Championship Manager 3

I have never played a football management game for 1,000 seasons. But I did once play through an entire season as the manager of 16 different Serie A teams in Championship Manager 97/98 simultaneously. At the end of the year I printed out the season’s stats for the squad of each of those teams to consult at my leisure away from the computer. That was the kind of thing the game lent itself to. Getting deep into stats and constructing your own narratives on top of them was something that it rewarded and encouraged. Play as that many teams and you can have even more narrative!

When I got Championship Manager 3, I remember being agog at the fact that a full install took up more than a gigabyte of hard-drive space. The prospect of the kind of detail it offered was incredible. It now offered full simulations of fifteen different leagues from around the world! You could manage in Argentina or Japan! And, unlike in Championship Manager 97/98, you weren’t confined to only having three leagues in full operation at once. So obviously I started a game in which I managed a team in each of those leagues. I think I got about three games into the season before giving up on it.

There are two lessons there. Championship Manager 3 retains the philosophy of its predecessor, down to text-based match commentary which changes little but the font and some added crowd noises. But the level of extra stuff you have to do in the game makes it a good deal more time-consuming. The second lesson is that, as a PC game, its performance was dependent on that of your computer, and in 1999 my family’s aging desktop was definitely not up to the job of running fifteen leagues at once without it becoming a tedious slog. It was barely up to running one at a decent speed. I had some good times with Championship Manager 3, but was never obsessed with it to the same extent as 97/98.

When I came back to Championship Manager 3 with my modern laptop, it was not the same experience. Data-crunching loading times now went by in a superspeed blur. I didn’t go for managing more than one team, but I did set all fifteen leagues running at once, and got the full experience of being a tiny part of a whole world of football. When I was planning transfers for my Arsenal team I could draw on simulated information from every one of those extensively researched leagues. And I had an even better time than on my recent replays of the previous games in the series.

One of the first noticeable things about the big world is how easy it is to navigate. One-and-done news messages are replaced by an inbox, which makes navigating what’s happening much smoother and more helpful. And even more so than in previous editions, almost everything written anywhere is a link. It might not have been connected to the Internet, but it took some of its best ideas. That makes everything from investigating opponents, to making offers on players, to going down research rabbit-holes, very easy to do. Click on a team, click on one of their players, click on their full career history, click on one of their past teams…. Even more helpfully, the little square alert boxes that appear next to the names of your players are now links to the part of that player’s profile that tells you what’s going on. Which can be a lot of different things.

Championship Manager 3 excels again as a football tactical RPG. You get notification of your forthcoming encounters in a fixture list, but you don’t know what kind of status ailments members of your party might be dealing with when you get to them. Alongside the old standard inflictions of injury and suspension are a thoughtful range of others, like sadness (Luis Boa Morte is “finding it hard to adjust to the English lifestyle”), poisoning by low morale, and the dread status of sealed by the government (“Nelson Vivas’s work permit has expired and will not be renewed”). There is so much depth that if the game had forced me to deal with stat debuffs for Dennis Bergkamp for away European games as a result of his fear of flying, it would not have come as a surprise.

Another key area in which Championship Manager 3 excels above rival football RPGs is its jobs system. There are a lot of specific roles, from sweeper to right-sided forward, but each of your players is not confined to just one and many have several. You can even eventually train them into different jobs with the new training options. When you can only make three substitutions a match from a bench of five players, and your active party members can (and will) get struck down with an injury status at any time, players who are hybrids have a lot of advantages. Phillip Cocu was one of my best purchases in part because he could both play well at left-back and act as fine defensive midfield cover for the inevitable suspensions of Patrick Vieira, who started my matches with berserk pre-cast.

All of that plays into one of Championship Manager 3’s big successes, of making each of the players in its world feel more like people. Increased detail on contracts helps that too, along with including real world changes that let players move to a new club for free when their contract has expired. I was a bit slow off the mark to take full advantage of that one at the end of my first season but I still managed to bring in the very effective and only slightly declining Les Ferdinand for free. I told him that he would be part of a squad rotation system in the fun bit where you have to tell each player what their role is going to be and get to shamelessly stretch the truth. Sure, you’ll be a first-team player, definitely. When they get upset once your lies are revealed, it feels more personal than before.

Even the club’s chairperson gains more of an active personality, doing things like stepping in to stop me paying massively over the odds for a young right winger still in need of gaining a lot of experience points. Although Arsenal’s chair didn’t stop the absurd situation where I signed Juan Pablo Ángel on loan from Argentina amidst an injury crisis, only to find that he couldn’t get a work permit (because he was on loan) but I couldn’t cancel the loan, meaning we essentially paid him to take a year off work. I hope he enjoyed it.

Imperfections in the simulation like that certainly show up. I was baffled, if pleased, to receive the Premier League’s manager of the month award in my first August after failing to win a league game, presumably on the basis that my team had bossed the inconsequential Charity Shield. In my first go round at Championship Manager 3 I once got knocked out of Euro 2000 on the basis of alphabetical order, thanks to that order using Éire rather than the Republic of Ireland. Those issues are few and far between enough to be charming, though, an opportunity to take your own stories in the occasional bizarre direction. Championship Manager 3 being this serious and detailed, and built on a story-building engine more remarkable than ever, need not be a contradiction to the fact that football is, after all, a funny old game.