I once had a Western Digital hard drive sitting on the shelf above my desk. This came from the old Fuller family computer – a 1999 Viglen, on which I would spend a lot of time playing Championship Manager during my youth. When the Viglen died in 2010, I kept the hard drive.
A few years later, I tried to recover the data from the drive myself, only to be met by a load of lovely clicking sounds (not a good sign). Defeated, I reluctantly put it back on the shelf, where it gathered dust for the best part of a decade.
Earlier this year, I finally sent the drive off to a professional data recovery service. After waiting several months for them to find the right replacement parts, I was delighted when they brought my data back to life with a complete recovery! My old CM saves live on!
Anyway, while going through my CM archive and reliving my teenage memories, I stumbled across one particular save file from Championship Manager 00/01. This was a save file where all the real-life players were replaced with fake versions of themselves – goodbye Alessandro Del Piero, hello Federico Longo.
And this took me down a rabbit hole, into Championship Manager (and Football Manager)’s fiction factory…
WHAT ARE ‘FAKE PLAYERS’?
CM00/01 was the first game in the franchise where you could decide whether to use real players in a new save game. If you set ‘Use Real Players’ to No, the game will replace everyone in the database with fake versions of themselves. And I mean everyone – players, managers, coaches, chairmen, they’re all fakes, run to their mansions.
No, they’re not the same thing as regens or newgens… not quite. Regens in Championship Manager are when a retired player is ‘regenerated’ as a younger version of himself, with similar attributes but a different name. Newgens in Football Manager are players that are freshly generated by the game and aren’t linked to any previous players.
Fake players are more similar to regens. These players will have different names and attributes from their real-life counterparts, though their nationalities, birthdates and position(s) will usually – but not always – stay the same. To use an example from CM00/01, if Manchester United have a tough-as-nails Irish defensive midfielder born in August 1971, he’s probably Roy Keane with an alias.
In terms of ability, the fake player will usually be at a similar level to their real counterpart, though there are a few anomalies. This bumbling oaf who can’t hit a cow’s rear end with a banjo is apparently supposed to be Alan Shearer!
At least the ‘fake’ Sir Bobby Robson looks more like the real thing…
While some players’ real-life counterparts are obvious to figure out, others require a bit more detective work. The Millwall team that I inherited had a Hungarian midfield wonderkid who didn’t look like an obvious replacement for any real-life Lion. I just assumed he was Tim Cahill if he ate more goulash.
Why bother playing with fake players, I hear you ask? Well, some FMers are bored of using the same old database with the same old players, and they might want a new challenge in a whole-new universe.
Traditionally, the best way to create a world full of fictional players has been to holiday a new save until you’re 20-25 years into the future, when most (if not all) of the original players have been replaced with regens/newgens. But even then, you’ll still have plenty of real players who are still in the game as staff members.
So the idea of starting a new CM/FM save with ‘fake players’ is to create a randomised football universe without any of the holidaying hassle. It’s a neat idea in theory, but does it work in practice?
FAKE PLAYERS IN CM00/01
“Ladies and gentlemen… Mr Justin Worthington!”
One problem with using fake players on CM00/01 is that a lot of the teams remain largely recognisable. The names and nationalities might be different, but that ageing Italian forward at Chelsea is still Gianfranco Zola, and Bayern München’s unbeatable goalkeeper is still Oliver Kahn/Jens Mustermann. Likewise, you can tell that Watford’s flamboyant mega-rich chairman is Sir Elton John, even if he now has a much plainer name.
You’ll also note something odd with all the players – like RB Leipzig before 2009, they have no history. Yes, they ALL start a save with completely blank career histories. Even if they’re in their 30s and have multiple international caps, the game acts as if they’ve just started their professional careers.
This is something you’ll have to tolerate with fake universes. It’s probably asking too much for the game to generate fictionalised histories for everyone in the database, let alone generate realistic career paths. Nothing would break immersion like finding some random part-timer who’s been globetrotting since he was at primary school, or 100 different players who all played 40+ games for Crewe in the same season.
Anyway, let’s play a game of ‘Guess The Player’. Any ideas who this fella might be?
This big centre-forward with 42 international goals for Argentina is in his prime, but he’s not Batistuta, or Crespo, or even Daniel Cordone. Also, what’s he doing at West Brom?
A quick look at his birthdate, and the Baggies’ 2000/2001 squad, tells me that he is supposed to be…
…[drumroll] Des Lyttle! My younger readers probably won’t know who the hell Des Lyttle was, but I’m sure some older fans of Albion or Nottingham Forest will tell you that he was definitely not an Argentine striker!
On that note, let’s talk a bit more about the international records that are generated in these fake universe. They don’t really seem to take into account just how good a player is. You might find an elite 31-year-old midfielder at Real Madrid who’s never been close to the Spain national team, or an established Swedish international striker who is SO talented that he can’t even get a game for Oldham!
Sometimes, a player might have way more internatonal caps than goals. I’ve seen a Bosnian right-back who apparently scored seven goals in his only cap, and an Australian bloke who has four goals from three caps – a bloody impressive record for a GOALKEEPER! But that’s nothing compared to Joseba Vega (aka Fernando Hierro)…
No, your eyes don’t deceive you! Vega has scored 27 goals in THREE caps – literally a hat-trick OF hat-tricks per game!!! Even in real-life, Hierro only managed to score 29 goals in his 89 Spain appearances!
