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Welcome to 2Game's December Creator Spotlight: a special feature-length article where we talk with some of our valued community members and content creators. Last month, we had a bit of an anime-themed approach to the matter at hand with Resting Peach Face, but this time, we're going in a wholly different direction. Indeed, we've got a special interview with a legend of the Football Manager community: Lollujo!
Lollujo, or Kevin Chapman, as some of you may know him, is a mainstay in many Football Manager fans' YouTube histories. Featuring a huge array of the assorted franchise and football-themed content, Lollujo has made a name for himself by providing factual and informative content for virtually every profile of FM gamer. From broad overviews all the way to nitty-gritty strategizing, Lollujo's got you covered.
Since Football Manager content is Lollujo's part-and-parcel, though, we decided to take this interview in a slightly different direction. Not only is this your chance to learn about Kevin Chapman himself and how he made YouTube a viable career choice, but we also have a special giveaway featured at the end of the article. So, let's get to it!
Introducing Lollujo: A Football Manager Extraordinaire
So, who is Lollujo? What makes him interesting? How did he become the pillar of the Football Manager community that he is today? Well, this interview ought to help explain all the important bits!
As Lollujo himself puts it, "I play Football Manager in a cupboard and call it a job!" Jokes aside, he quickly summarized his experience with the franchise and content creation in general, as he's been providing coverage of Football Manager almost exclusively for the past 7 years! An impressive tenure, especially considering how specific and particular his content can sometimes get. "Before I started I didn’t really know what content creation was, had never heard of Twitch, and only went on YouTube for DIY or cooking tutorials," he continued. "I had no idea people were watching other people play games!"
However, it's worth pointing out that Kevin already had plenty of experience with FM at that point in time. "[at that point in time, Kevin had already] been playing Football Manager for over 25 years, pretty much every day, and had been hosting a gaming podcast for around 3 years at that point, and I started to become more aware of gaming content, and my partner convinced me to give it a try."
"[Football Manager is] the best job I’ve ever had." - Lollujo
Naturally, Kevin had his reservations about the whole shindig: "I didn’t believe anybody would want to watch someone play FM, I assumed you had to be playing Minecraft or FIFA to get noticed, but I searched for it on YouTube and found a few people doing it, nobody with a particularly big audience, but they seemed to be having fun so I thought I’d give it a go."
From that point on, Kevin released a new Football Manager video almost every single day. In fact, it's been five years since he last had to work a day job! It may be worth pointing out that Lollujo's uniquely engaging style of presentation may be owed to his formal education as a teacher. Handy stuff!
On Streaming, Growing Older, and Building Communities
"I’m 40 years old now," Kevin told us while discussing the opportunities presented by having a career in content creation. "It’s difficult to plan for the future as nobody has ever really done gaming content into their 40s or 50s before," he explained. "I’d like to think being in a niche like FM that has an older demographic that I’ll be able to carry on doing this for a living for the rest of my working life - it’s certainly the best job I’ve ever had, but even if one day I have to go and get a real job again, I don’t see myself ever stepping away from FM content completely."
For Lollujo, Football Manager has defined much of his life, and there are very few things that could replace the series for him. Doubly so, now that he's invested so much into establishing a burgeoning community of FM fans much like himself. "There’s no way I’m stopping now," he concluded.
What's particularly impressive about Kevin's experience with Football Manager is how long he's stuck it out: "I’ve been playing the FM series since Championship Manager 2, and before that the likes of Premier Manager on the Mega Drive and Kenny Dalglish Soccer Manager on the Spectrum in the late 80s sat with my dad!"
For our younger readers, it may be important to underline the fact that Championship Manager 2 launched on PC back in 1995, which ought to help contextualize just how valuable Kevin's tenure actually is. To successfully entertain such an experienced audience for such a long period of time is a compliment to Sports Interactive.
Other Gaming-Related Endeavors
"I’ve also played FIFA since the original on the Mega Drive, but I never got good at that so wasn’t able to translate that into content," Kevin continued, explaining what it is that keeps his content firmly rooted in one franchise only. At the same time, it's immediately worth pointing out that Lollujo is about as far from a one-trick pony as it gets.
"I love gaming in general - I’ve hosted the most successful independent gaming podcast in UK iTunes history, The Mature Gamer Podcast, for over 10 years, and love all kinds of games - in particular, handheld stuff from Nintendo or more recently the Steam Deck," he told us. "I love Pokemon and Persona, I’m a massive fan of The Elder Scrolls games, play Civilization almost as much as FM and go through spells where I get completely obsessed with Minecraft, but none of them have translated into content as well as FM has for me."
