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 Arsene 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 second part, I will chronicle my experiences from Football Manager 2011 – which got me back into the series after an anger-induced break – to the recently-released FM19. You can read Part 1 here.
Football Manager 2011
FM11 was the game that rekindled my love affair with the Football Manager series. I managed to get past three seasons in a full-blown FM career for the first time ever with… you’ve guessed it, Millwall.
That save lasted four-and-a-half seasons, mostly spent in upper-mid-table mediocrity, though my Lions reached the Play-Off Semi Finals once, losing on penalties to Wigan Athletic. On the other hand, we were surprisingly adept in the FA Cup, enjoying a couple of lengthy runs after scalping teams such as Arsenal (5-2 at the Emirates!), Liverpool and Newcastle.
I quit midway through my fifth season, with another promotion challenge having disintegrated. The final straw was a 2-0 defeat in Round 3 of the FA Cup against an average Leyton Orient team from League One. To this day, my heart skips a beat or two at the mere mention of Orient’s double scorer Will Hoskins. He’s right up there with Matt Ritchie and Jordan Rhodes as one of my great FM nemeses.
My long spell of underachievement could perhaps be down to the fact that I was struggling to get to grips with the new player roles and duties in FM. In retrospect, I should’ve known that putting all defenders on defend and all attackers on attack was a sure-fire way to concede loads of goals as well as score loads. It would take me a couple of years to figure things out.
I still retain some fond memories of a Millwall team that included Rob Earnshaw, Scott Robinson, Kevin Trapp and Anthony Wordsworth – all of whom proved to be excellent signings. The resilient centre-back pairing of Paul Robinson and Tamika Mkandawire was one of the best I ever had now. I will also never forget my young Danish midfielder Casper Christiansen, who tore up the Championship before I stupidly loaned him out to Israel for a bit of extra money.
Football Manager 2012
Because I was so engrossed in FM11, I couldn’t rouse myself to take charge of even one game in FM12. I installed the demo on my laptop one day and deleted it the next. I just wasn’t interested at all.
Football Manager 2013
And that brings me onto my favourite version of Football Manager so far. I registered more than 4,000 in-game hours on Steam, which equates to almost exactly six months. I could have learnt a second language in that time. Ah well… “cosa sai fare?”
For the first few months, I had a string of separate careers managing the likes of AFC Hornchurch, Wycombe, AGOVV Apeldoorn, England Under-19s, and Rangers (please don’t ask me about that last save). I never had much in the way of success.
I must admit, though, that I was – at that time – in a vicious cycle of reloading and replaying matches after what I considered to be ‘bad’ results. It was taking away a lot of enjoyment I had for the game, and every post-reload victory felt hollow. That couldn’t go on; I had to brush up on my tactics and start taking any adversity on the chin.
Just before I began a full-blown FM13 career in June 2013, I told myself, “For goodness sake, Christopher, you’re 23 years old now. It’s time to grow up. If you want to have a long and successful FM career that you can be proud of, you’ve got to do it properly – no cheating.”
That new mature outlook was what I took into my main career, which was – and still is – by far my longest and most fulfilling in CM/FM to date. My knowledge of the game, and my talent as a virtual football manager, has grown exponentially since I began the save way back in June 2013.
I started out at my hometown club Romford, taking them from the eighth-tier Isthmian League North to the Conference South. However, I then hit a proverbial brick wall and resigned after nearly a decade in charge. A very short and very unhappy spell at Elgoibar in the Spanish third division followed, as I played five league matches… and lost five.
The save game really got going again a few weeks later, when I got the job at Dagenham & Redbridge – another fairly local club to me. In October 2022, the Daggers were heavily in debt and trying to rebound in the Conference Premier after relegation from the Football League (much like they are in reality).
It took us a couple of seasons to get back into League Two, doing so as Conference and FA Trophy ‘Double’ winners. We then gradually moved through the leagues, eventually securing promotion to the Premier League in 2034.
Over the next nine seasons, we went on to lift all the major trophies at least once – the highlight being winning the Champions League at our first attempt in 2040/2041. I eventually retired in 2043, having secured my first Premier League title to nicely wrap up a thrilling three-decade career.
Oh yeah, and I also had a three-year spell as Norway manager during all that. It wasn’t exactly a resounding success… unless your idea of success is beating Northern Ireland to avoid finishing bottom of your European Championship qualifying group. That’s not what I have in mind, that’s for sure.
That save game got me really into the spirit of writing stories, so that I could share my experiences with other FMers. I turned my tenures at Romford, Elgoibar, Dagenham and Norway into four separate stories, which I published in the ‘FM Stories’ section of the Sports Interactive forums.
The longest and most successful of those stories – which followed my 21 seasons at Dagenham & Redbridge – was “House of Flying Daggers”. The FM Stories sub-forum hold an awards ceremony every autumn (seriously), and that story was voted the FMS Story of the Year for 2017.
Football Manager 2014
In a similar vein to FM12, my obsession with the preceding version meant that I had virtually no interest in FM14 at all. The demo was installed and uninstalled quicker than Manuel Neuer charges out of and back into his penalty area.
