Born in the small seaside town of Redcar in North East England, Tom has been an avid fan of the Football Manager game series since its conception, and was previously a fan of the PC-based Championship Manager series.
A fan of both Middlesbrough FC and other local northern football teams, Tom began playing competitive football for his primary school at 10, and quickly established himself as an old-school, hard tackling and lightening fast left back.
Quickly settling into secondary school in the same position, Tom’s love for Championship Manager outlasted his discipline to play competitive sports; after a small stint as his schools Goalkeeper, Tom left the Rye Hills School football team at 14 and didn’t kick a ball again for almost 20 years.
Playing Football Manager throughout his adolescences and college, Tom pursued a Radio Journalism and Sound Editing course at the Darlington College of Technology, before going onto to study a BA Journalism degree at the University of Sunderland (his main campus was just a stones throw away from Sunderland’’s Stadium of Light).
Graduating at the end of 2005, Tom felt into a career bartending, and went onto work in cities such as Newcastle, London, Edinburgh and New York in a career spanning over 12 years.
At the end of 2015 Tom met his life partner and future wife Elle, marrying in New York in the summer of 2017 and relocating to Miami at the end of 2018 to be closer to his wife’s family.
Upon moving to South Florida, Tom took up recreational football for the first in almost two decades, playing indoor six-a-side games with individuals from as far afield as France, Colombia, Guatemala and even the UK.
After injuring himself playing a friendly match on New Year’s Eve 2019 – resulting in a torn meniscus and ACL that would require surgery and ultimately keep him out for up to a year – Tom decided to launch a side project to keep him occupied during his six weeks off work and 12 months away rom the game.
Continuing his desire to play Football Manager, and inspired by the storytelling agendas from other FM blogs, Tom launched ballwinningmidfielder.com, an FM-based blog that features content focused around the alternative reality of world building within the Football Manager games.
Instead of simply blogging about the success of the teams he manages, ballwinningmidfielder.com attempts to give a colorful insight with a mixture of summaries and analysis, interesting tactical selection and colorful story telling.
As well as ballwinningmidfielder.com, Tom also produces content for ‘One Minute Mixology’, an online digital platform that produces 60-second cocktail tutorials for professional bartenders and home enthusiasts alike, and runs his own drinks and cocktail website http://www.tomlasherwalker.com (with an enormous amount of help from his wife).
When not working on drink content or fictional football content, Tom works at the Bleau Bar at the prestigious Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach.
He currently lives in Coconut grove, Florida with his wife and two adopted Puerto Rican dogs Rico and Milo.
Ball Winning Midfielder 