Championship Manager 01/02

Championship Manager: Season 01/02 was released 25 years ago today.

The final game of the classic CM3 era, this was also the last version before Sports Interactive made the big leap towards adding a 2D match engine. For many people, it offers the perfect balance between playability and depth – not too shallow, not too much pointless fluff.

CM01/02 remains hugely popular to this day – getting regular data updates, and even new patches that add more leagues and new tournament formats.

Oddly enough, I never really got into CM01/02 – instead preferring to stick with its predecessors Championship Manager: Season 00/01 and Championship Manager: Season 99/00. Then, in the summer of 2021, I decided to write a new Championship Manager story, titled “25 Years”.

Starting at Dagenham & Redbridge in the Conference, I would chronicle my virtual manager’s journey over the course of 25 years – from July 2001 up until the end of the 2025/2026 season. As the story progressed, I would also include regular updates from the wider game world, as well as references to real-life events – from the September 11 attacks, right up to the rise and fall (and rise again) of a certain tangerine man-baby.

I ran the game on a fully-patched copy of CM01/02, but with some extra user-made patches to improve long-term playability. I used a heavily edited version of the Luessenhoff database, which expanded the database to over 100,000 players – including a 14-year-old Lionel Messi in Barcelona’s C team.

I began posting my story on the SI forums back in October 2021 and eventually completed it in July of this year. This adventure took in five clubs, over 1,200 competitive matches, and more tantrums and overpowered goalkeepers than any sane football manager could handle.

Now that the story is finished, I am ready to share it with you in its full glory. I have uploaded the story as six separate PDF files, all of which are completely free to download. The main story is split into five ‘parts’ consisting of five seasons apiece, and the final part is an epilogue, which also includes various facts, statistics, and biographies of the main players.

To celebrate this story’s official induction into the Fuller FM archives, I have posted the prologue below. If you want to read more, you can find links to the full 1,874-page story underneath that.

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Football Manager 26 has been out for a few weeks, and… mmm, yeah. It’s still a mess, isn’t it?

While many FMers are still wrestling with the new interface or complaining that their favourite franchise has been turned into a mobile game, some will be looking for something else to play. But I know what you’re gonna say: “FM has no competition.”

Yes, it’s true that Sports Interactive don’t have as much direct competition as they did in the 1990s and early 2000s. FIFA Manager, LMA Manager, Ultimate Soccer Manager, Premier Manager and even Ally McCoist’s Director of Football have all fallen by the wayside – emphatically beaten by FM’s superior game engine and extensive database.

These days, if you’re looking for a non-FM football management game on PC, you will likely have to scrape the bottom of the Steam barrel for low-budget indie titles that don’t have anywhere near as much depth.

But there are still some good FM26 alternatives that allow you to play through the 2025/2026 season (or 2024/2025, at least) with a reasonable amount of realism. In this post, I will look at seven of those games – each with their pros and cons – and tell you how you can update them with all the latest data.

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Tag: Championship Manager 01/02

25 Years: A Championship Manager 01/02 Story

Alternatives to Football Manager 26