The History Of: Championship & Football Manager
After 25 years’ worth of games, taking its creators from non-league minnows to world conquerors, Ian Dransfield speaks to the creators of Championship/football Manager to find out how they murdered our free time
The Collyer brothers’ deliver their match report on their two seminal football management series
The series once known as Championship Manager, now Football Manager, turned 25 years old in 2017 – but its story begins further back than that: in 1985. Two brothers, Paul and Oliver ‘Ov’ Collyer, decided to try and make their own game of soccer management from their Shropshire home. “We were playing the other games – League Division One, Mexico ‘86, the sort of international version of it, and Football Manager,” Ov explains. “[We were] checking out all the other games of the time, and deciding we didn’t like them very much so, in our arrogance, deciding that we might be able to do it better.”
This ambition took time to bloom, however, with the original Championship Manager being worked on here and there for six years before it was finished in 1991, and released in 1992 for Amiga, Atari ST and, shortly afterwards, PC. A big reason why it took so long was that… well, Paul and Ov were in school and college, literally bedroomcoding the game. “There were times when maybe six months would go by when we didn’t do anything on it,” Ov explains. “The other side of it was when we’d spend our holidays locked in the attic just trying to make it better.”
And better things got – as the project took shape, the brothers starting hawking their wares to publishers around Britain, trying to get their new take on an established genre noticed. There were knockbacks, of course, with Electronic Arts turning Championship Manager down for not featuring enough ‘live action’.“the ‘no graphics’ thing was a big thing,” Ov says of another publisher’s feedback. “I remember ‘bolt some graphics on there’ was the exact phrase used.”
But one company expressed an interest, and Paul and Ov put their game in front of publishing house Domark. The rest, as they say, is a funny old game – and a slow, drawn out slide into professionalism.
The original Championship Manager might have been the beginning of a series with seemingly eternal appeal, but as a game it’s all but forgotten – immediately trumped by CM ’93 bringing with it real player names, and that’s where the hardcore football fans started to take notice. While, at the same time, critics started to miss the point.
“The good reviews made us happy – the shit reviews made us miserable,” Ov laughs. “It was kind of depressing to read something really bad – you’d feel angry because we knew people were enjoying the game. But I guess we did have some really good
supporters in the computer press. PC Zone got on board with it, I remember. We had our supporters, and we had others who just didn’t get it at all.” Even without the unanimous backing of the early Nineties gaming media, though, Championship Manager sold well enough that a sequel was on the cards – at least after a detour to the continent.
“Italian football was the main league people were watching, I think because of Channel 4’s coverage started around then,” Paul Collyer explains of the brothers’ decision to make Championship Manager Italia – a continental-themed update to the CM ’93 formula. “I guess we just thought people wanted to play an Italian version, with the leagues in it and so forth,” Ov adds.
But it wasn’t as straightforward as it might seem, with Domark not actually on board with the decision to make the Italian league version of Championship Manager : “We took it to Domark and they didn’t want to do it,” Ov says. “So we ended up sort of half-publishing it ourselves, in the end they got on board and carried it on.” A move no established dev team would make with its publisher these days, of course, but back then it was two brothers who didn’t even have an office.
Italia performed well enough, but work on a sequel proper was commencing – and ambitions had grown off the back of a few years’ success in the lower leagues. And so, late in 1995 the ambitious, processor-and-ram-hungry Championship Manager 2 hit and took the world by storm. The original might have opened some eyes, but Championship Manager 2 brought tears to them with its incredible depth, realistic portrayal of the trials and tribulations of management
and – for the first time – players with abilities ‘scouted’ by the Collyers’ studio, Sports Interactive, without just using a book of stats (we’ll get back to that).
An early casualty thanks to the improvements in Championship Manager 2 was the Atari ST and – surprisingly, for the time – Amiga. “The Amiga and ST were the machines at the time,” Ov admits. “For us to turn around and say, ‘We’ve just written a sequel and it doesn’t work on the same platforms as the first one,’ it’s a little bit controversial. We had tried to do it on the Amiga and realised we couldn’t, the spec wasn’t sufficient to handle the game. So we said, ‘We can’t do this and we don’t think it’s a good idea.’” Two years later a truly terrible port of CM2 for the Amiga 1200 did release, but that was nothing to do with Sports Interactive or the Collyers. The brothers agree it should never have been released, but let’s not dwell on that particular heartbreak, shall we?
