Retro – Page 4 – Fuller FM

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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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 202320 October 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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FM13 In 2022: The Superstars That Weren’t

Published on 11 November 202212 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

It’s time for another trip back in time here on Fuller FM! I will once again be revisiting my long-time Football Manager 2013 save to see how the footballing world looks in the year 2022.

Last time out, we looked at where some of today’s football superstars had ended up 10 seasons into my FM13 universe. Who’d have thought Son Heung-Min would be playing Championship football for Aston Villa?

For today’s article, I’ve found 15 players who developed into world-class talents on FM13, but who never reached those giddy heights in the real world. So where, how and why did it all go wrong for these Football Manager wonderkids?

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FM13 In 2022: The Best Players In The World?

Published on 28 October 202212 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

And now it’s time for something a bit different on Fuller FM. Today, I’ll be revisiting probably my favourite FM game of all time – Football Manager 2013, which just so happens to be celebrating its 10th anniversary next week!

My longest and probably best ever save was on FM13. Starting at my hometown club Romford in the lower reaches of English football, I played on up until 2043, when I led Dagenham & Redbridge to domestic and European glory… but I’m not here to talk about that!

In this mini-series, I’ll be looking at the state of the FM13 game world at the end of the 2021/2022 season, and how things compare to the present day. For the opening installment, I will look at the nominees for this year’s Ballon d’Or, and see what happened to them in this virtual universe…

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CM99/00 Revisited: Fitba’s Coming Home – Part 13

Published on 10 August 202011 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

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Here we are, folks. It’s the 13th and final chapter of my Championship Manager 99/00 series with the Scotland national team. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.

Today’s final chapter sees the Tartan Army co-host Euro 2008, where I hope to cap off my reign with a major trophy. Even a Semi Final would be quite nice.

You can go back to Part 12 if you want to see how we concluded our preparations for the Euros. When you’re ready, let’s jump into the action and see who I’ve brought along with me for the last leg of my international adventure…

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CM99/00 Revisited: Fitba’s Coming Home – Part 12

Published on 7 August 202011 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

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Welcome to the penultimate chapter of my Championship Manager 99/00 series with Scotland. Tensions are rising in the Tartan Army as the 2008 European Championship draws nearer. Today’s chapter will cover the final season of pre-tournament friendlies.

If you want to find out just why Rod Stewart looks so stressed out here, you can revisit the first year of our Euro preparations in Part 11. I don’t want to talk about it.

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CM99/00 Revisited: Fitba’s Coming Home – Part 11

Published on 3 August 202011 July 2026 by Chris Fuller

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My Championship Manager 99/00 series with the Scotland national team is nearing its conclusion. We’ve just played through the 2006 World Cup in England, which you can revisit right here.

Our focus now switches to Euro 2008, where we’ll be attempting to make history on home soil and end my tenure in style. Today’s chapter will cover the first season of our preparations for the European Championship.

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