“Continued to come forward” – Championship Manager 01/02

**Championship Manager 01/02** (Sports Interactive/Eidos, PC, 2001)

At the height of Championship Manager’s success, Sports Interactive found a fine midway between anticipation-generating sequels and seasonal updates, putting out both in a clearly delineated way. Championship Manager 01/02 was the final refinement of Championship Manager 3 before the next sequel. As such it didn’t have a lot that was completely new, besides an update in stats. And as ever, the continuity was part of the appeal.

It’s one of the most lastingly popular versions of the game and keeps receiving fan updates today. In search of new experiences and faced with a choice of 26 different countries in which I could manage (I remember when a mere 9 in Championship Manager 97/98 felt absurdly decadent!), I decided to head to Croatia and take over at NK Dinamo. Stories emerged with the series’s usual understated flourish, and they illustrated the strengths of new tweaks and old familiarity alike.

One of the new things in 01/02 is attribute masking, a neat ‘fog of war’ that means that you do not get to be omniscient as a manager. You have to, say, send your scouts from Croatia to Scotland to get the verdict that a young player there isn’t up to scratch for your team rather than being able to view all the stats of someone your in-world equivalent would probably never have heard of. For getting into the feel of being a manager, though, there are other changes which have a bigger effect.

After an initial run of good results, things started to go against me, and that was when Championship Manager 01/02’s biggest power came to the fore: that of terrible momentum. My players started getting edgy. At first it was about individual issues with competition for places, or their own omission from the team. Then the ‘Unh’ boxes on the squad screen started spreading, with players unhappy about the fact the team was underperforming, a vicious cycle.

Things got worse as the media and ex-managers started chipping in, picking on individual members of my squad, getting them down too. Generally it was the ones who I was already only playing out of lack of alternative. When the supporters staged a protest after an embarrassing defeat, things were all over. All of this was conveyed by the game via fairly terse text, and yet it felt like psychological warfare, and more like the way things go wrong for managers in the real world than ever.

That was great, but not my favourite moment of the game. That was when I started off with an immediate look for out-of-contract players who might be interested in a move to NK DInamo, and saw a familiar name: Davor Suker, now near the end of his career. It wasn’t just real-world knowledge that had me immediately deciding to sign him as player-coach, but his central role in my more successful Sevilla team on my last play of Championship Manager 2. At Dinamo, he didn’t live up to his Sevilla goalscoring record at all, but he was consistently my best player and unruffled by any of the chaos going on around him. And he scored both goals in a tough UEFA cup win after his more prolific young strike partner got himself sent off.

The immediate warmth I felt towards a page of text and stats is a key secret to the ongoing success of the series. By this point it wasn’t just building on a solid foundation of its audience’s love of football, but also their history with Championship Manager.