What if Football Manager let you actually play the match?
Here is the full loop as it stands today. Continue your career. Open the squad and sort it however you like: number, position, age, overall. Pick the fixture. Hit Play, and drop straight off the team sheet and into a live 3D match with the same players.
That transition, from a sortable list of names to those same names running around on grass, is the differentiator against a pure management sim. It is also the thing that keeps the two halves honest: if a player is bad in the database, he is bad on the pitch.