I have played a lot of computer games over my 50 years of life, and the ones I have enjoyed most have been games that you can only play on a computer, because under the hood they are actually structured like board games but there are too many dice rolls or card shuffles for it to be played in real life without it taking weeks to play out. The Civilization series is the pinnacle of this model, but there are many others, including Blood Bowl which started as a board game but is probably more popular now as a Java app on FUMBBL and then a video game.
I have also grown to enjoy in recent years the hero collector genre, started by Chinese games Summoners War and Heroes Charge but with many followers, including in the West where it is now the model for Star Trek Timelines, AFK Arena and RAID: Shadow Legends and many others.
I have played the same sports video games as every other fan, but they have always struck me as too wedded to the concept of realism. Blood Bowl showed that you could have some fun confecting your own mythos for a sport, melding two seemingly incompatible but secretly analogous genres together to make something new and interesting. Mobile RPGs also feature indestructible heroes whose deaths are little impediment to advancement, magically exhumed after each battle to trudge on to the next checkpoint and open the latest gleaming chest of murderous trinkets. Realism is boring, we’re playing a game here!
Mr Football is an attempt to smoosh all of those influences into one game: a heroic card collector game but for sports, a squad-based RPG with footy players instead of paladins and mages, a football management simulation but in an alternate universe where there is no single national league.
To quote from the Influences page of the Rulebook:
The primary source was Star Trek Timelines, as many screens mirror its design as well as player levelling and the challenge system. STT itself is built on the hero collection game template started by Heroes Charge, Summoners War and similar Chinese card-based RPGs.
A lot of the original design of Mr Football came from Blood Bowl, another attempt to turn the chaos of team contact sport into a board game using six-sided dice… as well as creating an alternate history. Its seasonal campaign design teaches a lot about how to develop a sustainable player development system, and the fan site FUMBBL was also an influence with its league design.The concept of seasons where player cards and soft currencies are wiped is also shared by FIFA Mobile, and though it was not an inspiration it did show that you can do that while still keeping coaches interested between seasons.
Finally, the inspiration originally came from Hounded 2, a greyhound management simulation developed for the Commodore 64 by South Australian accountant Kelvin King in 1985. What a legend! The game was written in BASIC, and Kelvin left messages in the code for hackers to find detailing how he created it.