Ben Nuttall - Getting Claude to extract data from a 1997 football manager game
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Blog " 2026 " April
Published 29 April 2026
Getting Claude to extract data from a 1997 football manager game
There's a football manager game I got for my birthday when I was nine years old: FIFA Soccer<br>Manager<br>97. I spent countless hours playing it as a child, trying to win the league, the cup or just avoid<br>getting the sack! Two years later I got a newer manager game with better graphics and more complex<br>gameplay but it ran incredibly slow and I didn't enjoy playing it at all, so I stuck with the 1997<br>one.
Every couple of years I get it out again and spend an evening basking in nostalgia and reliving the<br>experience. Originally it was made for Windows 95, and it was still working on Windows until (I<br>think) Windows 10. But it works perfectly well in Wine on Linux, so I can still play it today. It<br>just has a teeny tiny resolution and looks silly on my 42" monitor.
I wondered if I could get Claude to extract data from the game files. I pointed<br>it at the directory my Wine installation installed to. I told it I was only interested in players,<br>teams, stadiums and that kind of thing - the stuff that maps to the real world of football rather<br>than internal game data. It found everything in the file SM97.DAT and was very quickly able to<br>answer simple questions like which is the biggest stadium or who is the best rated player.
I asked it to make an HTML page summarising all the data. It produced this:<br>https://files.bennuttall.com/fsm97/
I asked it to create CSV files of all the data it found, so I could make sense of it and make sure<br>it looked right. There were a few issues with it messing up the data but it was easily able to fix<br>it. It didn't know what all the column names for the player stats were, so I launched the game and<br>wrote them all down along with David Seaman's stats so it could calibrate. I expanded the scope to<br>all players and clubs, not just the English leagues.
Once I was happy with the CSV files, all future queries would be scripted against these files so I<br>could be sure it was coming from extracted data and not extracting from the game data again or even<br>hallucinating. I then asked for a more comprehensive website of all the data, with lots of<br>interlinking. I was really impressed with what it put together, and I spent some time diving deeper<br>into the data and making tweaks to the website.
I wanted to produce a set of Python code to make this process reproducible, so if anyone else wanted<br>to do it they could do so without needing an AI tool of their own. It's now on<br>GitHub, and I've published the website too:<br>fsm.bennuttall.com
fsm.bennuttall.com
I've worked with Claude to fine-tune the way the website works, trying to interlink everything and<br>make it easy to find what you're looking for, or explore the data looking for interesting things.
Stats, trivia and EA All Stars
I always found it annoying that it only ever used short versions of team names like "Sheffield W"<br>instead of "Sheffield Wednesday",<br>purely to keep the strings short enough to use everywhere. I had Claude correct them to their proper<br>titles. Stadium names are not used in the game, but they all exist in the game data, albeit with odd<br>mistakes sometimes, like "Bramall Lane<br>Ground". I corrected those too. Some more<br>obscure club or stadium names were just wrong so I fixed those too. I didn't want to mess with too<br>much of the game data, but felt these changes were reasonable.
One thing I found interesting was that there's data in there that isn't used in the game at all.<br>Players go by first initial and Surname, like "D. Beckham", but the data has "David<br>Beckham". It has all the<br>manager names of all English leagues and a few others, but they're never used in game. Same for club<br>nicknames and stadium names (and sometimes town/city and even first line of address!).
This revealed oddities like P. Shilton in the game actually being former England goalkeeper Peter<br>Shilton, who really did play for<br>Leyton Orient until 1997, at the age of 47;<br>and oddly, Olympic decathlon champion Daley<br>Thompson at Mansfield<br>Town (an easter egg).
I didn't realise there were some clubs that shared stadiums, which is reflected in the game. I<br>wonder if you managed Wimbledon and expanded the<br>stadium (Selhurst Park), if you played against<br>Crystal Palace away, would you see the ground at<br>its default appearance or would you in fact see your own upgraded home stadium? (The Reddit<br>community confirms they do appear as different stadiums!)
I made sure the extracted data was aware of the concept of shared stadiums, and it also picked up on<br>the fact that some of the clubs' managers were also listed as players for the same club - a once<br>popular "player-manager" role.
I put together a few special pages showing some interesting stats, such as top rated<br>players, top 10 best players in each age<br>group, top rated<br>player-managers and stadiums...