It’s hard to believe that I have been playing Football Manager (or Championship Manager, as it was) for nearly two decades. I was eight years old when I first set out to prove myself as a virtual Arsène Wenger, and I’m still going now as I near my thirties.
My love affair with CM/FM, like any relationship, has had its peaks and troughs. I’ll go through some of the trials and tribulations I’ve had on this game since I was introduced to Championship Manager 3 during the 1998/1999 season.
I should note that I have retrospectively played the original Championship Manager (released way back in 1992), CM2, and CM97/98 since I started out with CM3. I shall not be recounting those earlier games in this article, though I may look back at them in the future.
In this first part, I will chronicle my experiences from the Championship Manager 3 demo to Football Manager 2008 – a game so buggy that it almost killed my enthusiasm for this franchise completely.
Championship Manager 3
Back in the late 1990s, my dad subscribed to a now long-gone computer magazine called PC Review, each issue of which came with a cover CD. Included on one of those CDs was the demo for Championship Manager 3. It was on one cold night in early 1999 that I sneakily installed the demo onto my parents’ computer.
When it came to choosing which club I would manage in my first ever CM foray, I just closed my eyes and picked a team at random. That team was Shrewsbury Town.
I was only eight years old at the time, and my football knowledge was still very basic, so I had little idea of where my players were meant to go in my line-up. I knew that defenders went in defence, for example, but not necessarily that left-backs should go on the left side, so I frequently – and unwittingly – fielded players out of position.
Needless to say, my debut career at Shrewsbury was not a success. In my first CM session, we failed to win a single game on a pre-season tour of Wales, which I remember included a 3-0 defeat to Total Network Solutions. However, that first session took me well past my bedtime, much to my parents’ annoyance! I had fallen for Championship Manager – hook, line and sinker.
Our fortunes didn’t improve over subsequent sessions, when the competitive matches got underway. We crashed out of the League Cup at the very first round, and after eight league matches, we were rock-bottom of Division 3 – with zero points.
I gave up on Shrewsbury after that terrible start, partly because I was absolutely rubbish, and also because I forgot the password I had set for the game. However, as you’ll discover by reading on, it didn’t put me off Championship Manager forever. Far from it, in fact.
Championship Manager: Season 99/00
The first full version of Championship Manager that I played was CM3’s direct successor, which was bought for me when I was nine years old.
Although I was building up a passion for Arsenal by that point, I was very much a glory-hunter when it came to CM in the early days. That perhaps explains why my first few proper careers saw me start out at Manchester United.
With United having just won the treble, you’d have thought things would be easy for a rookie like me. Bear in mind, though, that I was still finding my feet as a CM player. I was an abject failure at Old Trafford, and I resigned in December, just as I was about to be sacked.
What followed was a nomadic career that saw me take charge of Scotland (I managed them at Euro 2000, quitting after two group defeats), Charlton (for three months), Birmingham (not even a week!), Shrewsbury again (barely three weeks), Luton (two weeks), Sheffield United (four months), and finally Barnsley. You can tell that I had a lot of patience when I was a child! I was into the year 2003 when I accidentally deleted the save, but frankly, it was for the best that I didn’t go any further.
A few years later, when I’d learned how to put players in the correct positions, I started a new career – as manager of England. That actually went quite well for me, as I won the 2002 World Cup (beating Finland on penalties in the Final!) and Euro 2004. By 2009, I was building a Three Lions team for the upcoming World Cup in China…
…and then the family’s old Viglen computer died a death. I still have the hard drive, so there’s a slim chance that I will one day get a chance to finish off that save. A second World Cup win, to trump Sir Alf Ramsey, would be a perfect finale.
Championship Manager: Season 00/01
I bought CM00/01 when I was 10 years old – in fact, and this is quite sad, I can still recall the exact date that I bought it! (8 February 2001, for the record. To put that into perspective, Pietro Pellegri hadn’t even been born yet!)
