I have a memory of being off school sick, chomping my way through entire packs of Lockets, and playing Premier Manager 2 on the Amiga for an entire day. I liked Premier Manager 3 a lot too. They didn’t have anything on Sensible World of Soccer, but they were the premier, no nonsense football management games, unburdened by any of the annoying burdens and gimmicks of rivals.
Later on, for reasons I can’t quite remember, Premier Manager 97 was such an object of obsession before I got it that my repeated pleas became a running family joke. Once I did have it, my interest rather dropped off, but it was a good modernisation of the same principles with a clean and colourful look that brings back fond memories. Premier Manager 98 for the PC was a straightforward update of Premier Manager 97. The PlayStation version has the same cover image, including photos of a gesturing manager and blurry football players (and indeed the same images go back to Premier Manager 3 and are noticeably not current by 1998). The game I’m playing here, though, is very much not the same game as its PC counterpart.
Some of that change is positive, at least in theory. Competing with the incredible Championship Manager 97-98 was a tough prospect for anyone, but that series’s increasing complexity did leave a gap to be filled for something simpler. Simpler should also be a logical fit for consoles, where the lack of a mouse makes more basic menus a blessing. Premier Manager 98, however, still gives you a cursor to move around the screen with your pad as if you had a mouse. And rather than a simplified version of the bright and beautiful stylised spreadsheet look of the PC version, it has a very ugly inverse colour scheme, with baffling icons and elements all around. It starts like a dark mode and ends up as a darkest timeline mode.
The team tactics page is a prime example. It gives you big pictures and text for decisions like your type of passing and how hard you tackle, which change when you press the button over them. And then in the corner it gives you tiny icons which… do exactly the same thing.
The simplicity carries through more successfully to the game’s approach to management. Those team tactics are a few straightforward options. Players don’t have a lot of stats, but a straightforward star rating. That makes sense as an update of what made the earlier games so appealing, with the modern element being game highlights in the Actua Soccer engine. Its swoopy camera is better suited to this than to playing a match yourself, in fact, and it is the best graphical representation seen in a football management game to date. It’s also good to listen to, with the familiar tones of Barry Davies on commentary enhancing the big occasion feel without going over the top.
Not actually being able to intervene while watching highlights is a drawback for sure, and it never feels as much like a real match is happening as reading Championship Manager 2’s text commentary, but it is a good enough simulacrum of football to be worth a watch, especially during a time when real football is on hold. And if you don’t want to watch the highlights, you can zoom through games in 30 seconds, which gives the chance to get involved with macro-level, season-long narratives much sooner.
Except that is where we run smack into the single shoddiest aspect of Premier Manager 98. Even ahead of the fact that it makes changes to your team seemingly at random between matches (if I drop Gilles Grimandi, I expect him to stay dropped!). Now, the PlayStation saves game data on an external memory card, with the available majority of its capacity of 128 kilobytes split into fifteen blocks. Many games have save files which only take up one block. Some require a few. I thought that buying one memory card would suffice for the number of games I have on the go for Super Chart Island at any one time. Generally, that has been proved right. When I went to save my Premier Manager 98 game, though, it unexpectedly told me that I needed to delete save data from the memory card to make space. It turned out that it wanted all fifteen blocks to itself.
Premier Manager 98’s memory demands are a level of grasping that might make the founders of the Premier League blush, and they put paid to its chance to dazzle me with any longer term evolution. My Arsenal made a start to the season in which we comfortably beat everyone besides Liverpool and Man U, didn’t make any signings yet because I didn’t see any value in the market, and that is where I had to leave it. Going back to basics and updating the simple things is a nice idea, but failing to bring anything forward from the days of floppy disks besides the match engine leaves Premier Manager 98 looking as behind the times as its cover image.
