The UK chart success of Computer Scrabble in 1984 showed the audience for direct computer versions of modern board games. The makers of predecessor Monty Plays Scrabble had got started with Monty Plays Monopoly, using the same formula of taking one of the most popular and well-known board games. Those were far from the only table-based games inspiring computer-based ones, though. Elite took open inspiration from tabletop RPG Traveller. Ghostbusters may well have started life as an adaptation of the tabletop game Car Wars. And one of the belated success stories of 1985 had its own roots in another set of board games drawing on another different world of play, that of sport.

There are a couple of different ways to simulate football on a table. One is to simulate the match being played out between two teams. There is table football of course, although that is more in a table than on a table. Outside of that, this mode’s biggest success has been Peter Adolph’s Subbuteo, with its little model footballers on weighted bases, to be flicked at the ball to knock it across the felt pitch. The first versions of Subbuteo were made in Tunbridge Wells in 1947, building on previous games with a similar concept.

As Subbuteo spread, the alternative approach of fitting the world of football into more sedate forms of board games took off as well. These generally worked by zooming out from the individual match to simulating the broader life of a football club. The company Ariel produced Wembley in the 1950s, which simulated the FA Cup with spaces on the board for different teams you might get drawn against, using dice to decide the match outcomes. It came with several colour-coded dice to use for teams from different divisions, with the idea that lower league Charlton should have a lower chance of scoring lots of goals than a 1st Division giant like Arsenal.

Photo taken from Vintage Toys & Games

ASL Pastimes picked up the baton in 1968 with Soccerama, which looked to simulate not just the FA Cup but entire seasons complete with moving up the divisions from the 4th to the 1st. It similarly used a pair of dice to decide the scores for two teams in each match. Outside of that it added Monopoly-style money as well, though with even less strategy involved, playing out very much like a football-themed Snakes and Ladders. ASL would go on to make a game called Chartbusters which did something similar for the world of pop music. Soccerama was enough of a success for them to release further editions a few years later which added an endorsement from England footballer Alan Ball. “The best game I’ve ever played” it said on the box, next to a cut-out photo of his head.

Photo taken from Picclick.co.uk

Kevin Toms, then a teenager living in Milton Keynes, was a fan of Soccerama, Wembley, and Subbuteo. He organised a Subbuteo league with seven other children on his street, drawing up a fixture list and playing as West Ham. He won the championship. He played all three tabletop games with an analytical eye, because he really wanted to make a much better football game. He couldn’t quite get his superior game to work just yet, but he had aspirations towards a career as a board game designer. His school careers advisor, as these things often go, told Kevin’s parents that this would just be a phase. He turned out to be right in an unexpected way.

With Toms’s dreams of designing board games on hold, he instead found work as a computer programmer, with jobs including one at the Open University. After getting the hang of delivering programs for a planned purpose and audience, he then had a breakthrough thought. Making a board game more complex than Wembley or Soccerama was tricky because working out fixtures and league tables was such a pain. A computer, though, could handle all of that. He could adapt his football game where you play the role of team manager to run on a computer. He called it Football Manager.

He finished the first version in 1982 for the Video Genie, a computer from Hong Kong manufacturer EACA which strongly resembled the TRS-80. He quickly made a ZX81 version too. He programmed that initial Football Manager in BASIC and it had leagues with only 8 teams in, but the core of the game was already there. You select a team from a squad of players who each have two key characteristics – a fixed skill stat from 1-5, and an energy stat from 1-20 which decreases each time they play. The lower the energy stat, the more chance they will get injured and forced to miss a match. The matches are decided by, essentially, a Wembley-style weighted dice roll, but the outcome is drip-fed rather than given all in one go. After each one, you can see the league table and how your team is doing.

There are other flourishes. There are real footballers featured, in that it uses the names of a selection of well known players (B. Robson, G. Hoddle, K. Keegan and so on) with randomly assigned skill levels. After each match, you get the chance to buy one player, inputting your bid and hoping the unnamed other team doesn’t reject it and raise their asking price. Not quite after each match, in fact – if your FA Cup first round game against Rochdale goes to three replays, you don’t get a chance to buy new players until after they’re all done, so good luck. You can sell players too. And over the course of seasons, you can climb your way up the divisions, just like in Soccerama.

  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982, ZX81
  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982, ZX81
  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982, ZX81

Toms set up a company to sell Football Manager. Based on observing his friends’ experiences playing the game, he named the company Addictive Games. He released it early in 1982 and in April it got reviewed in the first issue of Sinclair User, which failed to actually name the game but called it “a modern, up-to-date game.” Initially he produced the cassettes in his flat, watching TV and getting up every so often to start another one recording. He recalls the first few months’ results as 300 copies sold, with 297 of those copies being for the ZX81.

Before the end of 1982, Toms spent six weeks working around his day-job to make a version of Football Manager for the Spectrum, which he has described as “the purest version”. It added more teams in each league and, crucially, graphical depictions of the matches as a set of highlights showing goals and near misses. With their halting rhythms and their players all stopping dead after the last kick of the ball, they bear somewhat of a resemblance to Subbuteo.

The Spectrum version is still largely the same basic game underneath. On various menus, you still have to type 99 and press enter to advance. It still doesn’t even have goalkeepers separated from defenders. It also has all the same appeal. There is something compelling in its combination of chance and competing statistics, with the balance of numbers gradually increasing in your favour as you buy more and more good players.

  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982, ZX Spectrum
  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982, ZX Spectrum

Based on early charts from individual shops, it seems that the Spectrum version soon started selling well. Then, in early 1983, it started selling really well. Sinclair User gave that version some coverage which actually named it, calling it “ideal for a football fanatic”. High street chain WH Smiths put in an order worth more than Kevin Toms’s annual salary for his programming job, and he quit that to work on Football Manager full time. Somewhere along the way he made new cover art for the game. In the absence of an endorsement from Alan Ball, it featured a cut-out photo of Kevin Toms’s own head.

If the comprehensive charts I’m working from had started a little earlier than June 1983, Football Manager may have been battling it out with The Hobbit at the top of them. The Spectrum version carried on reaching more players, peaking again early in 1984. In the first issue of The Big K it even finally got a professional endorsement to match Soccerama’s, with Arsenal’s Charlie Nicholas saying that “I could play this 24 hours a day and never get tired of it”.

I am not covering Football Manager as a 1983 or 1984 #1 though, but as a 1985 one. How this happened is a little harder to fathom. When Kevin Toms posted about that chart on Facebook a few years ago, he didn’t offer any reason for why. It seems to have been a case of adding more and more versions on different formats, the balance of numbers gradually increasing in its favour. The fact that the most important bit of the game was entirely text-based meant it could easily be converted to a lot of computers, with a lot of variation in their graphic renditions of the matches. Word-of-mouth and press coverage accumulated across all those different versions.

Addictive released a BBC Micro version in Spring 1984, and a Commodore 64 one that Autumn. The Commodore 64 one has the best looking match graphics by far, and is the only one which I played as a child. Despite that, it actually offered me less of a nostalgia hit than the BBC Micro version. That’s because the text of the BBC one looks so much like the BBC’s Ceefax TV broadcast text system, something I continued to use to check football scores (and music charts) into the 2000s.

  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982/1984, Commodore 64
  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982/1984, Commodore 64
  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982/1984, BBC Micro
  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982/1984, BBC Micro
  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982/1984, BBC Micro

The week Football Manager hit #1, the only one of Gallup’s individual format charts it appeared in was the BBC one, at #4, just behind Elite. That was only enough to get Elite, still a BBC/Electron exclusive, to #19 on the combined formats chart. Football Manager was now selling on just about every format going, though. Gallup didn’t have an Amstrad CPC chart yet, and while their chart doesn’t list that as a format for Football Manager, the CPC version seems to have come out just before the end of 1984. The Amstrad CPC was a computer doing increasingly well, and was maybe the one to put it over the edge to being able to top the charts.

  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982/1984, Amstrad CPC
  • Football Manager, Addictive Games, 1982/1984, Amstrad CPC

At some point during this time, Kevin Toms met with board game company Waddingtons to talk about the possibility of them making a Football Manager game. They didn’t end up doing so, and his aspiration to design a successful board game remained unfulfilled. Instead, he had to settle for having designed a computer game so simple, flexible, and addictive that it could inspire devotion on the most powerful home computers and the simplest alike. That was a pretty good trade-off. 

Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 5 March 1985, Home Computing Weekly

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