ESMS

ESMS (Electronic Soccer Management Simulator) is a simulator of soccer management for play-by-email (PBeM) games. ESMS is very popular - thousands of people from all over the world play it, organized in dozens of leagues and “associations”, in many languages (originally ESMS was released with only the English version, but later was tranlated to Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Latvian, Czech and other languages by dedicated fans).

After almost 10 dedicated years, I stopped my involvement in ESMS in mid-2007, in order to pursue other interests. The latest version released and supported by me was ESMS v2.7.3:

The ESMS community is still active through the ESMS website.

From the User’s Manual

What is ESMS

ESMS is an acronym for Electronic Soccer Management Simulator. It is a program, or rather a family of programs, that allows people to run fantasy soccer management games. Think of a soccer computer game, like Championship Manager, for example. It allows you to build a team of players and manage them through a soccer league, setting the opening squad, tactics and formations, substituting players etc. You deal with player injuries, suspensions, transfers and all the other aspects of soccer team management.

ESMS gives you these abilities, but submits the whole league to your control, and not the PC’s. That means that you decide how your league looks like, what teams play (these are often completely made-up, fantasy teams, and not copies of real soccer teams), who are the managers (it can be your friends, or just people from the Internet who want to play), etc. It’s really a wholly another concept, which might be difficult to get used to unless you know what you want. The best advice I can give at this point is to look at some existing fantasy leagues online that use ESMS, to get a feel of how these things work (it is as simple as looking for “esms soccer league” or something similar in your favorite web-search engine).

Some History

ESMS was initially created by myself (Eli Bendersky) and Igor Oks. We started our soccer play-by-email journey in 1998, as managers in a fantasy league called WWISL, which used spreadsheets to ‘run’ games. This was extremely cumbersome and time consuming, and the league fell apart shorty after starting. However, 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, together with David Austin (another ex-WWISL player) we 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) with MSWL. Over that time, the league developed some unique needs and features that weren’t covered by MSWL, and were handled manually.

This is about the time when we decided to create a program of our own, which will both answer the unique needs developed in GISL and be an improvement of MSWL. We took our time during a break we had in our University studies and in about a month 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 we 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.