How Championship Manager Created A Legacy

Sport-related video games are big business. FIFA, for example, is one of the biggest video gaming franchises in the world with 325 million sales. Pro Evolution Soccer, NBA 2K, Madden NFL – all popular too.

For those gamers who prefer managing to playing, various games allow you to do so. Football Manager is probably the most famous – certainly in the UK, at least – but before FM, there was Championship Manager, still a cultural icon.

Championship Manager began life in 1992. It was created by the Collyer brothers, Paul and Oliver, in their bedroom in rural Shropshire, near the small market town of Church Stretton. They founded the company Sports Interactive in 1994, with CM 93/94 the first installment to be released under SI. 

Championship Manager 2 and 3 followed while Championship Manager: Season 03/04 became the final CM game developed by SI. In 2003, SI split with Eidos, the game’s publisher. Eidos kept the name and interface, but SI kept the database and match engine. 

Eidos kept making Championship Manager games, developed by Beautiful Game Studios, while Sports Interactive created Football Manager. Gradually, the sales of CM began to fall drastically under the sales of FM, with the last version being CM 2010. 

Keeping The Game Alive

There has been a revival of sorts. Square Enix Europe, who bought Eidos, relaunched the series under the name Champ Man in 2013, and since then has released five games for iOS and Android. 

But for most fans, Championship Manager is something they associate with the 1990s and early 2000s. And, in particular, CM 01/02 has become a cult classic. Available on Windows, Mac, and Xbox, it sold over 300,000 copies in the UK. 

The graphics of 01/02 weren’t a particular improvement, but there were plenty of new features for fans to enjoy. They included the ability to send players off for surgery, attribute masking, the new transfer system regulated by the European Union, and better interaction with the media and your club’s owners. 

In 2008, the game was released as freeware, and it’s still regularly updated another 15 years on. On the ChampMan0102.net forum, contributors still offer new patches and updates, with various new additions. It boasts over 80,000 members in total, all of whom are united by one thing: a football management game that’s over two decades old. 

There are several Facebook groups where fans can congregate and discuss tactics and transfers too, with the most popular boasting over 25,000 and 20,000 members respectively. An awful lot of posts are from people who have rediscovered the game in their thirties or forties and trying to juggle soaking in the nostalgia with being a parent and a spouse. 

A Family Affair

One fan, Stuart Danton, told me that he got into Championship Manager when he was 15, and his brother upgraded his Amiga computer and he received the older version, complete with CM 96/97 and CM Italia. “I didn’t leave my bedroom for about 18 months,” he jokes to me. 

It definitely seems to be something that brothers pass down. George Osborn, the creator of Video Games Industry Memo, says that his brother told him about CM when he was about nine or ten. “At the time, that blew my mind,” he explains, “I’d played my fair share of Sensi, the early FIFAs, and even some International Superstar Soccer, each of which had light management opportunities.

“So when he introduced me to Championship Manager 00/01, it was like being shown into a completely new world … The thing that captivated me when I look back is how perfectly it blends the power and powerlessness of football management. Meticulously building a squad, carefully developing your match tactics and then watching in horror as a mid-table side blasts three past your cavalcade of elite footballers was in many ways horrifying.”

Football writer David Black, who runs the CM9798 blog and has written two CM books, says, “My first Championship Manager was CM 2 which I got for Christmas in 1996, so I must have been eight. I wasn’t very good at it but, having played a lot of management games on an old hand-me-down Amstrad 64, I was besotted with the level of detail. 

“At that time football was the number one interest. It was the Entertainers-era Newcastle team and we’d just had Euro ‘96 so I was watching any bit of football I could find. Football Italia was therefore crucial viewing on a Sunday and trying to sign the players making the papers James Richardson so eloquently translated for us became a fun game in itself.

Pinpointing Championship Manager’s Appeal?

But, with Football Manager and football itself progressing so much over the past two decades, it got us wondering how Championship Manager created a legacy and what the source of its appeal is? The modern editions of FM are detailed, intricate masterpieces that allow you to control almost everything and find players from all corners of the world. 

But perhaps that’s the problem. Football Manager is such a complex game now that it can take days of play to complete a season – and that’s if you have the time to dedicate whole evenings to playing.

When you’re at work all day, and then there’s housework, childcare, exercise, and socialising to think about, FM can, simply, be too time-consuming. Sure, if you’re off sick, you’ve got the house to yourself for the weekend, or you’re 16 and you’ve got the whole summer to do nothing, FM is great. 

But for the more casual player, perhaps the parent who plays for an hour or two a few evenings a week, there’s too much to think about. You want to actually make it through a few seasons without the game taking over your life. 

Reminiscing Over A Simpler Time

Osborn plays FM now but describes the “purity” of Championship Manager as something that he misses. “Objectively, modern Football Manager is a vastly superior game to CM 01/02. It has evolved into a proper beast of a game, bringing the whole world of football management to life in such a convincing and credible way that it is literally changing the sport it based itself on,” he says. 

