Championship Manager: Season 00/01

A Brand Name to Rely On

The Championship Manager series is one of the best-selling PC brands in the U.K., and probably in most of the soccer-playing world. This of course excludes the United States, where the game has never been published. And that's a shame, because American gamers who don't find a way to import this one don't get to see what the world's most detailed sports management game is all about. On paper, Championship Manager's lack of in-match graphic highlights should relegate it to the world of soccer has-beens, yet despite being a text-only game it offers a level of depth and immersion unsurpassed elsewhere.

Back in the days of Championship Manager 2, the UK version of the game came with separate add-on European league packs. Now, in Championship Manager 00/01, you get no fewer than 26 leagues from around the world, all playable either singularly or concurrently for what amounts to a massive simulation of world football featuring some 50,000 real life players. The latest league additions are Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Turkey, Greece, Russia, Poland, Croatia, Finland, and Australia, with the data for all these circuits being bang up to date for the start of the 2000/01 season.

While most gamers will jump into the game to manage their favourite team, this mammoth virtual soccer world will (if you have the CPU power to run all the leagues simultaneously) let you play out an entire management career, applying for jobs with any team in the game. As time passes, you build a reputation that will enable you to command respect and maybe land that plum role with Man Utd, Lazio, or Barca. Of course, you can also just start off in charge of one of those illustrious teams, but working your way up from the lower leagues is a real challenge, made all the more enjoyable as the virtual soccer world changes around you as players retire and teams gain promotion and relegation.

One of the new features is the option to play the game with fictitious player names. Given the fact that a good number of fans have discarded their lives and loved ones to assemble the game database, this may seem an unthinkable option. Yet one of the dilemmas you face in playing CM is that because the players are real, and represented by at least 30 stats and attributes, you pick teams based on your perception of real players, rather than their CM counterparts. This can be a problem if you don't take the time to analyse all the player stats (though because time stands still when playing the game, this is less likely to be an issue as your game proceeds). By playing with "random" players, you have to learn their strengths and weaknesses, including a dozen or more hidden attributes, and you're not coloured by your preconceptions.

Being a glutton for punishment, I invariably play CM as Plymouth Argyle, the team I've followed since primary school. Not for me the dizzy heights of Man Utd. This of course makes the game a real challenge. If you play as Man Utd you get a bank balance of £40M, all of which is available to spend on players. Start it as Plymouth and you'll get maybe £100K, of which less than £10K can be used on new players. Given that free transfer players want a suitcase full of cash to sign for you, your options are limited (though I found the Scandinavian leagues a good source of quality, cheap players). This problem is compounded by the fact that if you sell a player for, say, £250K, you don't get a similar rise in your transfer fund. You have to have a certain reserve (a few hundred thousand) before you can spend what you bring in freely. Bloody useless chairmen. Likewise, a good cup run can bring in money, but you won't always be able to spend it (I got £180K from one home FA Cup game against Arsenal).

Skimming off the Water

Having the board shackle your actions is frustrating, yet unerringly realistic. Another new feature of CM 00/01 is the increased richness of the dialogue coming from your coaching staff, the press, and the players. You might be prompted to comment on speculation that one of your players is about to sign for another club, or to criticism of one of your players' recent performances. Coaching staff will report on players' hidden stats when searching for prospective signings---e.g. "Fred Smith takes a very good penalty"---but while you'll recognize some of the old CM 99/00 dialogue, the text certainly adds to the immersive appeal of the game. The text has been expanded in the match dialogues too, so you'll now see passes "skimming off the water" on wet days.

The other new features are also relatively minor, yet each enhances the game atmosphere or playability, and can't be considered a mere token addition. The live league table available during games lets you check where you'd be if the scores in all the games remained as they currently are. This is handy if you want to work out whether you should play for a draw in that crucial end-of-season run-in match. Additional stats in the player records now report on pass completion ratios, tackles and dribbles per game, and the ratio of shots on target, so you can use these season-long stats when selecting your team.

The appeal of the CM series lies in its ethos of presenting you with as much information as possible. It's up to you to make what you will of that data in picking your team, choosing tactics, and buying new players. With every stat from every game from (with default settings) the last two seasons available at the click of a mouse, there's a seemingly infinite volume of numbers, stats, and records to wade through, all the more if you play with all 26 leagues turned on (I generally only play the English and Italian leagues). The problem with all this information is making sense of it. With so many variables, it's nearly impossible to deduce what combination of players, tactics, or phases of the moon caused a certain event to unfold. You can spend days on end trying to read meaning into it all, and the beauty of the game is that it seems to respond (or at least taunt you) at whatever level you choose to play.

Thus, the only real criticism I have of CM 00/01 is that it presents so much information that it's inevitable that you'll be overloaded. It's easy to blur the line between realism and detail; lots of detail doesn't necessarily make for high realism, but, as CM proves, it makes for one heck of an addictive experience. At least now the player stats are absolute rather than relative (in CM 2 days a 20 tackling skill for a division 3 player was not the same as a 20 for a Premier player), so you can compare players like for like, with the proviso that their hidden skills are always something of a mystery. The fact that any player, team or result can be clicked on for more details just propagates the illusion of limitless depth. It's not far off being true, of course. Thankfully the DVD-style game case contains the best manual of the CM series to date, with 70 pages of useful info including the meaning of all the player stats, including those hidden ones. This season's official strategy guide looks a lot thinner!

I must also comment on the "job hunting" aspect of the game. As usual, I got sacked from Plymouth, most recently about three or four games from the end of the season. I'd had a poor run, but brought in some good future players. The chairman wanted quick results, however, and while I was well clear of the dreaded Conference drop slot, with some money in the bank, I got a couple of votes of confidence, followed shortly thereafter by the boot. I then played through the game as a spectator for an hour and a half trying to get a new job, to no avail. That's kind of understandable, but the bad part was that I never got any feedback from my job applications. In the end I resigned from the game and added myself back in as a new manager (to the same running game) in October of the next season. It would be fun if the game more readily allowed you a second chance on the same career; I couldn't even get a job with the team standing 18th in the Conference.

I didn't experience any bugs of note while playing the game; the only oddity I observed was with transfer valuations. On some occassions a negotiated fee would be replaced by the original fee in the news screen, but the figure ultimately used was the right one. Otherwise the game played flawlessly. The overall level of "realism" in the scores and ratings also seemed to be as good as they've ever been in the past CM games.

CM 00/01 comes with a game editor that you can use to update your favourite team rosters, to create some "fantasy" teams to play with, or to give yourself a foot-up with some extra cash in the bank for the season ahead. The editor is a separate program, but is very easy to use. It also gives you an insight into players' hidden stats, as well as some of the more esoteric properties that are recorded, including a player's favourite and most disliked teams and his favourite manager, and a club's most favoured and disliked staff (which is useful, for example, to stop Exeter's manager taking over at Plymouth!). Chances are there will be many downloads available off the Internet before long, but having the power to edit the database yourself is always going to be handy.

Hard to Rate

Rating CM 00/01 is a hard task. It's as immersive as ever, and the most feature-rich of any of the CMgames to date. The text-based match action, with optional stereo crowd chants from home and away fans, is in essence the same as it was in the first CM, yet just as nail-bitingly brilliant as ever. The myriad of game, team, and player screens encourage you to take tours through the cavernous underlying game database. While it's nowhere near a quantum leap from its predecessor, CM 00/01 is the best soccer management game you can buy, provided you don't have a prerequisite for graphical match highlights. And it's not made in Sweden.

Review By GamesDomain