The dopamine of FIFA 20 administration | Jack Marshall's column

You’ve taken a side from Spain’s second tier and established them in La Liga, adding to the initially-sparse playing roster year by year. You push for European football, go far in the Europa League, and then steal a Champions League spot on the last day of the season.

Soon, the team is dominated by a coterie of superstars purchased from the likes of Bayern Munich, Manchester City, and Paris Saint-Germain. You have a 26-year-old goalkeeper who has been at the club since he was 18 and who is now one of the world’s best. You’re regularly splashing out for £100m transfers and getting similar offers for your own stars.

This is life at the top of the game. This is life in FIFA 20 manager mode.

One of the world’s most popular video games, FIFA allows you to take over a club as a novice manager. Given a transfer budget and responsibilities like bringing through youth players or selling more shirts by playing an attractive brand of football, it’s a ludicrously immersive experience. And in lockdown, it’s come back in a big way for yours truly.

With sports cancelled until financial demand saw most of them churn back into crowdless life, the chance to trick the brain with a virtual world of familiar sights and sounds, of goals and competition was always going to hold a particular appeal. Plus, fretting over selling that right-back and replacing him with another available on the cheap was a handy way to pass the time.

Each version of FIFA these days is more ornate than the last. It’s genuinely got to the point where the playing of the football matches has evolved to be arguably the least interesting part of being a manager on the game. Balancing budgets and fiddling with the figures to ensure you can afford Erling Braut Haaland is exhilarating. The administration is where the dopamine is at.

Game developers know this and so, over the past 10 years or so, there has been a boom in games which are all about escapism. There are truck driving games which involve hauling cargo across virtual continents. People could do that as an actual job, but instead there’s a game for it. And it’s the same principle which makes worrying whether to sell an aging Josip Ilicic and bring in Mason Greenwood so brilliant.

It’s all about the make-believe, after all. And today’s make-believe machines are world-class.