NOV. 21, 2013 • It took six months after the PC release of Football Manager 2013 last November before a cracked version began circulating on the Internet and soon more than 10 million unique free downloads of the sports game were tallied.  Nothing extraordinary there except perhaps that it took so long before such an important soccer title was made available for illegal downloads. Yet what is intriguing is where the illicit copy was most downloaded. What is intriguing is that developer Sports Interactive was able to track the pirated version of Football Manager 2013 when it went online and provided the IP of the computer the game was installed upon, as well as interactive access to usage data.  By far the most illegal downloads happened in China at close to 3.2 million. The next largest download market was Turkey at 1 million. Other notables included Portugal at No. 3 (782,000), Italy at No. 4 (547,000), South Korea at No. 5 (385,000) and Brazil trailing at No. 7 (354,000). While this installment of the Sega published franchise has sold the most units in the series, further investigation of the IP addresses by Sports Interactive found that only 1.8 million of those who illegally downloaded the game played it five times or more.

Impact: Futbol is truly a world sport, which makes tracking the pirated version of Football Manager 2013 a valid test subject for peeking in on who is doing the pirating. In that context, China’s overwhelming lead makes perfect sense. But for countries such as Russia not to even show up in the top ten seems odd. Another valid context would be to look at countries with robust broadband penetration and a major interest in futbol. That begs the question of why countries such as Argentina, France, Mexico and Spain are not on the list when countries like Serbia and Thailand are ranked. In addition, 2014 World Cup host Brazil seems under-represented on the list at No. 7. Another contributing factor is whether people in these unranked markets ever became aware of the cracked code. Then again, there is always the possibility that after six months those who wanted to play Football Manager 2013 already had done so. Still, with such excellent data, we are left scratching our heads at what markets made the ranking, and which did not.