Is this thing still on?
Hey, folks. It’s been a while. Anyway, here’s another Fuller FM ‘Retro Review’ – and this one is kind of a special request.
Today, we shall be going back to the innocent heady days of 2007, when a war-mongering Republican was in the White House, a team from the Midlands was hopelessly stinking out the Premier League, and Football Manager was an unplayable mess. Good times.
So sit back and enjoy this retrospective review of Championship Manager 2008…
BACKGROUND
After parting ways with Sports Interactive in 2003, publishers Eidos kept hold of the Championship Manager brand name, which they would use in a new football management game. Developed in North London by Beautiful Games Studios, Championship Manager 5 was released in March 2005 to a disappointed reaction. Nonetheless, the flagging CM franchise soldiered on for another four PC releases before becoming a mobile-exclusive game in the 2010s.
A couple of years ago, I revisited Championship Manager 2010 – the final CM game to be released on PC. Despite having a largely pretty user interface, I said it was a “poorly-executed mess” with a farcical match engine and bizarre AI logic. In short, this was an even more obvious franchise killer than Football Manager 26.
I had no plans to review any of the earlier Championship Manager games published by Eidos and developed by BGS. That was until early last year, when I received a message from a fella in Switzerland named Sven, who put forward his case that the BGS series was “extremely underrated”.
Sven recommended that I should test either Championship Manager 2007 or Championship Manager 2008, saying that that the earlier games “concentrate on the essentials without getting lost in unnecessary details”. In terms of the 2007 release, he said the “user interface takes some getting used to but the game is extremely fun”.
Thank you for the message, Sven. I’m only too happy to take up that offer. Just before Steam’s Christmas sale, I bought CM07 for the low, low price of 59 pence, and then loaded it up for the first time on New Year’s Day.
I lasted 20 minutes before I had to stop. Basically, there was a game-breaking UI bug that filled nine of the positions in my starting line-up with the goalkeeper (and two with my right-back). This made even basic squad selection a laborious process, so my only choice was to reset and quick pick my team before every single match – and that just wouldn’t cut it for me.
So instead, I’m going to play Championship Manager 2008. We’re in the 2007/2008 season, where José Mourinho has just had his triennial nervous breakdown at Chelsea, and Steve McClaren is about to become a national laughing stock. Meanwhile, my relationship with SI has hit its lowest ebb – one which would not be surpassed for another 18 years.
I really did not enjoy Football Manager 2008. Just like its predecessor Football Manager 2007, FM08 was incredibly unstable, with my saves frequently corrupting before I could complete a single season. In fact, it was such an awful experience that it put me off playing Football Manager again until 2011.
In hindsight, should I have bought Championship Manager 2008 instead? Let’s find out, shall we?
STARTING OUT
CM08 allows you to load up to 64 leagues in 27 nations, with the English pyramid going as far down as the Conference North/South. If you don’t want to have every league playable, you can just select the leagues you want and then (optionally) have the remaining leagues simulated in the background.
You also have a limited number of preferences that you can change to improve your experience. The game rates player attributes on a 1-100 scale by default, though you can change this to 1-20 if you wish.
When adding your manager to a club, you can tick an option to be a “Club Benefactor”, thus giving yourself a larger transfer budget to play with. As tempting as it was to pump a load of oil money into Grays Athletic in the Conference National, I had to resist. After all, why spend millions on Robinho when I can just bring in future Sutton United legend Bedsenté Gomis on a free transfer instead?
One new feature that BGS liked to make a big deal about was its Prozone analysis tool, giving feedback on how your players performed in a match. Back in 2007, Prozone was still considered groundbreaking technology – but on CM08, it is about as insightful and informative as Jamie Redknapp. You can probably just ignore it.
If you have played Championship Manager before (either the SI original or the later BGS versions), setting up a tactic is pretty straightforward. Just be aware that you will have to confirm any tactical changes you’ve made before you can change your starting line-up, even if you’ve only tweaked a single role or instruction. This can get a little annoying after a while.
WHAT I LIKED
Well, for one thing, CM08 was much more stable than FM08 – at least from my experience. I never encountered any crashes or corrupted saves throughout this review.
The match engine looks pretty decent for its time. The 3D engine is obviously not as pretty as CM10’s – the players are represented by peg-like characters with bobbing heads – but it’s also not as frustrating to watch. Whenever players make mistakes or produce moments of magic, they feel more natural than it did on CM10, where basically every match felt like a Sunday League game.
