Four years into the timeline of Super Chart Island and we’re still yet to play a straightforward, standalone football game. It’s not a gap that will be repeated again, unless something dramatic changes post-2018 before we get there. Instead of the act of playing the sport, what we have seen is games about overseeing it. Football Manager 2 takes a more enduring (and therefore familiar to me) approach to that than FA Cup Football, in putting you thoroughly in charge of once club. You manage team selection, transfers, and sponsorship and it’s a less immediately strange concept, though it’s still hard to miss that it’s an early go at its subject.
Among other differences from FA Cup Football is that rather than just watching a score ticker to find out how your team is doing, budding Howard Kendalls get to watch highlights of the match play out. Doing so gives a fair idea of why games where you actually control the team hadn’t taken over yet while the Spectrum was the leading format. The difficulty of getting twenty-two footballers to move realistically in a free-flowing game is quickly apparent and the football depicted is of a chaotic, kick-and-rush ball-chasing style, but the strategic chaos is nothing compared to the visual chaos. The hideous mess of clashing, strobing colours that occurs when players from opposite teams try to occupy the same space, which – see the previous sentence – is all the time, is physically uncomfortable to watch.
Fine, though, that’s just a more elaborate way of keeping players up to date on the match scoreline. It’s not the determining factor in the management experience, right? At this point I would love to say that the rest of the game is more recognisably enjoyable, but it was essentially a graphical update of 1982’s original Football Manager and it shows its age. You work with a very small number of variables, with each player having a skill rating and energy rating, and while you can also change formation, it quickly turns into running through and making the obvious moves to optimise skill and energy balance, buying in higher skill players and shifting ones no longer needed. That’s kind of a description of every football management sim we’ll encounter, at heart, but with no artful covering detail, doing optimisation with such a bare skeleton is more obviously busywork.
With a fast enough feedback loop, perhaps seeing numbers gradually increase would be its own enjoyment. I have played a version of, essentially, this game on fast-forward, programmed within a spreadsheet, and I can confirm that. The slow match highlights put paid to that though, and are joined in fun-killing by a woefully unhelpful interface, probably best represented by the process of choosing which team to manage. In FA Cup Football you had to type in the number of the team you wanted from a list, which would never fly now, but that was the pinnacle of convenience compared to Football Manager 2, which asks you whether you want to manage Everton (No/Yes), Liverpool (No/Yes) and so on one team at a time until you give up on the whole process. And regardless of who you choose you get started off in League Two Division 3 the Fourth Division with a random selection of familiar names in your squad anyway, so what even is the point.
The weaknesses that scream at me now obviously didn’t seem like as big a deal at the time, and the game was enough of a success for me to be writing about. The time for Football Manager to truly excel was not yet, though. And in this form developed by Kevin Toms and company, that time would never come. Hold onto the name, though. One day, in unusual circumstances, Football Manager would come back in a big way.
