Changing stadium and player names in Football Manager

As great a game as Football Manager is, some of the generated stadium names are a bit naff, aren’t they? If new stadia aren’t named after club legends (e.g. Alf Ramsey Park for Ipswich), they are usually given totally uninspired monikers (such as the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium… oh, hang on a minute).

Of course, these new stadiums can be renamed using FM’s in-game editor or a third-party program such as FMRTE. But what if you don’t want to fork out for an in-game editor – or, like me, you have absolutely no interest in using one?

Fortunately, there is a cheap alternative that is quite easy to learn, though some of you might not be too familiar with it.

If you use a real-name fix (such as the one on Sortitoutsi), you will probably know about LNC files, which are just text files with a different file extension. They can easily be created and edited using a basic text-editing program such as Notepad (on Windows) or TextEdit (on Mac).

LNC files allow you to change the names of any stadia in your game, as well as any people, competitions, clubs, and even nations. One of the great things about them is that they can take effect in existing save games as well as new ones. Continue reading “Changing stadium and player names in Football Manager”

Keeping your save files safe in Football Manager

Those are the seven words every Football Manager player dreads reading. We’ve all been there. You’re 20 seasons into your FM career and are about to lead Blyth Spartans into their first Champions League Final when you realise – to your horror – that the save file has been corrupted.

My worst experiences with this date back to Football Manager 2007. A career with Millwall in League One corrupted within a few in-game months, and I also lost an Arsenal save shortly after winning the League Cup with them. On both occasions, I didn’t have any backups to – pardon the pun – fall back on.

Once bitten, twice shy. Twice bitten, third time determined to never let it happen ever again. I have always taken precautions from FM11 onwards, and I haven’t had a single save game corrupt on me since.

I hope this guide helps you to back up your own Football Manager careers and protect them against corruption (that’s the data file kind, not the Manchester City kind):

Continue reading “Keeping your save files safe in Football Manager”

Football Manager and Me: Part 2

It’s hard to believe that I have been playing Football Manager (or Championship Manager, as it was) for nearly two decades. I was eight years old when I first set out to prove myself as a virtual Arsene Wenger, and I’m still going now as I near my thirties.

My love affair with CM/FM, like any relationship, has had its peaks and troughs. I’ll go through some of the trials and tribulations I’ve had on this game since I was introduced to Championship Manager 3 during the 1998/1999 season.

I should note that I have retrospectively played the original Championship Manager (released way back in 1992), CM2, and CM97/98 since I started out with CM3. I shall not be recounting those earlier games in this article, though I may look back at them in the future.

In this second part, I will chronicle my experiences from Football Manager 2011 – which got me back into the series after an anger-induced break – to the recently-released FM19. You can read Part 1 here. Continue reading “Football Manager and Me: Part 2”

Football Manager and Me: Part 1

It’s hard to believe that I have been playing Football Manager (or Championship Manager, as it was) for nearly two decades. I was eight years old when I first set out to prove myself as a virtual Arsène Wenger, and I’m still going now as I near my thirties.

My love affair with CM/FM, like any relationship, has had its peaks and troughs. I’ll go through some of the trials and tribulations I’ve had on this game since I was introduced to Championship Manager 3 during the 1998/1999 season.

I should note that I have retrospectively played the original Championship Manager (released way back in 1992), CM2, and CM97/98 since I started out with CM3. I shall not be recounting those earlier games in this article, though I may look back at them in the future.

In this first part, I will chronicle my experiences from the Championship Manager 3 demo to Football Manager 2008 – a game so buggy that it almost killed my enthusiasm for this franchise completely. Continue reading “Football Manager and Me: Part 1”

Shades of Deep Purple: Preview

The Football Manager 2019 beta is now live! That means I will be launching my first FM19 story – “Shades of Deep Purple” – very soon on Fuller FM. Over the course of that save, I will aim to restore Fiorentina to their former glories in Serie A and Europe.

To whet your appetite, let me take you on a mini-tour through Florence – and the history of ACF Fiorentina – before giving you a taster of what’s to come. This will be quite a long post, so you might want to get yourself a snack first. Continue reading “Shades of Deep Purple: Preview”

Welcome to Fuller FM

Welcome to Fuller FM – a new blog dedicated to football management PC games, and in particular the award-winning ‘Football Manager’ series.

Before I go on, I’ll quickly introduce myself. My name is Christopher Fuller, but you can call me Chris for short. I am a 28-year-old from north-east London, and I have supported Arsenal for two decades. More importantly, as far as this site goes, I have been playing Football Manager – or Championship Manager, as it used to be – since the CM3 era in the late 1990s.

For most of my CM/FM life, I have always wanted to write and tell stories about my adventures in management. This passion I have for storytelling has grown more serious over the last few years, and in 2014, I started publishing my work on the official Sports Interactive forums. Some of you may know me there as CFuller.

My stories have developed a strong following in the ‘FM Stories’ section of the SI Community, and have been nominated for (and even won) the sub-forum’s annual awards. Now, though, I feel that it’s time to take my exploits to a wider audience. That is where this blog comes in. Continue reading “Welcome to Fuller FM”