The football management sim is not a good fit for consoles. It’s a genre that thrives on complexity and realistic detail, and looking at complex information and selecting from a wide range of possible options lends itself to sitting at a computer and using a mouse and keyboard.
That was the received wisdom. But then, not so long ago it had been received wisdom that simulation racing games weren’t a good fit for consoles either. Codemasters had overturned that spectacularly with TOCA Touring Car Championship and Colin McRae Rally, making games that succeeded on PC and PS alike to great effect. Alongside those, why not try to do the same thing with football management? Besides, people were already playing console football management games. The PlayStation editions of Premier Manager, made out of Actua Soccer and broken menus patched together with sticky tape, charted better than the competent PC versions.
LMA Manager 2001 is the second game in a console-specific series that Codemasters started in 1999. The name comes from the League Managers Association, an organisation that these days sits below the Loan Market Association, Lloyd’s Market Association, London Metropolitan Archives and Large Model Association in search results, but it’s not like TOCA or even FIFA were household names at one point. LMA Manager 2001 falls straight into one console pitfall previously seen with those PlayStation Premier Manager games: it asks for an entire memory card for each save game. That still feels like a bit of a bloody liberty, but sitting down with it for a couple of matches convinced me that I actually wanted to be able to see more, so I took to eBay and got it it’s own dedicated card.
There are some ways in which LMA Manager 2001 is a throwback to the old Amiga days of football management. You can control a lot of detail and can mess around with your team’s staff, sponsors and stands if you like. But that doesn’t feel like it’s in any way essential to enjoying it. It doesn’t have a lovingly rendered stadium as its menu, for a start. Its no-nonsense user interface, full of simple logos and big block colours mostly in various shades of blue and grey, looks rather like that of Colin McRae Rally 2.0, and does its more complicated task pretty effectively. It takes a bit of learning, especially using the circle button to switch between different parts of the screen, but cycling through two layers of options using the PlayStation controller shoulder buttons keeps a range of information and action within quick access without needing to spend time studying.
Simple useability would already render LMA Manager 2001 much better than Premier Manager Ninety Nine, but it does more than merely beating that low bar. Lots of bits don’t just work, but work very well. Its inbox conveys news without getting in the way too much (transfer negotiations do drag on a bit, but we’ll call that one realism). The heatmap it shows for the positions each player is any good at playing is a very smart idea, as are the scout reports on forthcoming opponents written in prose with some personality. The live action matches with players pinging the ball around aren’t much of a step up from Amiga counterparts in utility or verisimilitude, but being able to tell that the smartly put together commentary and TV angles of the highlights package alternative are based on something simulated out in full does somehow enhance them. Giving you a set of quick commands in match is also very clever; just pressing triangle and R2 to hear someone shout ‘attack’ and have your players stream forwards for an all-out attack is highly satisfying.
And that’s where LMA Manager 2001 does its job. It makes you feel in some kind of control while at the mercy of other forces. In my case the way control played out was that trying to set up a dazzling short pass and press approach failed abysmally (0-3 v Sunderland abysmally), but setting all the tactics sliders to default and relying on Arsenal having better players than anyone else generally succeeded comfortably (7-0 v Coventry comfortably) but at least the choice not to get too involved felt like a meaningful choice and being along for the ride felt involving. It’s not, as my careful avoidance of any mentions may have made clear, Championship Manager 3, but it wasn’t trying to be. It didn’t need to be. You can only beat the opposition in front of you, and in the PlayStation league, LMA Manager 2001 was the rightful champion.
Top of the charts for week ending 17 March 2001:
UK games: LMA Manager 2001 (Codemasters, PS1) 
Japan games: World Soccer Winning Eleven 5 (Konami, PS2) 
UK films: Enemy at the Gates 
UK singles: Hear’say – Pure and Simple 
UK albums: Eva Cassidy – Songbird