You’ll also find young players who have played an obscene number of internationals for their ages. Take the German sweeper Stephan Albrecht, who is just 18 years old but has 90 caps! He might well be the next Beckenbauer, but seriously – has he been playing for Germany since he was NINE?
Clearly, these fictional universes in CM00/01 leave a lot to be desired, which might explain why teenage Christopher never got past pre-season on this save. But let’s fast-forward two decades and see if things are any better on Football Manager 2023…
FAKE PLAYERS ON FM23
Creating a save game with fake players on FM23 is fairly simple. At the career game setup screen, you’ll want to click on “Advanced Setup”, and then under “Advanced Options”, you’ll want to tick the box next to “Use Fake Players and Staff”. As the tooltip says, this will allow you to “use a database consisting entirely of entirely generated players and staff”.
So what do these ‘generated players’ look like? Well… let’s have a look at the Manchester City squad and see if we can work out which player is supposed to be which?
Well, this is easy. Belgian superstar playmaker, Spanish and Portuguese defenders, experienced English right-back, Brazilian sweeper keeper, tricky Algerian winger… they even have a 21-year-old Norwegian goalscoring machine! Hmm, I wonder who that could be?
You see that defensive midfielder at Bayern who can sometimes play right-back? Ahmann, he’s clearly Joshua Kimmich! No, seriously… compare and contrast their attributes! Literally the only thing that’s changed is that Kimmich has 20 Determination and his knock-off has 10 Determination!
That veteran Polish forward at Barcelona? Obviously he’s Robert Lewandowski, except he’s got 9 Determination and is now called Michał Bartkowiak – you know, Michał BartGOALiak?
And that brave and versatile 36-year-old at Liverpool who speaks Spanish to his kids? It’s James Milner, just less determined. Some people say he looks like Homer Simpson.
At least CM00/01 sometimes made the effort of changing the players’ nationalities or positions – not to mention their attributes – so that it wasn’t so obvious who their real-life counterparts were!
Yeah, this does still happen sometimes, but there are are other telltale signs such as a player’s preferred club. In this save, I can tell that Arsenal’s Chilean striker is actually Gabriel Jesus because he supports Palmeiras….
…and this is Antonio Rüdiger cosplaying as a Spaniard. His second nationality is Sierra Leonean (like Toni), he made his international debut in 2014 (like Toni), and he recently spent nearly five years in England (you get the idea). It even says he scored his first international goal against Azerbaijan in 2017 – not bad for a player who has ZERO goals in 44 caps!
International records for fake players aren’t quite as absurd as they are on CM00/01. You’ll still find the odd player who scored four goals in one cap, but the most-capped players are all 30-something veterans. There aren’t any teenagers going around with dozens of caps dating back to their school days… in fact, you’ll find the opposite problem!
If anything, all this makes fake player universes even LESS fun to play on FM23 than on the older Championship Manager games! It’s a bit like if Sports Interactive didn’t have any FIFPro licences and couldn’t use real players’ names, so they just gave them names like Bakoya Sako or Barry Lane or Kévin M’Bippi.
And yes, this rather lazy attitude to ‘randomising’ players even goes right down to the non-playing staff. City’s manager is just Pep Guardiola but with a different Spanish name – probably Iván, because of that stupid bug that leads to roughly 45% of all Spanish newgens being named Iván! (Seriously, SI…)
Still, at least this gives me another chance to laugh at the stupid newgen faces!
CAN WE IMPROVE THIS?
Some people in the community have suggested a workaround. If you deleted all the best players from the database, you could – in theory – generate a fictional database that feels more random.
I decided to test this out for myself. I removed every single player from the five major European leagues, then started a new save with “Use Fake Players and Staff” and “Add Players to Playable Teams” both ticked. This filled all the top teams with newly-generated fake players who aren’t based on any real-life players, as you can see below:
The good news is there are no obvious De Bruynes or Haalands in this Manchester City team. Indeed, you could say that City’s squad looks more… GB News-friendly. The wages and transfer values are also far less obscene, which is also a sign that these randomised fake players are not as good as the ‘original’ fakes.
There appears to be a cap which limits how good these added players can be, in terms of both Current Ability and Potential ability. The best player I could find in the major leagues was a right-back at Espanyol who had a CA score of 131 – the same score as Luke Ayling at Leeds. Yeah.
In the Premier League, the best player was a Nottingham Forest winger with a CA of 127, which puts him on the current level of Timothy Weah or Manuel Benson. Not a single added player in the PL had a PA above 130. It’s also worth noting that NONE of these players were generated with any international caps.
This means the standard of fake players at the ‘elite’ level will be rather mediocre – at least for the first 5-10 years until the newgens (who are unaffected by this CA/PA cap) start taking over. It’s not ideal.
Other than that, it appears we’re short of options when it comes to creating a genuinely random FM universe. The onus is on SI themselves to change how this game mode works.
The thing is… will SI want to do that when (apparently) the vast majority of FMers play with real players? Is it worth putting in the time and effort when only a few FMers will appreciate it? Could you even call this a vicious circle, like with international management – SI don’t make enough improvements because players are’t interested, but players aren’t interested because SI don’t make enough improvements?
Answers on a postcard, folks.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey through the crazy worlds of fake players in Football Manager. I am still (barely) active on Twitter, though you can now find me on Threads as well.
Until next time, this is Jeff Studmuffin signing off.
Fuller FM 
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