One of the greatest and addictive game franchises ever. Doesn’t usually get much discussion from the hardcore gaming crowd
First game a played was championship manager 2 95/96 season and was hooked instantly.
Nothing better than taking a team from nowhere in the Scottish 3rd division to the champions league final
Personal favourite games of the series were championship manager 97/98 & 01/02.
Sunk nearly 500hours in to football manager 2020 during lockdown.
Anyone else love this game series]
I have lost an incredible amount of my life to this game. I started in the same season you did, and have had it on the go constantly ever since. Wow, coming up 30 years.
I think that outside of the game play loop, the reason that the game is so successful is because you can play it while doing something else. Watching TV, working from home, even playing another game. I used to play Pro Evo and FM simultaneously for hours on end.
Gameplay loop is addictive (in my opinion) for two reasons. 1) if you win a match you need to play the next match to keep the run going, and if you lose a game you need to play the next match to turn it around. 2) when you get your team perfect, 5* first eleven, youth team crammed with 5* potential wonderkids, entire world scouted, tactics learned to 100%, that’s when the game decides you need a fresh start so inexplicably makes you lose ten straight games and get fired. So you start all over again with Dagenham or someone.
Bliss
CM 97/98 was my first as well and I think I played every version since then, for 1000s of hours in total.
Looking forward to FM24, but even more to 25 as that is finally on a new engine which was overdue imo.
I always start with my fav club Utrecht, which has been overrated in the game for years now. 
I remember with 97/98 the game ran through MS dos so all you had to do was install the game and then it would run without the disc so you could just give it to your mate to install it as well the kids on our whole street were playing it religiously. Comparing what we had done with teams.
If the weather was bad during school holidays 4/5 of us would be playing this game together around one PC all day.
I remember me and my mate attempting to sign Brazilian Ronaldo I was chelsea before they had mega money and my mate was man united we both had bids accepted and went in for talks.
My mate could afford to pay him 60k per week I could only afford 45k per week. All I could do was bump his goal and appearance bonus’.
My mate was was giving it the big un thinking he’d got him & shocked him by saying yes to me.
His face was brilliant at the time.
Great game
Quick search on YouTube came across this
actually states that they were happy for the game to be shared and not disc locked so it would spread
But it was still the biggest selling PC game of 1997
Probably the single player franchise i’ve played the most, nice get from MS on Gamepass, hope next one ends up there too!
My first game was CM 99 if i recall correctly, i still remember Zidane was 8.000 million Pesetas (48 millions in €, tho you had to pay 72mill to purchase), that was a must buy X’D
I’ve played almost every CM-FM since then.
And i’m actually hyped about the changes coming on this next one for the first time in several years, FM’s biggest problem imo was that after 2-3 years it became too easy due to the IA being too stupid in transfer market, rivals were mostly purchasing 29-32 year old players due to their current ability instead of their potential one, which meant the average age of teams like Madrid, Manchester etc controlled by the IA was so old after a few seasons.
They changed it so teams now focus on potential ability now, and they made it so younger players evolve faster, this should improve the game a lot.
There’s also some nice transfer changes, like player swap being improved, now it’s also easier to sell players who don’t want to leave, you can go in debt, etc
Definitely put more hours into this than any other game, though I tend to do much less nowadays. Combining it with playing your favourite music is an easy way to lose a nights sleep!
This ended a friendship when i was younger. Probably 96/97, at a sleepover, we were all playing together and one guy went to the toliet or something (long time ago to know for sure) and we free transferred his entire squad pretty much (long before the days when the board would stop you). He did not find it funny.
I tried multiplayer only a couple of times, but it always ended up in quitting after a few games as it was hard to be available for a gaming session at the same time, not many of my friends were into PC gaming also.
Recently I watched a couple of cool FM stories on YT, people in here will probably enjoy them as well.
Have you never tried to play by yourself. Once you’re in it will grip you and you’ll not want to stop
You mean with random people? Back in the day I played a football manager game by mail. Where I’d get a weekly sort of magazine, on paper, which somebody typed out. Even had short match reports which the ‘game master’ made up.
I never tried FM Online, or a FM multiplayer game with randoms. Perhaps we can start an XBoxEra game on XBox in FM24? The console version is more streamlined for MP games I think anyway.
I’d be up for that.
I’ve never played online With mates it’s either been by myself or when I was younger in the championship manager days, me and 5 mates would be huddled round 1 pc taking it in turns sort our squad & and transfers and play games. 1 season would take us all day and night. Tonnes of fun
I remember me and my best mate were playing Championship Manager 3 together on my PC and we almost missed the flight to a stag due we just lost all track of time
What was meant to be a quick game before we headed off to the Airport turn into over an hour and thank GOD one of the mates texted us ‘where the hell are you’
Documentary on football manager.
Shows how deep into this game goes into football culture
I still prefer the text based matches over that graphic match engine
Great doc indeed.
I caved last night and bought FM24 on Steam for the Early Access. Didn’t buy the game in the past years because of Gamepass, so it wasn’t hard to make the decision to pay for it this year.
I played a by-post football manager game too! I LOVED IT as a kid. Was so exciting.
Then I got CM01/02 (I had CM3 but was very bad at it, too young) and went nuts on it.
FM06 remains my favourite. Can’t really say why.
Gutted the latest football manager is being delayed
I jumped in at the champion manager 2 96/97 expansion
Eidos the fools completely blew it
Sega benefited massively