I loved Manchester United Europe. 1991 has the highest concentration of games I played endlessly as a child, and this one is up there with Lemmings and Magicland Dizzy. It wasn’t this version that I played, though, but the Commodore 64 version, which has a completely different game engine for playing matches. Playing the Amiga version now gives me the oddest combination of feeling nostalgia for everything about the menu screens, with their football cursor and outsized ticks and crosses, and feeling nothing at all about the more obviously important bit of the game where you actually play football.
That’s not the only disconnect that comes with hindsight. As behind the curve as ever, I played the game years later, as a relatively recent follower of football, at a time when Manchester United were the champions of the Premier League and top of the pop charts. They were an all-conquering force and regularly earned their way into competition against Europe’s other elite clubs, so Manchester United and that competition made perfect sense as the focus of a computer game. Who else would you make it about? In the game some of the team’s players were weirdly unfamiliar, and there was disappointingly no Eric Cantona, but it had enough players I knew (Pallister, Ince, McClair, Hughes) to be close enough to be a chance to virtually take part in those events.
I now know that when the game came out in 1991, Manchester United were not the dominant force in English football at all. Liverpool would have been the obvious answer there, even if they were on their way down, and indeed they had their own computer game too. Manchester United were a very well-supported club on the cusp of something, but it might not have happened. Manager Alex Ferguson, who ended up staying there for 26 years, was not far away from getting the sack based on their poor performance the previous season.
What saved Ferguson was the same thing that made Manchester United Europe stand out as a game with a compelling idea. Manchester United won the 1990 FA Cup. That earned them an entry to the following year’s European Cup Winners’ Cup, taking on the likes of Barcelona and Montpellier who had won the equivalent local cup competitions around Europe. And Manchester United went on to win that competition, too. In 1991 it wasn’t just a rarity for an English team to win a European trophy but a complete novelty, because it was the first year English teams had been allowed back in after a five-year ban. Manchester United Europe could not have been more perfectly timed; buying a game to relive the team’s success must have been an appealing prospect.
The game is lovingly detailed when it comes to the European competitions, with a huge number of teams from around Europe complete with club badges and at least vaguely correct colours. Not for the last time, I picked up a great deal of new knowledge of places not just mediated by football, but by a football computer game. The cups’ structure as series of knockout ties, generally increasingly hard, having to win each one to progress to the next, is a natural enough structure for a computer game that it could have been designed just for it. The same goes for the fact that each round is played over two legs, meaning a bit of a second chance when things go wrong. As a set up for a game, it’s brilliant. And maybe all of that, the bit which I get the nostalgia for, is the important bit after all.
As for the matches themselves? Manchester United Europe plays in a view from side-on rather than looking up the pitch, but it’s roughly the same story as Italy 1990. The ball sticks to players and running makes for an easier task than any kind of fluid passing game. There is less of a focus on spectacle, which makes it slightly less awkward but even more plodding. Collision detection and goalkeeping alike are sometimes dubious. Paul Parker gets whitewashed again. How matches play out is barely competent, dull, and maybe insignificant.
