Football Manager Fan Travels 1,000 Miles to See Virtual Club in Real Life

A video game fanatic who travelled more than 1,000 miles for a football match achieved his "dream" of seeing his adopted club play in the flesh on Saturday. Italian Andrea Lai has been playing the Football Manager series for almost 20 years and one day chose a new club, at random, as his new team to manage. With an average attendance of about 2,500, the team from a town near the north coast of Northern Ireland are a world away from Bologna, the Italian club Lai also supports. Last week, he travelled from Italy to see Coleraine Football Club play their final league game of the season as they pipped Glentoran to second place and a guaranteed place in European competition. 'Enormous to me' Lai first played as Coleraine in Football Manager seven years ago and has won a heap of virtual silverware since. The 39-year-old from Imola, who travelled alone, said his trip was "wonderful". "Astonishing - it was enormous to me because for many years I was considering coming, but it was too far," he told BBC News NI. "I decided to come by myself. I enjoyed some of the great landscapes in Northern Ireland, but the main reason, really, it was the Saturday match against Glentoran, and then I built my trip based on it." Founded in 1927, Coleraine have won the league title in Northern Ireland once, in 1973, as well as six Irish Cups and two League Cups. The team have been regular fixtures at the top end of the NIFL Premiership - Northern Ireland's top division - in recent years. In 2024 the club was taken over and a 24-year-old local property developer became its new majority owner. When Lai started playing with the club in Football Manager it was a semi-professional outfit. "I start playing with this non-pro team and I totally fell in love for it," he said. "The part-time contract, all the players, and bringing them to success, winning the premiership, winning the Irish Cup, and bringing Coleraine in the European competition was awesome." Lai started following Coleraine in real life too, buying items from the club shop online. Through this he got to know people involved in the club and made the decision to come to the last game of the 2025-26 league season. He turned out to be something of a lucky charm as they won 6-2 and qualified for European football for the first time since 2022, where they will enter the Europa Conference League's first qualifying round. Lai got to meet players and staff including hat-trick hero Will Patching and his physical counterpart, the real Coleraine manager Ruaidhri Higgins. With European football secured for next season, Lai said he "cannot miss this kind of opportunity" to watch the club live again. "I'm already looking forward to our next year to come," he said. There could be more success to come for Coleraine this season as they face Dungannon Swifts in the Irish Cup final on Saturday.