It's not all milk and honey, though: "Despite loving gaming, I’ve never been great at it - I’m colour blind, which makes the likes of COD impossible as it’s all greens and browns and all blurs together, and because I play such a range of games I never got really good at any particular genre, which you need to be able to produce content consistently."
No Fortnite or FIFA, But No Bother!
"I’ve played [Football Manager] for long enough to get good at it, which definitely helps, but the game itself lends itself brilliantly to my style of content, as at any moment I can just stop and chat to the camera and not have to worry about someone shooting me or scoring against me, and it’s a great blank canvas to build stories with, which is my great strength as a content creator," explained Kevin.
"I don’t do the crazy screaming, over-excited style that suits the likes of Fortnite or FIFA, but I can make you love a non-league football team you’d never heard of before, and celebrate when an imaginary player scores the winner in a Champions League like it was your own team!"
Did Kevin's local teaching community lose a valuable member some five years ago? We reckon so! It's particularly curious, though, that even though Lollujo is a football fan, Football Manager specifically still comes ahead of the sport itself. Namely, he told us that he much prefers Football Manager to real-world football nowadays, and offered some fascinating insight that's bound to resonate with other franchise fans: "It’s neither the strategy or the sport - it’s the stories that come out of a good FM save," he explained.
"I still remember a newgen called Ben Smythe who played for my Peterborough team in League 2 when I got the job on something like FM09 - he’d just come through the youth team and broke into the first team with me as manager, and he was our captain 10+ seasons later when that same team won the Champions League."
Kevin can't get enough of it, he admitted.
The Interrelationship of Sports Interactive and Its Player Base
Being a pivotal part of the FM community for such a long period of time means Lollujo's had his finger on its pulse all along. When talking about this aspect of the franchise, he let us in on something interesting: "The great thing about the FM community is that it hasn’t been cultivated by Sports Interactive at all, it’s grown completely independently of them, which has allowed us to have a much stronger voice than if it was something SI had any control over."
Building and cultivating communities is a crucial aspect of the modern gaming landscape. Many developers and publishers would give anything to be able to harness such a niche, yet incredibly loyal community as what Sports Interactive has enjoyed over the years. Yet, Lollujo believes the relationship between SI and its player base is far more organic than you'd suspect. He offered a very specific, very illustrative example of what he means: "It’s a little different in our little corner of the internet - 4 of the biggest content creators got together and we produced an hour-long video giving our honest thoughts on the game and some of its shortcomings, and now just last week SI have released the biggest non-transfer window patch I’ve ever seen them release that addressed a lot of the issues we raised in that video (that was seen by nearly 150,000 people)."
"The great thing about the FM community is that it hasn't been cultivated by Sports Interactive at all, it's grown completely independently of them." - Lollujo
Few other gaming communities are quite as dedicated to their franchise as what's shown with Football Manager. It's a push and a pull, of course, but Lollujo believes that the role that he and other FM content creators play is immensely useful for Sports Interactive and the genre at large.
"When I started making FM content, nobody had more than 5000 subscribers and the most popular videos would get maybe 2000 views. The idea of anybody doing it for a living, or even making any money at all doing it, wasn’t even considered, so that led to content only being created by people who were passionate about and loved the game - we’d be making content even if nobody was watching and we couldn’t make any money doing it, and we know that’s true because we all did," he said.
"So even though we’ve now grown to the point where there are probably 10 or more people now creating FM content as their full-time jobs, that passion, and love of the game is still there. We’re very lucky to be able to do this and make good money doing it, but that’s not why we do it - it’s just been a happy by-product of passionate people making content about a game they love - that kind of content resonates with people and grows the entire genre."
On Changes and Growing the Franchise into Something New
Being a hugely influential and knowledgeable content creator, we couldn't help but talk with Lollujo about what he thinks should change in Football Manager in the future. Naturally, he had valuable feedback to share: "I’d love for them to bring the game up to date graphically. I’m not looking for FIFA-level graphics, but at the same time the 3D match engine doesn’t look any better now than it did in FM09, and people are really starting to lose patience with that now, so I think a major graphical overhaul is long overdue."
According to Kevin Chapman, even though the existing player base is bound to continue playing Football Manager no matter what it looks like, there's a growing need for Sports Interactive to appeal to a younger audience, too. People are used to PS5 and, if we're being cynical about it, even iPhone-level graphics and FM is simply falling behind in this regard. Kevin Chapman drew a curious comparison, too: "I’d be in support of them going back to the naming conventions they used on the Championship Manager series, and that is still used by the likes of Civilization, where you release a “new game” every 3-4 years that include a new match/graphics engine every time, a new user interface, new gameplay mechanics - every main game feels very different from the previous one."
