was being made for that channel at the time were tutorials about the game so I didn’t want to shake up the format or do other things because obviously, it wasn’t my channel.”
But it also comes from his feelings about the saves series format in general:
“It’s just not a form of content I enjoy watching. It just doesn’t hold my interest, and I now I just don’t have the time to dedicate 25 minutes every day to keeping up with a series like that. And this isn’t any sort of commentary on that sort of content, it’s just not something I enjoy watching”
And as Zealand transitioned from the FMBase channel to his own brand, he continued the tutorial-style.
Now sitting on 118K subscribers, Zealand has been credited by some members of the FM community with changing the way people are thinking about the game. While I am far from qualified to given a definitive answer on that line of thinking, Zealand does do the FM YouTube game completely different.
One of the few ‘series’ Zealand does on YouTube is one called Saving Your Saves. A concept that originally began on Twitch and migrated to YouTube, each video in the series features Zealand evaluating viewer-submitted save files on Football Manager and giving them advice to solve their perceived problems or problems that he spots. It’s literally about helping people play Football Manager better.
And as someone who casually (very casually) plays Football Manager, I have found Zealand’s content useful. His concept of ‘wiring the world’ (ensuring that you have an extensive scouting network that covers all the major places that the game consistently generates young talent) is a simple yet game-changing tactic that you can so easily miss.
As his friend and fellow Football Manager YouTuber DoctorBenjy said during an video featuring the two of them, Zealand reinvented Football Manager on YouTube.
Twitch Pioneer
While we will get into Zealand’s Twitch origin story a little later, once again Zealand was doing things a little different on his Twitch channel. This is the only place (aside from his second YouTube channel with archived streams) that you will find recordings of Zealand doing a ‘typical’ save. Streaming a couple days a week for 3-5 hours at a time, Zealand typically guides smaller teams through a Football Manager save. The community best knows him for his BATE save, guiding the Belarusian club to the Champions League final. Currently, he is working his way through the Portuguese football pyramid with Oriental Dragon FC, who currently reside in Portugal’s fourth tier of football.
But Ben! I thought Zealand didn’t like save series??
Well, according to the man himself:
“I love Football Manager. I love playing Football Manager. And I just think that saves work better on Twitch for a number of reasons. People can dip in and out, they can come and go. They don’t have to invest in keeping up with a series. The thing with saves on YouTube is that I just don’t see them as something that can be successful in the long run. If YouTube recommends you episode 105 of someone’s Football Manager series, why are you going to watch that if you aren’t already watching the series? Whereas with my YouTube content, it’s something you can watch on your lunch break. You don’t have to invest in anything bigger than that video to watch my videos”
But as mentioned in the introduction, Zealand streams are a performance more than anything else. You tune in to watch this loud, energetic, smooth-voiced Floridian be excited about soccer. And there’s no better example of this than his ‘Live Sports Save’.
The Live Sports Save and the Rise of Clive
“Football Manager on Twitch…I’m a pioneer of that and I’m very aware of that. I’ve spent a lot of time fumbling around in the dark, I’ve done a lot of things wrong. But the live sports save, I had no idea that was something people would want…but it all started because I was streaming and someone said “hey, isn’t the World Cup happening?” so we started to watch a couple games of the World Cup because I had some Colombians players at my club who were in the national team. And people loved it. So we started doing streams dedicated to just watching these international tournaments. Euros, Asian Cups, African Cup of Nations, Gold Cup…
This new format of stream would lead to the debut of Clive. Clive is Zealand’s English match commentator personality, who is a beautifully executed amalgamation of practically every English soccer commentator ever. It’s utterly ridiculous and undeniably hilarious.
But now I have my segue, let’s talk about who the hell this Zealand guy is, and how he to where he is today.
Zealand Shannon
Zealand Shannon has always been an announcer first and foremost:
“You won’t find it in any official record or anything, but my agent looked into it and we’re pretty sure I’m the youngest person to announce a Minor League Baseball game…but really I started out because when I play things like FIFA, I would commentate the matches out loud”
In 2013, he would win the NASPAA Bob Sheppard Award for Best High School PA Announcer.
He would start at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2014, and threw himself into production-side of college athletics as he pursued a double major of media studies and history.
His resume boasts a lot of experience across a variety of collegiate and pro sports, but safe to safe that the dude is good. He hits you with his engaging, immersive commentary in this deep, smooth voice.
But it would not be until 2018 that he began to do the things his audience now knows him for.
