Miles Jacobson OBE is studio director of Sports Interactive, the team behind the Football Manager series of video games, and creators of the original Championship Manager. Early life Jacobson was born in 1971 to a Jewish family. His father was an inventor and his mother was a teacher. Jacobson was raised in Watford. A talented musician, his childhood ambition was to become a singer, and he spent more time on music than education when at school, singing or playing at the Royal Opera House, Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican and St Martin-in-the-Fields during this time, and appeared in Carmen alongside José Carreras. However his singing ability was affected by the voice change during puberty. He attended Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School on a scholarship – fellow pupils at the time included Matt Lucas and Sacha Baron Cohen. He also became a keen fan of Watford F.C. in his childhood, attending his first game at Vicarage Road on his seventh birthday. His interest in and love for music sowed the seeds for his early career; while working in a record shop he produced a fanzine which caught the eye of the then NME editor Steve Lamacq. Lamacq helped Jacobson to secure his first position in the music business, introducing him to Andy Ross of Food Records, who hired him as an A&R manager. During his time in the music business (with Food and Polygram Island Music), Jacobson worked with a number of household names, including Jesus Jones, Dubstar, Shampoo, Blur, Feeder, Fatboy Slim and The Bluetones. Sports Interactive Sports Interactive was founded in 1994 by Paul and Oliver Collyer on the back of the success they had achieved with a game they had originally created in their Shropshire bedrooms in the late 1980s. That game was first published commercially in 1992 as Championship Manager. Jacobson first became involved in Sports Interactive as a fan of the game, after obtaining an advance copy of Championship Manager 2 in exchange for two Blur concert tickets, offering his services as one of the early testers. The Collyer brothers realised that Jacobson's abilities and experience would be put to better use in other areas and he became the fledgling company's unofficial business advisor. Jacobson quickly became an integral part of the team, assuming the role of part-time Managing Director in 1999 before finally taking the helm on a full-time basis in 2001. Under