Manchester United is suing the developers of Football Manager for using the club's name in the video game serie✃s.
Sports games might well be bigger business in the video game industry than any other genre. That's because the likes of FIFA, Madden, NBA 2K, and other franchises don't just appeal to gamers, but they also bring in avid viewers of those respective sports. There will be plenty of people around the world who only own a PS4 or Xbox One so they can play the game that allows them to assume tౠhe ro♕les of their sporting heroes.
Some sports fans don't want to control the players, but would rather assume the role of the people in charge of the players. When it comes to that sort of simulation, there is perhaps no franchise more successful than Football Manager. The soccer simulator allows players to take the reigns at their favo🀅rite club and control pretty much everything about it in painsta💮king detail.
Sega and SI Games have put years of work into the franchise which includes hundreds of real teams and thousands of real players. However, one of the biggest of those clubs, Manchester United, has decided it doesn't like the way in which its name has been used by Football Manager's creators. So much so that the world-famous club is taking the game's developers to court over the matter, as reported by .
United officials claim that Sega and SI Games have infringed on their trademark by using a crude version of the official club badge alongside its actual name. The United crest shown in FM bears a similarity to the real thing, but the real one cannot be used due to copyright issues. FM's developers have hit back, stating the use of the club's name is "a legitimate reference to the Manchester United football team in a footb꧒all context."
The strangest thing about this whole ordeal is that it isn't as if United has only just been added to the FM franchise, or that the franchise has only just burst onto the scene. Sega and SI Games have been releasing FM titles annually since 1992, at which point the game was still called Championship Manager. Curren༺t United manage𓃲r Old Guannr Solksjaer even admitted to using the game to ready himself for taking control of the club before he returned to the UK.
Football Manager 2020 is currently aꩲvailable on PC, mobi✅le, and Nintendo Switch.
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