Welcome back to my Championship Manager 3 story, where I will be aiming to take Napoli back to the top of Italian football.
After securing promotion in 1998/1999, the previous chapter saw us kick off the 1999/2000 season in Serie A. Results haven’t been too bad, but our supporters are perhaps getting frustrated with our pragmatic tactics. And to be honest, so am I.
Will things get any better over the next few months? Read on…
Continue reading “CM3 Revisited: Canzone Napoletana – Part 5” →
My Championship Manager 3 series with Napoli is now in full swing, as I’m about to kick off my second season at the San Paolo!
In the previous chapter, the Partenopei secured promotion from Serie B as champions. We will now kick off the 1999/2000 season back in Serie A, where this once-great club belongs.
Today’s installment will take us through the summer of 1999, as several new faces arrive in Naples before we begin our quest for top-flight consolidation. Will that be easier said than done?
Continue reading “CM3 Revisited: Canzone Napoletana – Part 4” →
I’m glad that you’ve joined me for the latest installment of my new Championship Manager 3 series. I’m now well into my first season at Napoli, who are flying high in Serie B after averaging nearly two goals per game!
It is now March 1999. CM3 is about to hit store shelves, and the Partenopei look like they are about to celebrate promotion back to Serie A at the first time of asking. Can they finish the job… or will this season reach a nail-biting, perhaps even a heartbreaking conclusion?
Continue reading “CM3 Revisited: Canzone Napoletana – Part 3” →
This is the second chapter of my new Championship Manager 3 series. The year is 1998 – and while Cher is asking us if we believe in life after love, I’m making Napoli fans believe in life after relegation.
In last week’s opener, I took over a Partenopei side who had just slid down into Serie B after years of steady decline. Our season so far is off to a strong start, thanks in no small part to a young Argentinian striker who could become the next Diego Maradona… or at least the first Ezequiel Lavezzi.
We pick up this story in November, where Napoli are looking to consolidate their position in the promotion places. And after knocking out Parma in Round 2, we are aiming to complete another Serie A scalping in the Coppa Italia…
Continue reading “CM3 Revisited: Canzone Napoletana – Part 2” →
Welcome to a brand new story on Fuller FM! This week marked the 25th anniversary of the release of Championship Manager 3, and I’ve been thinking for some time about how best to mark the occasion.
My first thought was to recreate my first ever CM save – with Shrewsbury Town, down in Division 3. Maybe I will revisit them on CM3 one day, but I’m still feeling sore about how my FM19 Shrews story ended.
Another idea was to load the Brazilian leagues, start the game in December 1998, and then take over a struggling team in a top European league midway through the season. Unfortunately, this can lead to some very strange scenarios, such as Liverpool or Chelsea fighting relegation, or Piacenza challenging for the Serie A title.
Instead, I have decided to take on a fallen giant in Serie B – at a time when Italian football was coming to the end of its 1990s heyday. Yes, folks, it’s time for some GOLLLLLLLLLAZOOOO!
Continue reading “CM3 Revisited: Canzone Napoletana – Part 1” →
Championship Manager 3 celebrates its 25th birthday later this month. In lieu of baking a cake, I thought I’d take the opportunity to celebrate some cult players who would often develop into world-beaters.
I’ve come up with a list of 15 players in the CM3 database – young and, er, not-so-young – and have looked at where their careers went after the turn of the millennium.
I’m looking for cult icons, so I will not be including players like Pablo Aimar and Javier Saviola who enjoyed at least some real-life superstardom. I also won’t be revisiting anyone that I’ve already covered on my lists of Championship Manager 99/00 icons (Part 1 and Part 2).
Continue reading “CM3 Revisited: Cult Icons” →
Championship Manager 3 was released in March 1999 – almost 25 years ago – and marked the start of a new generation for the CM series.
CM3 was also the first football management game I ever played, when I was about 8 or 9 years old. Over the coming months, I will revisit this game in various articles, along with a new career story that will begin very soon.
For the first installment, I have found 17 players who are currently playing for Premier League clubs, and whose fathers were themselves players on the CM3 database a quarter-century ago. I’ve taken screenshots of the dads on CM3 – and their lads on Football Manager 2024 – and written a little bit about their careers.
I’ve already done something like this before, when I revisited Championship Manager 99/00 about four years ago. Expect to see a few familiar faces from the past, along with some contemporary stars who’ve already outstripped their fathers’ achievements.
Continue reading “CM3 Revisited: Like Father, Like Son” →
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Retro Review time again!
This year marks the 25th anniversary of me playing Championship Manager for the first time. It was back in 1999 that I first discovered Championship Manager 3 – the game that started a lifelong addiction for me.
I will revisit CM3 in more detail later this year. Today, though, I will fast-forward a decade to 2009, when the Championship Manager franchise was on the decline. Could Eidos really make a good game without Sports Interactive?
This is Championship Manager 2010.
Continue reading “Retro Review: Championship Manager 2010” →
Welcome back to this occasional series on Fuller FM, where I look back at a football management PC game from years gone by. I did not write any retro reviews in 2023, but I’m starting off 2024 with another journey back through time.
The game I will be looking at is perhaps the most obscure one I’ve reviewed so far. This shareware title had a small but devoted following when it first came out just over 20 years ago, but has now seemingly disappeared into obscurity.
Well, how about we revisit it now – and perhaps reintroduce it to a new generation of fans? From Germany, this is Andreas Osswald’s Championship Soccer.
Continue reading “Retro Review: Championship Soccer” →
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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