It started early on in my first season in charge of Arsenal, while the fans were still casting aspersions about my lack of experience. We played Reading, and we drew 0-0. We played Chelsea, and we drew 0-0. The latter was a rather better result than the former, but it did seem to point to a bit of an issue. I went all in on using Tomáš Rosický as playmaker to try to introduce some creativity and start scoring some goals. It worked. We drew the next set of games against middling to poor teams 1-1 instead.
There were no such stalemates in the world of competing football management games. Football Manager 2007’s success was just a continuation of victory for Sports Interactive and their new publishers at Sega. Football Manager 2006 had similar early sales figures but release dates just didn’t align in the same way for it to top the charts. They carried on where they left off with Championship Manager, essentially taking Championship Manager 4 and doing it properly.
Meanwhile, by this point the results of Eidos’s zombie Championship Manager were #4 in the charts for Championship Manager 5 in March 2005, #9 for Championship Manager 2006 in April 2006, and #9 again for Championship Manager 2007 six months later. It turned out that an audience trained to look in detail at stats and what lay behind them were particularly well placed to research which game series was the continuation of the ones they enjoyed before, even if it didn’t have the same name.
In the three and a half years since they last topped the charts, Sports Interactive had made some changes. The match display is a lot more developed, even if it still involves numbers in circles moving around. Watching them manage to convey a player making a jumping header by animating said number in said circle is a particularly neat trick. The animations, commentary and scoreboard now line up perfectly.
As a fan of the emergent poetry of earlier Championship Manager text commentaries, there is still something missing in the new approach, constrained as it is to realistic timing and unable to use rhythm to enhance its storytelling in the same way. But seeing the ball moving around all the time does add an additional level of constant low-level dread which was always a currency of the series, so there are some benefits. And the presentation is rather nice in general, without getting too far away from the basic world of tables and links, data above everything.
The other thing that makes a marked progression is going much further down the road taken in Championship Manager 01/02, of populating its world with people and entities with their own developing views. You make team talks before and during each match, choosing their general message and tone and getting feedback from your assistant as to which individual players liked being told they could win. One of my early decisions involved a player with a virus and whether to send him home to avoid potentially affecting the rest of the squad, which was quite a thing to play here in 2022 on Plague Island.
Contract negotiations, be it with my own players or to sign Mikel Arteta ahead of schedule, take on more detail and variety than ever. You can offer a player around to other clubs (excluding rivals if you wish) to try to gain quick interest, as I did with Aliaksandr Hleb, but if it goes wrong the only result will be to piss them off. And you get asked questions by the media, about most games and sometimes about specific players.
That was where my run of draws started having an interesting effect. Football Manager 2007 does some rather smart analysis of how you have been doing (as well as analysing how addicted you are to it; I hit “mildly addicted” which felt a slightly uneasy thing for it to put in those terms) to decide what your questions and possible answers are. Part of this is making use of your number of games unbeaten or number of games without a win. It stumbled a little on how to deal with a long run that was both at once. “Arsenal drew with Middlesbrough 1 -1 to maintain their unbeaten league run of six games”, an update told me. “The Gunners look easily capable of moving away from the relegation zone and climbing the table of their current form can continue” it went on, talking of the very form which had put me in the bottom half to begin with.
It was an unexpected trip back to the same uncanny valley of emergent narrative as LMA Manager 2002. I could well interpret my own team’s results, and the game making less able attempts brought a tonal oddity. The difference was mostly in the ambition of what was being attempted, though. Football Manager 2007 is demonstrably very smart indeed, and when it made a bit bigger of a reach than it could pull off it felt pretty easy to give it the benefit of the doubt. By this stage, Sports Interactive had more than earned that back again.
Top of the charts for week ending 21 October 2006:
