One morning in my final year of primary school, lined up on the playground for the start of the day as ever, there was an unusual request from the teacher. “Girls, go inside, and boys stay here”. We boys were to receive a lecture on the previous day’s activities. As part of a self-organised Year 5 vs Year 6 football match, we had stolen school equipment, bullied younger children off the playground, and generally behaved disgracefully. We were not to ever do anything like this again. I say “we”, but until that point I had no idea the incident had happened. The teacher quietly acknowledged at the end me and two others, standing there taking this all in, had not been involved. As innocents being subject to the collective punishment stung a little, but it also felt like a small mercy. She hadn’t drawn attention to how we had failed at being boys.
For the whole of my childhood that I can remember, football was a vital part of male social status. You had to like it and to not do so would be weird and suspicious. Maybe even gay. Liking it wasn’t enough, though, and there were additional criteria. First that was in terms of playing it well, and then in terms of making the right gestures with regards to supporting a professional team – humour with a serious edge underneath, passion but not too much passion. You should care but not show it too much. Similarly you should be interested and know stuff, but not too much stuff.
Alongside my lack of physical ability, the point about how to be interested was where I went wrong. It took until I was 20 and living next to Arsenal to form any proper attachment to one team, and my early interest in football was expressed as a voracious interest in facts and detail. Like a lot else in life, I wanted to pin things down to patterns and rules that could be understood. I wanted to know more and more. If it said in a book with the approval of Gary Lineker that it was very important to pass the ball in football, then boys on the playground who weren’t passing the ball were wrong and I could prove it.
Whatever was written down there, however much I could tell you about past World Cup winners and the current club teams of Eastern Europe, it wasn’t enough. All I needed was enough to boisterously express a view on Liverpool’s prospects for the season, but I wasn’t doing anything like that. It was readily apparent to everyone that in football, as in so much, I was failing to meet lots of unwritten social rules. It was no surprise that I was left out of that unapproved school match. It was no surprise that attempts to join in were met with anything from bafflement to cruelty. I was as weird as the boys who weren’t into football at all. If I was alone in primary school, though, I wasn’t set to be for much longer. There were a lot of other (mostly older) people who followed football with an eye for exacting detail. And in Championship Manager, they were to find a paradise.
On the surface it is paradoxical that a series of some of the most complicated games this project will cover should also be one of the most casual. Casual, that is, in the sense of ‘casual gamer’, players not tied down to those immersed in the medium of video games. The most arcane JRPGs or most layered RTSs have nothing on the impenetrability of Championship Manager. I try to picture coming into Championship Manager from a starting point of no relevant knowledge and can only imagine it being incomprehensible. There’s the rub, though. Developers Domark banked on football’s cultural dominance giving them a big enough pool of potential players who wouldn’t be coming to it from a zero starting point, and they got it right. The initial release, without real players or quite the correct leagues, was a success, and by the time they provided a ‘93 update with a more accurate simulation of the new Premier League, it was able to top the Amiga sales charts.
Championship Manager ‘93, for all that it tightens up some aspects of the very first game, is distinctly raw. Selecting a team – a pretty basic task as manager – is an unintuitive mission, involving clicking numbers, clicking players’ names and then working out whether they’re in the right positions. Stacks of options baffle and obfuscate further. None of the actions of management are particularly easy to do. But what it gives you is detail. Information. More of it than you could possibly know what to do with. Look at the entire page of attributes given to each player in your squad. Examine the squads, stats and records of any team in the football league, even ones several divisions away from your own. See all the other teams playing games and making player transfers. Step away from the actions of managing your team any time and look into the clockwork detail of this whole world ticking along. Even the extended loading time when you start a new game feels reassuring as to the depth of the simulation it’s got to work on creating. Like in Elite before it, the sense of immersion in your corner of the Championship Manager universe is enhanced by being able to see the rest of it going about its business without giving a shit about you.
The engine used to display each match to you stands out from other games as well. Championship Manager ‘93 provides a general statement on which team is attacking, stats for attempts on goal, and, if you pause, a constantly updating rating for each player. It doesn’t make any attempt to graphically depict anything happening on the pitch, and instead it just gives a sparse text commentary on notable events. “Goal for Arsenal” will pop up out of nowhere. Or “I. Wright is through on goal” quickly replaced with “But he shoots wide!”. The terse messages provide a much greater sense of atmosphere and colour than any visual engine was capable of in 1993, and possibly greater than any would be in 2019. I can’t imagine any picture’s thousand words competing with the six word story that is “Hendry booked. He said too much.” It trusts in the game’s player to do much of the analysis and weaving of stories themselves, correctly figuring there were many people well versed in that.
Championship Manager’s way of doing things came at just the right time. The success of the Premier League was making football’s cultural dominance ever bigger. The tendency to cite so many football statistics from ‘the Premier League era’ means that anything from twenty-six years ago feels a lot older still. Maybe there’s a parallel with British games history all but swept away after the takeover of bigger ’90s powers. Personally, I have only ever watched football in that era, and grew up playing later editions of Championship Manager. The effect of playing a version of the original game, experiencing one all-conquering franchise placed at the cusp of another, is all a bit Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time. The names of the Arsenal players under my command are a strange mix of the familiar and the not. I vaguely remember the name Anders Limpar, but him getting in a huff and wanting to leave after I fail to pick him proves a surprise.
Just like my team, Championship Manager ‘93 is not quite yet the Championship Manager I remember. It makes the game player’s actions as a manager too limited and difficult and doesn’t fit them as compellingly into its wider simulation. Analysing what is there and seeing small actions pay off, though, is still a great feeling. Looking into everyone’s ratings, trying to make sense of the flow of information and adjust my selection accordingly, I switch Ray Parlour to a more attacking position in my midfield. Watching him then score the opening goal in the next match is a delight. It’s a game that knows how to make you feel clever, and does it by providing you a set of rules, a ton of information, and stepping back to let you take it on from there. It had already targeted its audience; the concept was perfect for me.
By the time I was a few years into secondary school, my approach to football wasn’t such an outlier at all. Maybe some of it was just getting older, but there was a wider cultural change going on too, as the increasing success of Championship Manager suggested. More and more people also played fantasy league competitions that encouraged a data-driven approach to watching football outside of single-team fandom. The spread of the internet and all of its cultural impact was slowly ramping up. And Championship Manager was a regular talking point with friends and classmates. At one point my football knowledge, enthusiasm and lack of skill led to them electing me non-playing captain of our class football team, and while this was largely a joke, it wasn’t a cruel one. I was familiar enough with those to know.
Championship Manager might be a casual game series, but it never seems to be the target of gamer ire directed at ‘non-games’. I’d guess that more Animal Crossing players play regularly play other games alongside that series than Championship Manager ones, but somehow the latter get left out of accusations of ruining things for real gamers. And the simple explanation is that the clear majority of its players are men. It might not fit in to all of the masculine standards of the old playground, but it isn’t ultimately threatening to any of them. It’s the boy standing there in line alongside the other boys, even if it didn’t perform transgression and strength in the same way. In fact, it could easily be absorbed and tied up with the worst of the standards, misogyny and assumed heterosexuality and all. The examination of British adolescent masculinity that is the TV comedy The Inbetweeners gives an illustration. Jay, the one of the leads most characterised by fantasist bravado, is at one point asked about the game and responds in much the same way as all his been-there-done-that sexual boasts. “Championship Manager? Completed it mate.”
The parallel was one which the series’s own marketing has been keen to use. There’s the ad in which a woman in a nightie looks on disapprovingly as her presumed partner excitedly opens his Christmas present of a Championship Manager game. You will have an attractive girlfriend, it says, and you will neglect her to play your football management simulation, because those are the things that men do. And then there’s the even more blatant ad showing spurts of sun cream on a woman’s bare back forming a tactical diagram, under the text “What man doesn’t think about it every 6 seconds?” – masculinity, hetero sex and computer football management brought together in a tighter knot still, with a taunt that there is something wrong with you if you don’t fit them.
Looking back at that morning standing in the playground, receiving someone else’s lecture, it turns out that in the long run I wasn’t failing acceptable masculinity at all. I’ve grown up, the world has changed, and mine is the winning side. Following the detail of football and playing games that involve complex information processing still bring me joy. But I’m aware that just standing there and being counted alongside all the other boys is to be part of the problem. Amongst those there with me on the new winning team are a bunch of guys who are still mentally in the same playground and still seething about what they had to go through and that the girls didn’t, claiming they are owed something in response. Acceptance doesn’t bring relief any more. Seeing what goes into winning, I want to lose.
Amiga chart, Edge 003, December 1993