One is a veteran graphic designer and a holding midfielder currently without a club. The other is a former football commentator, an award-winning novelist and a striker on the injury list. Meet Viktor & Martin, the creative minds and lifelong football fanatics* who thought the world finally deserved a proper football board game.
And they went for it.
Before development, we set ourselves three conditions, pillars to build on:
We’re going amateur level. Capture the spirit of small, modest clubs that don’t worry about million-dollar transfers, but whether their showers have hot water.
We wanted laughter, loads of it. The players we invent for the game must be vivid and strong characters. No lazy writing allowed.
Respectfully, we weren’t here to make football-themed Monopoly. We wanted a game where every move demands tough decisions and smart tactics. A game you’ll want to replay endlessly.
We started in an unusual way: with the characters. Before we touched the mechanics, we brought the players to life. Viktor’s wife Daniela, a radiologist in Vienna with a talent for drawing, spent her evenings sketching their faces.
Martin with his experience in literature gave each one a personality and a deep backstory based on the looks. Viktor then tied everything together into a working concept.
What followed were weeks of researching, developing, designing, and balancing. Then more researching, rewriting, and redesigning. Finally, we began testing the first prototypes in nearby pubs. Hundreds more hours went into tweaking and fine-tuning until we found the perfect balance of mechanics. Until we hit our high bar for fun.
And what really gave us the push was a local crowdfunding campaign (November 2023), 400 early enthusiasts, and the support of Juraj Kucka, former AC Milan player and one of our biggest fans (Kuco is still demanding a rematch after his last tight loss).
Together they helped us raise €19,540. Not nearly enough, but we poured all our savings into further development and production anyway, trusting that this risk would pay off in the long run.
In December 2024 we finally released Sunday Manager in our small home country. We believed it was solid, honest work. But would people enjoy it as much as we did? Then the first reactions came, and oh my god, they blew past every expectation.
People fell in love. The artwork, the atmosphere, the backstories, the tactics, the replayability, the interaction. They wrote to us about all of it: about the perfect game board experience.
We expected football fans to embrace it, but Sunday Manager captured a much wider crowd. Friends were hosting private tournaments that ran long past midnight. Couples were dueling in the evenings (with ladies often dominating the men). Parents bonded with their kids. Even teenagers managed to put down their phones for an hour and get immersed. It was a shot straight into the top corner.
We translated the game into English and created a new international version with 24 nationalities (now expanded to 49). We sent it to test players in Austria, Italy, Portugal, and the UK... and the same emotions came up again, the same spark of addiction.
After half a year of preparation, we were finally ready to send Sunday Manager onto the world stage and in August 2025, we launched the global Kickstarter campaign.
This time, without fear. We knew you will love it.