But then, Osborn says he feels like FM 2024 has “morphed into Line Manager 2024: The HR Special Edition,” with the press conferences, discussions with players, and team meetings. He describes CM as “much leaner.” 

He continues, “The tightly wound core loop of ‘buy players, set up your team, play matches, cry a bit, get sacked, turn off the PC and try never to play it again’ is why I love the series and something that I do miss from the current game.”

Many fans of CM seem to share these sorts of sentiments. It’s a combination of CM being less intense and complex, but also football back then being more simple. 

Black says that he always tries the new editions of Football Manager, often when he has some spare time away from work over the festive period. “I’ve just finished a season on FM 2024 and I enjoyed it, but I am filled with dread about tackling the close season as I know I’ll have to put lots of time in to find the right players and strike the right deals,” he explains. “Sadly, it’s time I don’t really have which is why I spend most of my time playing Championship Manager 97/98 or other old versions of the series.”

Between running the blog, which he’s done for nine years now, as well as balancing work and parenting, FM isn’t something he has time for. “If I was a student, I would love Football Manager,” he says. “I got through a lot of FM 2006-08 during my student years but the game has evolved so much even since then. With my current lifestyle, I prefer Championship Manager. I can get through a lot of action, both in terms of playing matches and signing players, in a single sitting.”

Seeing A Different Side Of Football

As well as the iconic red box, Osborn explains that he views Championship Manager as arriving at the perfect time both for football and for football video games. Now, with the ubiquity of social media and video-sharing platforms, it can feel as though we know everything about the sport. We’ve been there, done that, listened to the podcast. 

“When CM 01/02 came out, the world was different,” explains Osborn. “Aside from the UK’s brief dalliance with Italian football culture, the world of football felt more distant and mysterious. You didn’t know who the next big thing was, you were waiting for World Cups to learn about superstars and most football clubs thought the only data that mattered was how many pints a player had managed to sink the previous weekend.”

He says that Championship Manager helped you see football differently. There would be quirks-players who were world-class in-game but didn’t reach the same heights in the real world, and world-class players IRL making surprise transfer moves at the end of their careers – but it changed the way we view the sport. 

Raising A New Generation Of Managers

Osborn explains, “The breadth and accuracy of its in-game player data widened the horizons of everyone who sat behind a PC playing it. The depth of its metrics raised a generation of football fans who looked beyond the eye test to ask what impact a specific player or a manager’s tactical approach had on the game. And the narrative possibilities it offered players – ranging from realistic rags to riches tales to those outlandish examples listed above – glued all of the best bits of the game together into the most compelling “water cooler chat” game for football fans.”

Likewise, Danton, who has “dabbled” with Football Manager but always goes back to its predecessor, praises it for its “simplicity, game engine, and playability.” He mentions iconic players like Maxim Tsigalko and Mike Duff, who are by no means household names outside of the fandom, as well as the fictional Tó Madeira – who was actually created by a scout for the game. And then, of course, the players who non-CM aficionados are familiar with like, like Taribo West and Pep Guardiola, who seems to be a half-decent manager himself these days too.

Black began playing the 97/98 edition of the game almost a decade ago when his laptop was struggling to play the recent FM releases. He’d been playing 97/98 and 01/02 at the same time as he was getting into football writing – and ended up bringing them together.

He explains, “I’d spoken to some friends about some of the mad stuff that happened on my 97/98 game as we reminisced about playing it together as kids, and I thought maybe I could write about this. It became a way to build a Twitter following so my work on actual football could be seen which worked to an extent, but my Championship Manager work was always way more popular and ended up spawning a couple of books so I focused my attention on it more.”

The blog became particularly popular during lockdown, “when people had free time for the first time since 1997, it felt like,” which encouraged Black and the other writers involved to run challenges and activities for readers. 

Taking The Game Online

Indeed, a huge part of how Championship Manager created a legacy, certainly now, must be the online communities that have sprung up around it. There’s Black’s blog, there’s the forum, and there are the Facebook groups. I joined the two biggest Facebook groups to get people’s views, and one thing for sure is that people love discussing Championship Manager.

One player described it as “the pinnacle of gaming excellence, offering enthusiasts an enduring and unparalleled gaming experience,” while another praised it because you “don’t need a UEFA B Licence to understand it.”

Others echoed the sentiment that it harks back to a simpler time. “It’s definitely a nostalgia trip,” one said. “It very much reflects a simpler, purer time in football. Once the [previous Chelsea FC owner Roman] Abramovich money came into the UK in 2003 it changed everything. The days of finding gems in the lower divisions and building them up started to disappear as it all became about buying success and that’s just continued.”

A mix of nostalgia and simplicity – it’s easy to see why it’s so popular now, and why it was popular at the time, too. “I was utterly captivated from the moment I started playing and have never really looked back since,” says Osborn. Meanwhile, Danton concludes, “I’ve now been playing this game in various formats for 28 years and I’m still not bored of it. I’m not sure if I ever will be!”