AI managers also seem a fair bit smarter – and more tactically flexible. Admittedly, this flexibility can get a bit overboard. I’ve seen opposition managers go for an all-out attacking 2-2-4 when chasing a game, or switching to an impenetrable 5-4-1 when seeing a lead out. Of course, my simple 4-4-2 was usually enough to beat most teams, even if my wingers tended to get worse ratings than a James Blunt album.
I also like the visual indicators that show you when your players are high or low on confidence, or when they’re struggling for fitness. If you see the magic sponge next to a player, get them off ASAP. They’re knackered.
Another neat feature I like is that you can customise exactly which highlights you see. This is particularly handy if – for some reason – you don’t want to watch any goals but are obsessed with seeing each of your opponents’ free-kicks. You can even set different speeds for highlights and the matches themselves.
WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE
It’s one thing having a user interface that is basic and simple to use. It’s another thing having a UI that looks basic and simple. CM08’s UI looks basic.
For one thing, it uses the Arial font (which I call the “Wonderwall” of typefaces, in that it’s an undeniable classic that has been gradually ruined by ubiquity). This only adds to my feeling that I could probably knock up something like this on Microsoft Paint in half an hour.
But in practice, what should be an intuitive interface is undermined by buttons that either don’t make it clear what they represent… or that are so small and blend into the background so well that it’s very easy to miss them. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it took me five minutes just to find the option to edit my tactics during a match!
Squad-building is a bit of a faff, which isn’t helped by the fact your scouts can only scout one player at a time. I had to resort to taking a load of random free agents on trial and hoping that at least some of them would be good enough and cheap enough. This started to feel like an exploit when I found a former Austria international who was happy to join Grays on just £100 per week (sadly, I couldn’t sign him because I was over my wage budget).
There’s also the usual array of annoying little things that add up to a generally odd experience. Stuff like the same player getting concussed twice in one day, or Cambridge United appointing some random bloke from the Netherlands Antilles as their new manager.
One particularly silly bug I encountered quite often was that some substitutions I made at half-time wouldn’t actually go through. If that bug sounds familiar, it’s probably because that was also a pretty common issue with Football Manager 26. Funny, that.
Even worse was when my Grays team beat Exeter in the Conference Premier Play-Off Final to secure promotion. The game barely even noticed the achievement. There were no post-match celebrations, and only a simple message from the club’s board saying “well done for beating Exeter”. I couldn’t help but feel a bit short-changed.
WE MUST TALK ABOUT…
Team talks. Yeah. I’m gonna talk about team talks.
Whether it’s at kick-off, half-time or full-time, you are only given a narrow choice of team talks, which usually follow this formula:
Option 1: “You’re all disgraces and your mothers should be ashamed of you.”
Option 2: “Good luck.” / “You can win this.” / “Good effort.”
Option 3: Same as Option 2, but with different words.
Option 4: Say nothing.
Some options don’t even make sense. “On paper, this should be a draw. But games aren’t won on paper,” reads like Alan Partridge trying to be Ron Manager.
Individual player talks basically boil down to “You are terrible”, “You are great” and “You are alright”. A bit more variety here would be appreciated.
It’s at least reassuring that different personalities can react differently to the same talks. Some of my players responded better to sympathetic or encouraging messages, while others needed firing up. I can get a good sense of all the different characters in my squad, which isn’t always the case in football management games.
SUMMARY
Championship Manager 2008 was a very frustrating game to play at times – and it wasn’t just down to the messy UI, either. My Gray team would switch from being utterly unbeatable for one month, to being borderline useless for the next month, and then back again just in time to win the play-offs.
And yet, on balance, I actually found this to be a better game than Championship Manager 2010. The match experience feels smoother and more fluid, and the game itself strikes a pretty good balance between simplicity and realism.
So this, then, was perhaps the pinnacle of latter-day Championship Manager. That’s not saying much, but it’s praise all the same.
FULLER FM RATING: 2.5* – Football League.
Thank you for reading this retro review. There are a couple of newer football games that I will be checking out over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more reviews soon.
In the meantime, if there are any other football management games you’d like me to check out in the future, you can contact me on Threads or Bluesky.
Fuller FM 
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