​FMDB Pro allows pro clubs to search for new wonderkidsGetty ImagesFor years, it’s been football’s worst-kept secret: professional clubs quietly mining the Football Manager database to help them unearth soccer’s wonderkids. Now it’s a secret no more, with the game’s makers turning that very database into a professional recruitment tool. FMDB Pro contains 760,000 profiles of players (male and female) and staff from around the world, all researched by the same team of 1,600 evaluators that provide the data for the long-running video game. Sports Interactive, the game’s makers, claim it’s “the biggest database in the world” for this kind of football data, and it’s already being used by more than 40 clubs to help with their real-world recruitment. It’s quite the transformation for a game that started life more than 30 years ago, coded by two teenage brothers in their bedroom. The Football Manager DatabasePlayers can be shortlisted on a variety of criteria Sports InteractiveAnyone who’s played Football Manager recently will appreciate the sheer depth of the game’s database. Hundreds of thousands of players with ratings for dozens of individual physical and mental attributes, such as finishing, passing, aggression, leadership and pace. Not to mention full career histories and other personal stats, such as height and weight. The problem with the Football Manager database from a professional scouting perspective, however, is that its out-of-date the moment its published. The game does two major database updates every year, following the closure of the transfer windows in Europe. It also has limited depth: the constraints of making a game playable mean it’s impractical to load more than a fraction of the total database at any one time.FMDB Pro overcomes both those issues. The database receives up to 50,000 changes every day, with player stats updated every Monday after a weekend’s round of games. In terms of depth, it goes right down to the seventh semi-professional tier of Spanish football, to give one example, much deeper than players can start from in the game. “That’s one of the key differentiations between us and the game,” said Dave Whitby, senior product owner at Sports Interactive. “We go much deeper in terms of the number of competitions that we cover, the number of players that we cover.”FMDB Pro lets clubs refine the search for players and staff using all manner of criteria, not least their expected transfer fee and wage demands. Searches can be based on physical criteria too, so if clubs are looking for a fast, left-footed winger they can search specifically for that type of player. “There’s nearly 250 data points on a player, and each one of those can be fine-tuned with a search range or a specific number, and you can just keep building and building and building on these,” said Whitby.The FMDB Pro database also has a number of preset searches, including “wonderkids”, a nod to one of the game’