Football Manager 2015
I did buy FM15, but because I was still playing FM13 on a regular basis, I didn’t get much gametime on this version (less than 200 hours, in fact, according to my Steam statistics).
After quickly losing interest in an Arsenal save, I began a holiday save in which I tracked the careers of 20 real-life Premier League academy scholars from the age of 16 until their retirements. I based this off a feature by The Guardian, who identified those 20 players for their Next Generation 2014 project and followed them season-by-season.
The result of that holiday save was a story called “The Next Generation”, which I published on the SI forums. (I am actually planning a similar story for FM19, in which I will follow the careers of the 20 players that The Guardian picked as part of Next Generation 2018. That’ll be coming soon on Fuller FM…)
In terms of a save game in which I actually managed a team, my longest effort was with a Swedish fourth-division team named IFK Eskilstuna. I played through an entire season with IFK whilst on a summer holiday in Derbyshire, and although I didn’t get much further into that save afterwards, I did quite enjoy it.
I would love to return to IFK in a future edition of FM, so I can give them my full attention and transform them into Swedish and European giants. Sadly, the club has fallen even further down the league pyramid, so it might be some time before they become playable ‘out of the box’ again.
Football Manager 2016
Much like FM15, my ongoing FM13 save meant that FM16 sadly didn’t get much of a look-in. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed over 300 hours of play-time and had three short-term careers, with varying degrees of success.
I started with an up-and-down trial season with Annan in Scottish League Two, narrowly avoiding a relegation play-off on the final day. I tried to play on for a second year after freshening up the squad, but a pre-season draw against non-league Blantyre Victoria convinced me that it was not worth attempting to make a silk purse out of that sow’s ear.
Then came a very peculiar career with my beloved Arsenal, in which we went through tremendous success on one front and spectacular failure on another. I turned that into another piece of fan fiction, titled “Sometimes Love Is Not Enough: The Triumph and Tragedy of Gary O’Hara”.
My third and final save was as manager of the Uzbekistan national team. The aim was to qualify the country for its first World Cup in either 2018 or 2022. We fell short at the penultimate round in 2018, and as for 2022… well, I never got a chance, because we crashed out of the 2019 Asian Cup at the Group Stage. I fear I’ll never be allowed to set foot in Tashkent again.
Football Manager 2017
If you were to ask me which version of FM I felt was the best (not my favourite), then this was it. It was the first FM that I bought on release, starting a career with Millwall during the two-week beta.
After a shocking first season in which I very nearly got the sack, we won League One at the second attempt, and then had a couple of seasons of stability in the Championship. During this career, I developed minor love affairs with Chris Long (a lethal striker when fit), Michael Cain (a roaming playmaker with a knack for long-range scorchers) and Shaun Williams (a dream box-to-box midfielder in the EFL).
My fifth season started terribly, though, and after a shocking early collapse against Brighton, I decided to resign and knock the save on the head. That also meant my reign as part-time manager of Northern Ireland ended after just one match, in which not even an on-fire Will Grigg could beat Sweden in a Euro 2020 play-off.
I subsequently moved on to a new career, in which I – or my new alter-ego Mark Catterall, for that matter – managed all England teams from the Under-19s to the seniors. That save also lasted a few years and became the basis of perhaps my most ambitious SI forum story yet: “An Impossible Man”.
All told, I got enough enjoyment out of FM17 to consider it value for money. My Steam hours on the game currently stand at 666 – the number of the beast, all hail Darth Vaughan. (Kudos to whoever can tell me in the comments which game that reference came from.)
Football Manager 2018
By the time FM18 came around, I still had active saves in both FM13 and FM17. That meant I had little desire to buy the new version, though I did at least give the demo a try.
I had a six-month demo career with Bristol City in the Championship. While results on the pitch were good (we were well inside the play-off places by the time the demo ended), I didn’t really enjoy the game all that much. Issues with the match engine and an unintuitive user interface contributed to me giving FM18 a miss.
Football Manager 2019
And so we come to the latest chapter of my CM/FM ‘career’, which is being written as I type this. I launched Fuller FM just in time for the new game, and I’ve been chronicling my beta career with Fiorentina here for the last few weeks. Feel free to check out my progress on “Shades of Deep Purple” if you haven’t already.
I’m not exaggerating when I say FM19 is shaping up to be the best version yet. The revamped training module and the various quality-of-life improvements to the UI have breathed fresh life into a series that I thought had taken a step back in FM18.
It’s now nearly 20 years since I first tried managing Shrewsbury in the lower leagues, so I plan to return to Shropshire once I’m done with Fiorentina. Far from considering hanging up my sheepskin and retiring after two decades playing this series, I’m happy to stay in the hotseat for a long time to come.
So there you have it: a potted history of my experience with Championship Manager/Football Manager – the one soccer management game series that has always kept me coming back for more. There have been countless other games that have tried (and largely failed) to capture my imagination, and I’ll probably look back at some of them in the future.
Fuller FM 
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