Can we win the league?

It starts, as these things do, in a bedroom in the early nineties, with three mates and one PC.

John Rothwell, Matti Rozzarotti and Rixius Clayderfox had found the football management game everyone was playing that season. Between them they had Man City, Sheffield Wednesday and Norwich, and one question that lasted the whole winter: can we win the league?

It didn't look like much. Blue panels, green buttons, yellow writing, a list of names and numbers. The match was a line of commentary at a time and a score that ticked over. But it was the best football game any of them had played, because the football happened in your head. You picked the eleven, you pressed Continue, and the three of you crowded round the screen to see whether your centre-half had held out on a wet Tuesday at Oldham. You took turns at the keyboard. You argued about who was hogging the good players. You stayed up far too late.

Thirty-odd years later

The games grew up. They got 3D pitches, hundreds of thousands of players, and more screens than anyone could read in a lifetime. They got very good. They also lost something the three of them still talked about: the feel of that first season, the speed of it, the sense that the whole game fitted on one desk.

So John set out to build the game they remembered. He's "Ron" to his mates, and the name is a nod to the Fast Show's Ron Manager, of jumpers for goalposts fame. Hence Ron Manager.

The idea was simple to say and hard to do: the old game on the outside, the depth of the later ones underneath. The 1993-94 season with all 92 league clubs, the cups, the play-offs and Europe. The week-by-week rhythm and the Continue button. And under the bonnet, the things the old game only hinted at: players with real strengths and weaknesses, tactics that suit some squads and not others, an assistant who tells you what he sees (as well as he is able), a board that loses patience, chairmen with deep pockets or none, young players who come good or don't.

You can play it the old way and do fine. The depth is there for the extra few per cent, and for the arguments afterwards.

Built in a few weeks

Ron Manager was built in a few weeks in the autumn of 2026. John had the memories, the football knowledge and very firm opinions. His coding partner was Claude, an AI made by Anthropic, which wrote most of the code to John's designs, ran thousands of test seasons to check the goals, the title races and the money made sense, and was told in no uncertain terms when it got the football wrong.

Most of the work isn't the look. It's the bit you don't see: making a season that feels like a real one. Enough goals but not too many. A title race that isn't over by Christmas. A board that sacks managers about as often as boards did in 1993. Promoted sides who struggle, and the odd one who doesn't.

Kick-off

On 7 November 2026 the three of them sat down to a season together again, for the first time in a very long time. Not round one PC this time but over the internet, each in his own house, the game running on John's PC and the others joining from their browsers. Same question as before: can we win the league?

It isn't finished. There are bugs, and there will be more. The news page says what's changed and what's coming. But the three of them are playing it again, and that was the point.