Chris Fuller

Championship Manager Magazine: The Cover CDs

Published on 26 September 202312 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

Did you know that there used to be an official magazine dedicated to Championship Manager and Football Manager?

Two decades ago, Sports Interactive teamed up with Future Publishing to produce a series of magazines about the game we all know and love, selling it in various retailers across the UK. Future was (and still is) a British multimedia giant behind many successful publications, such as PC Zone and FourFourTwo.

The first issue of Championship Manager Magazine was released in October 2002 and included loads of screenshot and feature reveals about the newly-announced Championship Manager 4. Another four issues were published throughout 2003, featuring plenty of content for anyone who enjoyed CM4 and its sequel – Championship Manager 03/04.

Championship Manager as we knew it became Football Manager in 2004, when SI split up with Eidos and shacked up with SEGA. That year saw three issues of Football Manager Magazine hit the shelves, building up to the release of Football Manager 2005. Sadly, the magazine series was cancelled shortly afterwards.

I collected every issue and still have them all… but they are currently boxed up, in anticipation of a house move that has (for now) been put on hold. I’d like to learn how to scan these magazines and archive them for posterity one day, but that will have to wait.

Each magazine also came with a CD, which included various programs, utilities and tactics for CM fans to enjoy – and a few other goodies to boot. Unfortunately, it appears that nobody has archived them online… until now.

Earlier this month, I uploaded all eight of these CDs onto the Internet Archive. The archive boasts “the largest vintage and historical software library in the world”, which includes cover discs from various other computer magazines.

You can find links to all those files below. These can be downloaded as ISO images and then ‘mounted’ onto a virtual CD drive. If you’re running Windows 8.1 or later, you only need to double-click on an ISO file to mount it. If you’re running Windows 7 or earlier, you’ll need to use a third-party program such as WinCDEmu.

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Fake Players in Football Manager

Published on 22 August 20235 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

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…

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Looking Ahead To Football Manager 2024 (And 2025)

Published on 3 July 20235 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

It’s fair to say that, for some people, Football Manager 2023 has not lived up to expectations.

Despite record sales, FM23 received plenty of criticism over its lack of exciting new features, and Sports Interactive’s apparent reluctance to fix some long-standing bugs. Long-time players, including myself, have begun to wonder if the series is stagnating.

But good news is on the way! Last week, SI put out a lengthy blog post in which studio director Miles Jacobson discussed “The Future of Football Manager”. This development update gives us some exciting details about Football Manager 2024, which will be released later this year… and even gives us a taste of what we can expect in Football Manager 2025!

So, what do the next 18 months have in store for us FMers?

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My thoughts on Football Manager 2023

Published on 5 April 20237 July 2026 by Chris Fuller2 Comments

I should probably have got round to this by now, shouldn’t I?

Hey there, folks. It has now been five months since Football Manager 2023 was released, and so much has happened during its life cycle. On a personal level, my dad had cancer surgery, my old computer slowly died on me, and I’ve been getting ready to move 150 miles across the country. It’s not been much fun.

And what about FM23 itself? Well… that’s not been much fun either.

During the beta, I started a short-term save with Real Betis (which I wrote about on Twitter), but playing the game was such a frustrating experience that I abandoned it a few weeks after the full release. I’ve dabbled in a few test saves since then, but I only got into playing the game ‘properly’ again after the Winter Update came out early last month.

So, at long last, here are my thoughts about the latest installment of Sports Interactive’s football management simulation. Is this a genuine upgrade on FM22, or is it a season update too far?

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Breaking FM: The Longest Season – Part 2

Published on 3 April 20234 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

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Welcome back to Breaking FM, where my aim is to take Football Manager 2023 to the limits – and see how it can cope with extreme (and extremely unrealistic) situations.

For the first experiment of this series, I will find out what happens if a team in the English league system played the maximum number of games in a single season. This includes ALL league games, play-offs, cup ties (including replays), and even European and intercontinental fixtures!

The club I have chosen for this experiment is Dagenham & Redbridge. In Part 1, I explained how the experiment would work, which involved beefing up the Daggers squad, and giving them two seasons to qualify for every possible competition, so that their 2024/2025 season can become the longest one ever.

But Part 2 is where the fun really happens! In this post, I will go through the entire 2024/2025 season, in which the Daggers are aiming to play 99 games of football. We’ll see if FM23 can cope with scheduling so many matches, or if it will all fall to pieces…

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Breaking FM: The Longest Season – Part 1

Published on 30 March 20234 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

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Welcome to the first installment of a brand new mini-series here on Fuller FM.

