I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of football and then asked it to write a script of its own. Well, I didn’t, but I’m sort of surprised I haven’t seen one of those yet. Perhaps it’s because computer-generated football matches were already perfected in 1996, in Championship Manager 2.
Championship Manager 2 has a lot of improvements over previous versions. It’s still relentlessly text-based and minimalist, but offers a bit more help. The method of assigning players to positions that I hated is replaced with a far simpler drag-and-drop mechanism that makes changing tactics splendidly straightforward. Left click and drag to move where a player will be on the pitch, and right click and drag to set up the movements you want them to make more of. Done. Little three letter text boxes in different colours next to players’ names in your squad give you key info like if they’re injured or subject to interest from other clubs. The transfer search remains complex, but is now more powerful than awkward. Feedback about what is happening is better in general, while still using the simplicity of the marks out of ten for each player. That’s all nice, but nothing compared to its central achievement. The Championship Manager 2 match engine is what transforms it from just another football management game with some unique ideas into a magical story machine.
What happens in a match is conveyed through a line of text at a time in a single box across the screen, with text and background in the colours of whichever team is in action at that point. The background turns yellow and red for yellow and red cards. In the original Championship Manager, goals appeared out of nowhere. In the sequel, every one comes at the end of some kind of sequence of tension being ratcheted up and down. The text talks about passes and balls forward, and sometimes they get blocked, but sometimes they lead to a chance, and sometimes that goes further. The prose is spare but evocative, full of spiralling crosses and defenders hacking the ball away. The player’s imagination can take full advantage of the minimalism to fill in the gaps.
Every line opens up multiple possibilities, and even when individual events recur they never come into the same sequence. And it comes with an exquisite sense of rhythm which makes every one feel like it was written rather than generated. Different lines get displayed for different lengths of time, the tension of a penalty conveyed with a longer wait, for instance. Only a goal closes things down for good. When a team scores a goal, it’s marked by all caps and the text box flashing rapidly. This simple break in rigidity communicates the shattering narrative impact of a goal more than any number of early FIFA scoreboard animations.
You take decisions, you see them reflected at the same time as being at the mercy of the winds of fortune, and stories keep on emerging out of it all. I couldn’t manage to find a playable version of the standard Championship Manager 2 that I played back in the day so I went with the version based on the Spanish league, and took charge at Sevilla on a whim. One positive of this choice was that every time I read ‘First Half From Sanchez Pizjuan’ at the bottom of the screen during a home match, it was enough to start me picturing imaginary Sid Lowe articles about my management. The other was that my squad included legendary Croatian striker Davor Suker. I set my team up to play a direct style, on the basis that getting the ball to Suker as soon as possible was a good move, and coupled that with a 4-4-2 to lean into the stereotypical Englishness that a time-travelling Sid and the Spanish press would doubtless be putting on me anyway. And soon, I was the proud recipient of the Primera División Manager of the Month awards for December 1995 and January 1996. More importantly, I had more than enough enjoyable stories developing to keep me playing on until a whole season had gone by in no time at all.
One of the great things about Championship Manager 2 and its approach is that it extends what I previously called (with thanks to Douglas Adams) the perspective vortex. It makes you feel like all of the other football teams out there are going about their own thing and being treated with the same importance as you. You can click and see anyone else’s squad or graph of league position across the season just as easily as that of the team you’re managing. You are just there putting in your small small decisions in a big big world.
After a positive Suker-powered start to the season, the game told me that he had played in a European Championship qualifier for Croatia, and asked if I wanted to look at the match report. I did so. He was taken off injured one minute into the match. This didn’t feel like the game picking on me and carrying out a planned scenario, but like something that emerged from it putting the match through its generator. It could just have easily been any another manager facing two months without their player, and adapting to the winds of chance is so much more interesting than the alternative.
Transfers are one of the biggest chances to influence your team, and the new straightforward system makes it a fun thing to do. I could see that I was missing a central midfielder for my desired setup — De la Fuente Marcos was excellent at holding things together in front of the defence but I needed someone to go in front of him. A few matches into the season I looked for who was available with the highest average rating so far and bought Josu Urrutia from Bilbao, who was from then on an essential part of pretty much everything we did. On the other hand, you could do what I did to replace my underperforming goalkeeper, which was to look at who was available and buy Rene Higuita on a whim. There was no reasoning to it beyond him being Rene Higuita, memorable Colombian goalkeeper, and me not having heard of anyone else. That didn’t seem to work out too badly either; if there’s one complaint about Championship Manager 2 it’s that it leans slightly towards being too easy. I have yet to discover if your goalkeeper saving the ball via scorpion kick is a possible line in the match commentary.
Another part of my team that I looked to upgrade was the right side of midfield, where my main initial option was Rafa Paz, DM R. That means right-sided defensive midfielder, which was not good for a formation where I needed my wide midfielders to be attacking-minded. DM R is a weird concept in general, actually, like has the dude never considered just being a right back? He couldn’t be much worse at that. Anyway, £2.7m purchase Antonio Tejero was a superior and versatile replacement, right up until I got to a cup game against the mighty Real Madrid. They had recently destroyed us in our league meeting and for the cup game Trevejo was ineligible, so I had to resort to bringing back Paz, dreading an even worse result. Except Paz was, suddenly, magnificent, and crucial to us winning over two legs. Playing against a much superior opponent with the upper hand, his defensive instincts turned into an asset at last.
Finally, there is the curious case of Luis Tevenet. At the start of the season I tried out different second strikers alongside Suker. None of them got good ratings so I tried buying in a new one called Ricky, who didn’t fare any better. Luis Tevenet outdid the others in at least scoring a couple of goals, so I kept him around, hoping he might play himself into form. What happened instead was that he kept getting average ratings at best… and kept scoring goals. Even when we were playing to our max and annihilating Sporting Gijon 4-0, the enigmatic Tevenet would be the one player in the team sitting on 6/10 amidst a chain of 8s and 9s. But he kept getting goals, and crucial winning ones, too. He was our top scorer right up until Suker came back from injury and scored four goals in one match.
It again says something about the successful immersion of Championship Manager 2 that I thought only of looking for Watsonian explanations for Tevenet rather than Doylian ones like, say, the rating system being broken. Looking at Tevenet’s stats I felt I could make sense of him as a player. He was rated 20/20 for shooting but only 8/20 for positioning. My working theory is that his ratings reflected that he was useless at evading defenders to get himself in position to have a chance to score, or to be of use to the team more generally. Meanwhile, the one time a match when the ball fell into his path, he could use his shooting skills to almost guarantee a goal. I rarely read a commentary line about Tevenet missing, after all.
As you might have noticed, I became rather attached to Tevenet and his teammates. That’s what Championship Manager 2 does, in my experience. Even from a distance of decades, with a bunch of players in another country who mean little to me (Davor Suker aside), it worked its narrative magic. Later games in the series would add more detail, to the match engine and plenty else, and would increase the detail in their stories as a result. From this point there are diminishing returns for added narrative satisfaction versus time invested, though. Championship Manager 2 asks very little, and gives so much in return.