Just like in the previous CM, I started off at Manchester United. I wasn’t quite so hopeless, but after finishing 3rd in what would be my only season at Old Trafford, I resigned and looked for a less pressurised job. I originally went to Bristol City, but when the Birmingham job became available just before the new season, I upped sticks and left Ashton Gate without managing the Robins in a competitive game! I played out a few matches with the Blues before losing interest in that save.
I got back into CM00/01 about eight years ago, shortly after the Viglen conked out. To rediscover my CM fire (I’d lost interest in the more recent FMs by that point), I loaded up my parents’ laptop and installed this game on that.
The plan was to relive my epic England save from the earlier version in this one… until I got sacked after we crashed out of the 2002 World Cup in the group stage. I then embarked on a journeyman-style career for the next decade, going from Boavista to Motherwell via Walsall and Wolves.
By the time I stopped playing after Euro 2012, the game world had really taken a turn for the bizarre. I might be tempted to reveal more on Fuller FM in the future, so watch this space…
Championship Manager: Season 01/02
Although CM01/02 was immensely popular (and still is now), I never actually bought it when it came out. I only really played the demo, and after a brief but unsuccessful spell managing my beloved Arsenal, I spent the next few months or so experimenting in the English leagues.
CM01/02 was declared freeware by Eidos in 2008, and the full game can be downloaded from sites such as FM Scout. I’ve tried it on a couple of occasions, but I’ve never really been motivated enough to get beyond the first season. I guess the allure of having a long save in a retro version of CM is never quite the same once you really get stuck into the newer FMs.
Championship Manager 4
Nostalgia can really cloud an old favourite’s faults, and CM4 was a case in point. My parents bought this much-delayed but hotly-anticipated game for my 13th birthday, and my now-teenage self LOVED IT. Yes, the shipped version had to be patched to be seriously playable, but there was no stopping me playing this game… until the CD got a large, fatal crack.
By then, I was into a short but unforgettable career as Millwall manager. I adopted them as my ‘second club’ in 2002 after watching my first live football match at The Den, and – as will soon become clear – I’ve since enjoyed many a CM/FM save with the Lions.
In my first season, Millwall emphatically won the Division 1 title, as well as the FA Cup – beating Aston Villa 2-0 in the Final! They also lost in the League Cup Final to a Chelsea team that hadn’t yet caught the eye of a certain Russian billionaire.
Our second season went quite well. Millwall took the Premiership by storm with some truly iconic players such as Tijani Babangida, Iván Hurtado, Michael Carrick and… erm, Mark Quigley. They were 4th in the table, and in the Quarter Finals of the UEFA Cup, when the CD gave up the ghost.
I revisited CM4 a few years ago, when I bought a new disc. I did finish off that second season, securing 4th place and a Champions League spot, as well as taking the Lions to the UEFA Cup Semi Finals, where they lost on away goals to Blackburn.
I then splashed the cash ahead of our third season, bringing the legendary Morten Gamst Pedersen to The Den, as well as Cannavaro (erm… that’s Paolo Cannavaro, not Fabio). By then, though, the game’s bugs had become too apparent and far too irritating for me to sustain my interest much longer. I doubt I will ever return to that save, but you never know…
Championship Manager 03/04
Because CM4 took so long in coming, CM03/04 was a virtual non-starter for me. I never got past the first few weeks of the demo on this version, which by most accounts was a vast improvement on CM4.
Following this game, there was a huge split between developers Sports Interactive and publishers Eidos Interactive. Eidos kept the rights to the name ‘Championship Manager’ and brought in new devs to build a rival franchise that, frankly, was utter conifers. Meanwhile, I stayed loyal to SI, who continued to deliver the goods under the new franchise name ‘Football Manager’.
Football Manager 2005
Well, I say SI continued to deliver the goods. When FM05 came out in November 2004, I really expected it to be the greatest football manager game of all-time. How wrong was I? VERY WRONG.
My biggest pet peeve with FM05 was that it was sooooo slooooooooow. One in-game week felt like one real-life week, and it didn’t help that I was having all sorts of problems trying to get Millwall promoted from what was now the Championship in the first season. Even a secondary save as manager of post-Invincibles Arsenal was proving to be a real struggle.
