A dedicated football fan (the soccer sort) has used Football Manager 2015 to simulate 1000 years of Premier League play to determine the greatest team of all time. It took 58 days for the simulation to complete, according to Redditor Lorf_Yimzo, who posted his results in a spreadsheet listing each club's first, second, and third-place finishes in the English Premier League, as well as the European League and Champions League. Points were awarded based on each team's result, and he also documented how many seasons each club played in the Premier Division.

The first century of the simulation contained a couple of surprises, Yimzo said (and I'll have to take his word for it), as Derby won the Premier League in 2021 and Stoke emerged as a dominant force, a position it held well into the 2100s, when Burnley stepped up and wrestled away the crown. After that, Sheffield United, Southend, Sunderland, and several others all had a turn in the spotlight, until the simulation ended in 3015, in "a struggle between Brentford, Ipswich, and Nottingham Forest, with the very last title ever going to Hull City."

The most successful club of the next millennium was ultimately determined to be Sheffield United, just ahead of runner-up Burnley. The most consistent club, with 982 Premier League seasons played, was Burnley, followed by Arsenal, with 905 seasons. (Presumably with Cyber Wenger 3.0 in charge, says Arsenal-loving editor-in-chief Tim Clark.) 

The team with the best Premier League season of the next 1000 years was (will be?) Sheffield United, which managed 101 points in the 2374/75 season. 300 years later, Sheffield United also had the dubious distinction of being the least-disciplined team of the millennium, accumulating 103 yellow cards and 9 red cards in the 2697/98 season.

The results are detailed in a number of screenshots linked in the Reddit post, and the save file is available as well if you want to load it up and play around. Are they accurate? Check back in 1000 years to find out, but the likelihood seems low. Sorry, Stokies. 

A new Humble Bundle is live. This time it's Sega's catalogue that's being plumbed for a pay-what-you-want bag of games. That should be a good selection for PC gamers—Sega have become a safe haven for some of our best strategy game developers. But while there are some undeniable classics, the whole thing is a bit... odd.

Here's the list:

Pay-what-you-want

• Dreamcast Collection (Sonic Adventure DX, Space Channel 5 Part 2, Crazy Taxi and Sega Bass Fishing)
• NiGHTS Into Dreams
• Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
• Total War: Rome 2 - Caesar In Gaul DLC
• Miles' Tactic DLC for Football Manager 2015

Beat the average

• Empire: Total War
• Company of Heroes 2 - The Western Front Armies: Oberkommando West

Pay $12 or more

• Total War: Shogun 2 - Fall of the Samurai

There's some good stuff in there. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is a lot of fun, and thus the best Sonic game in decades. Empire: Total War is good, and Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai is great. But it's strange that the bundle dials down so much on DLC for games that it doesn't also include. It's not like Sega don't have an extensive PC catalogue to draw from.

Company of Heroes 2's DLC is the exception in that it's a standalone thing that gives you access to that game's multiplayer—albeit with limited options. Fall of the Samurai is also standalone, although I'm not sure why, for the increased price, it doesn't also include the bigger main game.

The bundle runs for the next two weeks, and more games are promised down the line. And, as always, the bundle also benefits a selection of charities—including AbleGamers, Special Effect, The Willow Foundation and GamesAid.

Last year I played Football Manager 14 in classic mode , the faster, more streamlined version of the game. Going straight from that to a full game of Football Manager 15 is like sprinting headlong into a wall of molasses.

Football Manager is often billed as the football RPG : selling the feeling of a manager s life as much as the strategy game built around it. It s one of those ideas that sounds fantastic on paper, but every time Sports Interactive try and embrace the idea, they just end up adding more press conferences.

Press conferences are to Football Manager what Desmond is to Assassin s Creed. No-one likes them, no-one wants them, but SI keep trying to make them work. Now there are also tunnel interviews and lots more player conversations, all of which involve answering a series of questions and selecting a tone (assertively, calmly, passionately) and all of which take far too long.

Things taking too long is a theme the theme of this year s Football Manager. Scouting players now takes several attempts, during which their attributes are displayed as a range (eg: 10-15) that you gradually narrow down. It s a totally unnecessary time sink. I spent two solid months researching duff right wingers before eventually giving up and googling for one, which lead me to the excellent looking Andrija Zivkovic in a fraction of the time. This is how most FM fans actually play, but instead of embracing this level of meta-knowledge, SI are acting like it doesn t exist.

But it s hard to condemn the game for these irritations, because they all disappear the moment you flip over to good old classic mode. Scouting is instant, press conferences are kept to a minimum and unimportant matches can be resolved instantly. Classic values your time and gives you the tools to shortcut to the fun stuff. Of course if you do play that way then you ll find the game is almost identical to last year s edition, bar two crucial changes: the UI and the match engine.

The UI is a genuine improvement. It s not only pretty, but includes some smart decisions. Some changes are clear reactions to how players use the game, like moving the much used quicksearch bar front and centre, while others try subtly influence them, like combining the player search and scout sections to encourage you to use your staff. Veteran players may chafe at having to unlearn years of bad habits but trust me, it s worth it.

The bigger problem is the match engine. Criticising it is a dicey business. The way it works is so deliberately, wonderfully opaque that players tend to treat it like a force of nature rather than something that has ever actually been designed. But there s a significant pattern to this year s efforts: crosses are everything. Target men and traditional wingers are in vogue in a way not seen since the early 2000s. Get enough balls into the box and you will probably win. I d say two thirds of my goals came from crosses, and the rest from long balls over the top. Short passing got me absolutely nowhere.

Now you, dear reader, may love long ball football, you may delight in old fashioned wing play. If you do, you ll probably like FM15 s decidedly retro approach. But it does seem a bit strange in a world where all the major teams are all using inverted wingers and diamond formations for old fashioned touchline hugging wingers to be so dominant. I started the game fantasising about being Brendan Rodgers or Joachim Low, but I ended up playing like Tony Pulis. At its best, Football Manager reflects the state of modern football, but these tactics are straight out of 1998.

Contrast this to FM14, where players were playing gorgeous passing football and experimenting with avante-garde strikerless formations while holding discussions about verticality . FM14 was the football of coffee house intellectuals, FM15 plays like a lager lout. Football de-arte isn t everything, but after a few hours of FM15 s muscular physicality I found myself longing for the silky skills of my old Everton team.

This all might sound overwhelmingly negative, so it s important to stress that the basics of Football Manager are still there and working as well as ever. Football Manager 15 is still a good game, especially when played on classic, and you won t go far wrong if this is your first game in the series. But for existing fans there aren t a lot of compelling reasons to upgrade from last year s edition, unless you re really nostalgic for the Graham Taylor approach to football. Of course it s entirely possible the traditional mid-season patch will change the tone of the match engine completely, at which point I d heartily recommend it. But for now at least, this is a year to miss.