For you see, CM2 (and its two expansions, for the 96/97 and 97/98 seasons) didn’t just raise the bar – it ripped it out and flung it over a rainbow. The confidence of the young, growing SI team was bolstered by the fact those making it were having fun and – in a slightly surprising revelation – because Doom was on tap in the single room of the house share in which the game was being made. “Doom was trying to put paid to our work on CM2,” Ov laughs. “That was exactly the time of Doom – it was a brilliant release. When you were working on the game and you needed a break, you’d just get Doom loaded up and it was completely the opposite… almost.”
That help was needed thanks to the newfound pressure on the team. This was no longer a new product – it was an established series with numerous releases under its belt. “It wasn’t like when we first wrote it in Shropshire when it was just a bit of fun for us,” Ov says. “This was something we knew people liked, so we had the situation where we had a little bit of pressure and a little bit of expectation.” Said pressure and expectation merely spurred SI on, along with the confidence the brothers had that they knew what they were doing, the two brothers working together and some friends helping source and input the game’s reams of data.
By this point the complexity of the real-world game had increased, so it wasn’t just a case of fitting in more real players and formations – CM2 had to include rule changes. One big change in the mid-nineties was the Bosman ruling, so named after Jean-marc Bosman and his successful legal case allowing him to move clubs for no fee when his contract had expired. Including a complex ruling like this, even with the relatively amateur setup the Collyers still had, was never in doubt: Championship Manager was always about accuracy. And it’s always been about building a world around this realism.
“The thing that Ov said, and it’s always stuck with me,” Miles Jacobson, studio director at Sports Interactive, interjects, “was that they were trying to create a football universe. Everyone else was creating a football game, and it might reset at the end of every year so it didn’t matter, it didn’t
really interact with other teams, they didn’t really have players apart from [a basic] transfer market which would come through once a week when you’d be offered one player. But he said they didn’t care whether a human was playing or a computer manager was playing – the game would carry on because it would be a living, breathing world. That’s what we’ve always tried to do ever since then.”
Something very few would have predicted over the lifetime of Championship (and Football) Manager was just how influential the game series would become in the real world, thanks in no small part to the breathing world Sports Interactive created. We’ve all heard stories from other sports games where an athlete commented on their in-game stats, or seen a game take the bold step of having accurate kits, stadia and player faces in it – but the balance swiftly changed the other way when it came to Championship Manager, thanks to one key element: data.
Thanks to the power of crowdsourced information, Championship Manager was able to establish a footing in the realm of real-world player scouting early on, after having relied on information in the Rothmans Yearbook for the first couple of releases. Around CM2 the team began contacting fanzine writers for specific clubs and getting information from them on their teams, the players and who to watch out for in the future. It wasn’t always reliable, but it offered a much more genuine representation of teams and their players – especially in the lower leagues. Asking for direction from a local is always the way to go with specialised knowledge, and Sports Ineractive built on this with each iteration.
These days you’re looking at a scouting network comprising of thousands of individuals looking at around 2,200 clubs in 51 countries, along with an additional 2,000 or so lower league clubs covered in less detail. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, the largest single player scouting network in any sport in the entire world, and it’s all to make sure the data in a computer game is as accurate as it can be. So is it any surprise teams started knocking on SI’S doors, with Premier League club Everton officially licensing Football Manager’s database back in 2008?
There’d been a build towards this embracing of the series by the footballing establishment, with anecdotal tales popping up all around of players offering their coaches advice on littleknown opposition players by showing them said players in-game, lower league managers using Championship Manager as a £30 worldwide scouting tool to discover potential new playing talent – or even former Tottenham Hotspur manager Andre Villas-boas, whose self-confessed love for Championship and Football Manager contributed directly to his role as chief scout at Chelsea. By no means were these people using the game as a stand-in for reality, but its accuracy and utility hasn’t been in doubt for the last decade-anda-half. Football Manager is a game, but Football Manager is also a tool for the professionals.
At the same time, Championship Manager was becoming more of a game made by professionals – increasing sales and exposure meant more revenue, while changes at Domark (now Eidos following a merger) were pushing everything towards a more traditional publisher-developer relationship for CM3. “We were more of a serious operation,” Paul explains. “I remember people staying up for three days because we were about to submit the finished version of CM3.”
So maybe not that serious yet, then. “We had a competition to see who could stay
When you were working on the game and you needed a break, you’d just get doom loaded up Oliver Collyer