Match incidents – Championship Manager 4

In May 2002, a new football club formed in London in unusual circumstances. The Football League had given approval for the owners of Wimbledon F.C. to move the club more than fifty miles away to Milton Keynes, taking its name, league position and official history with them. This unusual and reviled choice saw many rival fans dub the eventually renamed Milton Keynes Dons as ‘Franchise FC’. Back in Wimbledon, fans set up AFC Wimbledon from scratch as an alternative, holding open trials for players to start life in the ninth tier of English football. Since then, AFC Wimbledon have climbed to the same league level to Milton Keynes Dons. The AFC isn’t officially short for anything, but some have gone with A Fans’ Club.

Within days of forming, AFC Wimbledon gained sponsorship from Sports Interactive, the developers of the Championship Manager series, a relationship which has continued ever since. Sports Interactive associating themselves with fan power and a football good news story made a lot of sense. When the deal was made, I wonder if the brothers who founded the company and coded the first Championship Manager games in their bedroom already had an inkling that they were soon going to live out a parallel story to AFC Wimbledon’s.

About a year later, Championship Manager 4 became the UK’s fastest-selling PC game of all time. It was also, as acknowledged by many involved, a disaster. Alongside the Championship Manager series’s reputation as a football nerd’s dream, and increasingly as a definitive source of informative data, its success had been built on solid reliability. The games might share significant qualities with a spreadsheet, but it was a spreadsheet that worked. The same could not be said for Championship Manager 4, rushed out to an arbitrary deadline in a state of buggy unreadiness. “We totally overreached ourselves,” co-creator Paul Collyer told Retro Gamer more recently.

The nature of playing old PC games, where patches to help them work on modern machines get mixed with old patches to fix problems (because of the assumption that people would rather play something that works better), mean that it’s more difficult to get the experience of playing them exactly as they were. The version of Championship Manager 4 that I played was in a different, better state. Nonetheless, even before reading about its poor reputation, I noticed some issues. 

There weren’t any major crashes, but it was things like a player scoring four goals in a match and the timing for the final goal disappearing off the score listing. In other cases the scoreboard changed to show a goal before the associated commentary, a big slip-up for a series whose sense of timing is generally impeccable. The fact that Thierry Henry scored as many as 11 goals in my first 6 league games also stretched credulity in a different way than I was used to from Championship Manager, as nice as it was to imagine that it was my superb leadership that was propelling him to such heights.

Alongside its flaws, the other issue was that Championship Manager 4, for all that it was a significant rebuild, was a less obvious step change than Championship Manager 2 and Championship Manager 3. It does have an even greater increase in detail. When I searched for players who I might be able to sign for free, and found a familiar name in the then-16-years-old James Milner, all of the info regarding the different compensation and contract types that would be applicable to such a young player was impressive. The game continued to expand on the world and the actions you could take in it.

The biggest change, though, was in finally breaking out from text alone and giving a graphical representation of matches as you manage them. This consists of different coloured circles with numbers in them moving around a top-down view of the pitch. Matching this up to the commentary was, I’m sure, not an easy task. And the match view is an improvement on the similar top-down match engines of football management games like Ultimate Soccer Manager (1995). But it’s not that much of an improvement that it can revolutionise the superb pacing and tension of Championship Manager 3’s peerless text engine. Getting a 2D match engine in place at the expense of basic timing issues was representative of a misplaced sense of priorities somewhere in the making of the game.

By the time Championship Manager 4 came out, Sports Interactive’s relationship with publisher Eidos had irrevocably broken down. They put out one superior yearly update, and then left for good. Eidos retained the rights to the name, free to put out its own Franchise FC versions of Championship Manager. And Sports Interactive started off anew, hoping to take the fans with them to a newly formed Football Manager series. In some ways the situation was the reverse of AFC Wimbledon and MK Dons — there was no league membership to advantage Eidos, and, unlike the disputed club’s football players, the staff actually responsible for making Championship Manager games went with the newcomer. Sports Interactive were not bedroom coders any more. Narratively, though, they set the stage perfectly for a battle of the grassroots football fans against corporate overreach. From then on, more than ever, this would be A Fans’ Series.

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Top of the charts for week ending 29 March 2003:

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Top of the charts for week ending 5 April 2003:

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