“I hadn’t heard of Twitch honestly. But a buddy of mine wanted to try it so we both started streaming. Real bare bones sort of stuff - no camera, terrible audio quality. But I loved it, my friend stopped after a few streams but I just kept going. This was something I really wanted to do... I went on vacation to New Zealand and I brought my computer set up with me just so I could stream. It didn’t work, hotel wifi and all that, so I now I was stuck having to lug this thing all over the country.
However, Zealand didn’t tell many people about his newfound passion.
“You know how people are. Doesn’t matter how successful you are, or how popular streaming becomes, there’s still this stigma around being a streamer. I was dating someone when I started streaming and I remember her dad was always very…ya know, about the fact that my two career paths were sports broadcasting and streaming.
Zealand would announce to the world that he had become a streamer on June 15th 2020, in a Instagram post published mid-stream.
At the time of writing, Zealand has 57K followers on Twitch. So I’d say it worked out pretty well for him.
Oh, and this past May, he graduated from Syracuse with a Masters in Broadcasting.
The US National Team and women’s soccer
But aside from his commentary and streaming prowess, Zealand loves his National Team:
“I love international football. I will watch every game at the World Cup... I don’t think I’ve ever suffered as a American fan - we’ve had good teams, we’ve had bad teams. But this young talent that is developing at the moment? We as a nation have never seen this. We’ve never had this. You’ve got Gio Reyna, who is the son of two US capped players which is insane, playing first-team football at Dortmund and he’s what? 18? Weston McKennie is playing at Juventus….You have all these young stars playing regular minutes for these top teams and we’ve just never seen this before. I don’t think the world is ready for how good American national teams are going to be in the next few years.”
And while he might not actively follow the NWSL or professional women’s soccer as closely, he watches every World Cup and had some things to say about the perception of women’s soccer.
“Sometimes I post about women’s soccer on Twitter and this gets me into fights with me people. You know the type - women’s soccer sucks, no-one cares about women’s soccer, the US is only good because everyone else is bad. And it’s just…what are you talking about? You clearly know nothing about this.
These women are elite athletes. You watch Megan Rapinoe do her stuff and its amazing. Yeah, it’s different from the men’s game but that’s because there are differences between men and women.
The story that always gets brought up is, FC Dallas’ under-15s team beating the US Women’s National Team and first of all, the under-15s FC Dallas team is like, a real team that trains and practices and whatever. It’s not some random group of kids. [ED: Also worth noting that that specific incident, along with most stories along a similar vein, was a training scrimmage and not in any way a formal 90-minute match.]”
The Hammers
So. Who are the people that tune into watch Zealand? According to publicly available Twitch data, Zealand gets several thousand Twitch viewers per stream. The ones that subscribe to him, i.e. pay money to support him, join a group called the Hammers.
Now it is very easy to say “well of course a Twitch streamer likes the people who give them money” and Twitch wouldn’t exist if not for parasocial relationships. This same easy argument could be made about Little Miss Houndoom and Team Doom, Matea and The Magicals. Basically, it is so easy to claim that Twitch streamers are nice to their communities because it is financially profitable to do so. And hey, that will be the case with some people (which is absolutely ABSOLUTELY fine).
But those aren’t the sort of people I cover on this newsletter.
Case in point, on a Zealand stream a few days ago, he got a resubscribe from someone whose message alongside the rebsubscribe was all about how they were sorry they hadn’t been super active in Zealand’s community Discord as of late because of real life issues.
Zealand waved away the apology and proceeded to the shout out the guy because “the Discord wouldn’t be the same without him”
Zealand cares about the people who show up to his streams. And while he maintains control of the stream
“I’ve always been very clear. This is my stream, this is my save. I’m not going to do something just because chat wants me to. People have said to me in the past that you have to sign an interesting player early in the save to keep people interested and I’m like, no you don’t because the save should be interesting on its own.”
The passion and energy he puts into every minute of every stream. The way he reacts to new subscribers and chat’s comments are the signs of a person who very much enjoys performing for a regular audience.
TLDR
Zealand Shannon began his journey in the sports industry as a broadcaster and commentator, going from minor league baseball to national broadcasts of collegiate sports.
In 2018, he discovered Twitch and began to pioneer the landscape of Football Manager content on the platform. The pinnacle of this was the live sports saves, where Zealand would commentate the matches of the in-game international tournaments. He would bring his honed commentary skills to the format, as well as his character Clive - a persona based on the mannerisms of English football commentators.
YouTube came later but once Zealand arrived on the scene, once again he was a pioneer. While most content creators focused on playing the game, Zealand’s work on the platform is all about explaining the game.
Zealand is an entertainer. His streams are full of energy. But at the end of the day, he is using what he knows to change the way people look at Football Manager.
If you want to check out Zealand for yourself, you can find him on Twitch and YouTube.