Online Football League Management is a FREE Play-by-email (PBeM) football management game, using the ESMS freeware software developed by developed by Eli Bendersky to simulate matches.
OFLM was founded in December 2002 and has just completed several seasons successfully. Originally, OFLM consisted of two leagues with 12 teams in each, but after two weeks and a high demand, it was expanded to include a third division with another 12 teams. At the end of season 1, the division were again expanded to 16 teams each, introducing another TWELVE teams because of a large interest in the game.
The OFLM game was set up by Ceri Griffiths, who having retired from competitive judo in 2002 due to injury was looking for somthing to do with all his "spare" time. Ceri has some experience running Play-By-Mail football management games from as far back as 1993, when he was running Superboss League Challenge for school friends. Using a very primative formula and dice to calculate the results. This was a very successful game but ended after three quarters of the first season due to pressures of schoolwork!
Then again, towards the end of 1999, when he was unemployed, he started another PBM game called Superboss Challenge 2. This ran for a season and a half, before collapsing due to lack of interest and work commitments (in that he finally got one!).
Then in November 2002 he joined a game called Kick-Off, as the manager of struggling side Aston Villa and after a few weeks playing, gathering some experience and knowledge of the software, he resigned as the manager and set up OFLM.
A Brief History of ESMS.
The program was created by Eli Bendersky and Igor
Oks. They started their soccer play-by-email during 1998 in
a fantasy league called WWISL, which used spreadsheets
to 'run' games. This was extremely cumbersome and time
consuming, and the league fell apart shortly after starting.
But the people who participated in WWISL were left with
the feeling that this kind of a game may be successful.
Shortly after the WWISL fell apart, David Austin and
Eli Bendersky, formerly WWISL players, teamed up to create a new
play-by-email league, calling it the Global Internet
Soccer League (GISL).
The GISL used a program named MSWL,
which was created by Allan Sellers to run its games, and
had 30 participants (team managers). GISL went through
all the difficult phases of a start-up league, but managed
to survive, and ran very successfully for 3 full seasons
(a bit longer than a calendar year). However, over that
time, the league developed some unique needs and features
that weren't covered by MSWL, and were handled manually.
It was about this time when Eli and Igor decided to create a program of their own, which will both
answer the unique needs developed in GISL and be an
improvement of MSWL. During a months break in their University studies they
created the basic skeleton of ESMS. It then took a couple
of months of much less intensive work to create the final
form of the main (game running) program and the other
components, and ESMS was released in early 1999.
For the record, the first official ESMS game was run on
April 10th, 1999, in a test league arranged with some
friends to test the program. The GISL started to use it
almost immediately after release, and it didn't take much
time for other leagues to pop-up using this program. Today,
ESMS is widely used in dozens of leagues, by thousands
of managers from all over the world.
You can contact Eli by email at spur4444@yahoo.com
Credits for OFLM
Eli Bendersky and Igor Oks for creating the software used to run Football League Manager. Credit goes to my good friend Andrew Beaumont who wrote the very complicated formulas which are used to calculate players wages & values in OFLM (he was tragically killed in a car crash in January 2004 but will be always a part of this game). Also I would like to thank & give MUCH credit to Richard Gubby for creating the training software used in OFLM to develop players skills & fitness. Finally I would like to thank my wife Becky & daughter Layla for giving me the time & space each Thursday to play this game. ;-) |
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