Afterward, said Kevin Chapman, SI could release yearly updates and/or expansion packs that would update the game's content for a new season, as well as to introduce new quality-of-life updates and beyond. "That way it manages expectations of players better - they know they’re only getting the massive changes every 3-4 years so expectations are lower for years like FM23 has been where less changes, but it also applies pressure back to SI to make sure they deliver with the main releases when they come around to make sure the game moves forward at a faster pace than it has for the last 10 years," he explained.
Competition? What Competition?
When we asked Kevin Chapman if he'd ever pivot to a different game franchise, he was adamant: "I wouldn’t." His reasoning is simple, too: he's practically grown up with Football Manager in this or that form.
"I’ve made videos and streams on FIFA, Minecraft, Pokemon, and loads more games over the years and they just don’t suit my content style as well," he told us. "They all attract a younger audience that I don’t appeal to, and I just end up making poorer quality content that doesn’t really get views. So I’m an FM content lifer!"
Most notably, there's hardly any proper competitor on the market, which is owned in no small part thanks to Sports Interactive's long and storied production process. They've been around for such a long time that stagnation was practically unavoidable: "I’d love to see a competitor come along and release a viable alternative. Competition is good in any industry and leads to new levels of creativity and advancement. If the team that made F1 Manager want to make a football management game I’d happily give them some pointers on where to start! But even if that did happen, I don’t see myself ever stopping playing Football Manager. I’ve spent more than half my life playing it, and I still look forward to playing it every day!"
Stories Matter the Most!
To wrap things up on a high note, we wanted to hear what Lollujo thinks about his own content, and why he's grown to be such an important pillar of the community over the years. His answer wasn't surprising, but it was very emblematic of what makes Football Manager such a hugely important part of our interviewee's life: "The stories! My main series each year Non-League to Legend is the most viewed Football Manager series of all time and is all about the story. We go full roleplay mode, I only make decisions in game that I’d make in real life, which extends as far as starting with a non-league club close to my house so it’s a comfortable commute and building a career from there."
The way Kevin Chapman explained it, there's nothing else quite like it: "There are sackings, championships, house hunting, matchday vlogs, interaction with the clubs I manage in real life and channel legends born in the series every year - it’s a must watch, and it’s still early in the series for FM23 because the game only came out last month, so it’s easy to get caught up on this year’s version where we’ve started with Peterborough Sports, a semi-professional team who 5 years ago where basically a Sunday league side who are now playable in FM for the first time!"
So, what else is there to add? You, too, can become a small but important part of these discussions if you follow Lollujo and join his community over at Discord. No matter how you feel about the sport itself, there's an argument to be made here that Football Manager, specifically, and what came of it, is nothing short of monumental.
Lollujo and Football Manager Content
If you'd like to familiarize yourself with Lollujo's content, you've got plenty of stuff to choose from! Expect plenty of Let's Play and Road to Glory videos, as well as dedicated strategizing and tutorials for those who need them. Here are your options:
And, for those who'd perhaps like to get in touch with him, we recommend checking out the man's own Discord channel for stellar Football Manager discussions and more. After all, there's a good reason why the Football Manager community favors Kevin's content over almost anything else. Notably, Lollujo is particularly known for his penchant for experimentation in Football Manager, which makes for some truly fascinating videos if you're a football fan.
2Game December Creator Spotlight, Featuring Lollujo
Football Manager 2023 Giveaway - Join Today!
To end things on a particularly high note, 2Game and Lollujo have joined forces to give out two copies of Football Manager 2023 to the community. Our collaboration has a long and storied history, and this is only bound to continue for the foreseeable future. For the time being, though, let us take a minute of your time. Really, though, that's about as long as it takes to join the giveaway in the first place! If you've been on the fence about the game or simply couldn't spare the money to buy a copy, now's the time to enter the raffle.
Join 2Game and Lollujo's Football Manager 2023 giveaway on PC today!
And, of course, if your gaming tastes go beyond Football Manager, why not scroll through some of our other giveaway opportunities, too? At the time of publishing this article, 2Game is hosting several notable giveaways, one of which includes a whopping 12 games coming out over the course of 2023! That's right - we're quite giving when it comes to rewarding our community members! There's more to come, too, so stay tuned.
So, don't dawdle - join up and win a prize or two! And, while you're waiting, why not check out some of Lollujo's own content as well? Have fun!
Get in the Game ! 