Like with CM4, my first FM05 disc was rendered unplayable by a large crack, and although I bought a second disc, I really shouldn’t have bothered. The game was still very slow, even on my new laptop, and I uninstalled it just before I could lose my mind.
Football Manager 2006
I managed Millwall again on the FM06 demo, and the results were much more satisfying – both with regards to the game itself, and also to my team’s results. We were top of the Championship by the time I reached the end of the six-month demo. Liverpool midfielder Darren Potter was a sensational loan signing, and he also became the first player in any CM/FM to have me amongst their ‘favourite personnel’. Bless.
In retrospect, this was the version of Football Manager that I most regret not buying. Back then, I was going through a phase of only buying CM/FM every other year, which continued to some extent for the next decade. If I’d been more willing to buy FM06, it might well have saved me from further frustration later on…
Football Manager 2007
When it came to the FM07 demo, I took charge of Grays Athletic – a Conference Premier side based fairly close to where I lived. Over the course of six months, I built up a title-chasing Grays side that included some players who will probably never share a pitch in real life.
My star midfielder was Tim Sparv (now at FC Midtjylland), and my deadly strike force consisted of Aaron McLean (a future Peterborough icon) and erstwhile West Brom trainee Stuart Nicholson (last seen at Springvale City in Australia). Those were the days…
I expected big things, then, when I bought the full version. What I did not expect was my save games to keep corrupting during the opening season. A Millwall career bit the dust, as did an Arsenal save in which I had just won the League Cup with the likes of Leighton Baines and Steven Whittaker (sorry, I can’t explain that second signing). Not even Arsène managed that, so you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered it was all for nothing.
In retrospect, those issues might have been of my own making. I remember my laptop having some problems at the time, and the speed at which I exited FM after it had saved my games can’t have helped. Even so, my memories of FM07 were forever tainted.
Football Manager 2008
I thought my Football Manager blues would be cured by FM08, but that was not to be. Once again, corrupted save games prevented me from getting far beyond the first few games of the opening season.
My best effort was an international career, in which my fictional alter-ego Hank Sawyer – from good old Denver, Colorado – took charge of Rwanda. I had this idea of a ‘Cool Runnings’-style story in which a washed-up American coach took a footballing backwater to global prominence.
Things started well enough… and then Rwanda got spanked by Cameroon in their opening game of the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations. ‘Hank’ promptly gave up before the next match.
Otherwise, my longest FM08 save was a holiday save that ran on until 2012. By then, Portsmouth were playing at the state-of-the-art ‘Spinnaker Stadium’, flying high in the Premier League, and figuratively swimming in money. They also reached the Final of the Champions League, where ‘newgen’ striker Ben Thorpe gave them the lead against Real Madrid before the Spaniards fought back to win 2-1. I had no involvement whatsoever. How times change, eh?
Football Manager 2009 and Football Manager 2010
Because I was so disappointed by their two direct predecessors, I didn’t play FM09 or FM10 at all – not even the demos. Like a long-time FIFA player switching to Pro Evolution Soccer, I contemplated crossing the management simulation divide and buying Championship Manager 2010 (now published by Square Enix, who had bought out Eidos in 2009).
I played the demo (as Millwall, obviously) and liked what I saw, even though defenders seemed to score almost as regularly as strikers. Essentially, most teams had at least one Paul Warhurst clone in their ranks.
I was about to take the plunge and buy CM2010… and then I read the reviews on Amazon and Play.com. The game was so… ahem, ‘critically acclaimed’ that I slowly backed away, never to return to ‘the dark side’.
Square Enix have not released a new version of Championship Manager for PC since then. They put out a series of mediocre games for mobile devices before pulling the plug earlier this year. I never played any of those games, because I have standards.
And that’s all for now. I’ll be back soon for the second part of my potted history as a Football Manager… erm, manager, starting with FM11.
Fuller FM 
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