In Breaking FM, I will be pushing Football Manager to its limits, seeing how well (or otherwise) the game handles extreme scenarios. I’m not sure if this will become a regular series on the blog, but if you enjoy reading this, then who knows?

For my first attempt at breaking FM, I will take over a team in the English leagues and manipulate their results, so that they play the maximum number of games in a season. Chelsea currently hold the record, playing 69 matches during the 2012/2013 season… but that’s not even close to the number I have in mind!

This first chapter explains how my experiment will work. I’ve worked out the maximum games a team can play, and how long it will take to get them into every available competition at the same time. Then it’s just a case of finding a club, assembling a team, and setting everything up for the longest season ever.

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CM4 Revisited: Still Playing In 2023

Published on 28 March 202312 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

Today marks the 20th anniversary of Championship Manager 4 – one of the most controversial games in Sports Interactive’s long-running franchise. To many fans, it was a groundbreaking release that introduced a 3D match engine to our favourite game. To others, it was a broken and buggy mess that was rushed out to the public before it was ready. Over the coming months, I will revisit the game in a series of posts.

In this article, I am celebrating the ‘survivors’ of Championship Manager 4. I have found 17 players in the CM4 database who are still playing football at a high level 20 years later, on Football Manager 2023. Some of these names will be familiar to you, but there are others that might not be so well-known…

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Running old CM & FM games on Windows

Published on 22 February 202312 July 2026 by Chris Fuller1 Comment

We’re all Football Manager lovers, aren’t we? But as much as we might enjoy the newer titles, I’m sure those of us who’ve been around for a while would love to go back in time – and re-play an older version of FM or Championship Manager.

Technology marches on – and those classic games that were designed for Windows 95, 98 or XP may not run perfectly on newer operating systems. Fortunately, it is still possible to play those older games on Windows 10 or 11, with a little bit of work.

In this guide, I will give you some tips on how to get your old Sports Interactive games running on modern versions of Windows. These instructions might also work for some other video games from the 1990s and 2000s, but I’ll be focussing on the CM and FM series.

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From The Archives: My Football Manager Forum Stories

Published on 13 February 202316 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

I’ve been writing stories around my Championship Manager and Football Manager saves for a very long time. Since I was 13, in fact.

When the Fuller family went online in 2003, one of my first visits was to the Sports Interactive forums – and its Championship Manager Stories sub-forum (now known as Football Manager Stories, or FMS for short). As someone who has always enjoyed writing, I was so enthralled with some of the narratives other players were creating around their saves that I wanted to do the same.

So, I started writing about my Championship Manager 4 career with Millwall, in which I took the Lions from Division 1 to the Champions League in just two seasons. Looking back, the story was pretty badly-written – after all, I was only a teenager – and should never see the light of day.

Over the next few years, I gradually became more competent and confident in my writing. By the summer of 2014, I was finally ready to take the plunge – and publish my first story to FMS.

That story was “Welcome To Romford” – the first of several stories that I wrote about my long-running, 31-season career on Football Manager 2013. That was followed by more tales about my other FM saves… and some of these were so popular that they won several ‘FMS Awards’, as voted for by other members of the FMS community.

In October 2018, I launched this Fuller FM blog as the new home of my Football Manager stories. I subsequently stopped writing on FMS from 2019 until 2021, when I returned with a new long-term story celebrating the 20th anniversary of Championship Manager 01/02. That story is called “25 Years” and is currently ongoing.

Until now, these stories have only been accessible to anyone who has signed up to the official SI forums. And due to a problematic forum migration in 2016, some of my older FMS stories are either missing several chapters or have even disappeared completely.

Now, I have decided to make all my completed forum stories available to download as PDFs right here on Fuller FM.

Just a heads-up: these stories are generally quite long, quite wordy, and they read much more like epic novels than the shorter, screenshot-heavy blog stories you’re probably used to seeing here.

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Player interactions in Football Manager

Published on 5 January 202314 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

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Being successful in Football Manager isn’t just about signing the right players and building tactics that best suit their skills. You also need to show good people management to keep squad morale high, while also ensuring that your players are motivated and confident.

Player interactions are becoming increasingly important in FM. It’s vital know how to praise your players when they’re doing well, encourage them when they need picking up, and even discipline them when they deserve it.

Any top manager knows how to strike a good balance between punishment and reward. Being too harsh on your squad can create discontent and destroy team confidence, while constantly showering your players with praise can make them complacent and maybe even see you as a soft touch.

If you are struggling to handle player interactions, I’m here to help. Today, I have some tips for building up player relationships through interactions, including quick chats and promises. I also have a word of warning for those of you who like to reach for the water bottles after a defeat!

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