Football Manager 2022

[Waking Life]

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We had a few good ones on the Spectrum and the BBC. Or they seemed good at the time. Soccer Boss was an early one where you had the same players each time and they had fluctuating numbers - McCafferty was always the star. FA Cup 87/88, which was less skillful but it was good for a multilayer player approach and not time intensive. (The original) Football Manager too, with its rudimentary match engine. Always got excited when you saw the angle that players ran towards the goal, knowing it was guaranteed to go in.

There was also a really good country manager one too, but I can't remember the name of it. I got it in a five pack with four other football games (Handball Maradona was one); part of me thinks it was linked to the Euros, but you basically just got a birds eye pitch (with no other graphics) and you waited like watching teletext. One of the better ones certainly.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Enjoying the 'other footy management games' chat.

I liked USM 96. Pretty user friendly and while it was broad enough to dip your toe into different aspects it wasn't especially deep. The tactics were a bit hard to figure out, at least as an 11 year old. The screens were beautiful to look at too.

Did Premier Manager during the Newcastle glory era. Shearer and Asprilla destroying everyone as we won every game bar 4 each by scorelines of 6-3 and the like. Very fun as a kid.

[sevendaughters]

I wish I could do that but for some reason I've never been able to play FIFA or Football Manager as anyone other than Arsenal. I just can't get invested if it's not my team. Daft I know.

I'm the opposite - I can't bring myself to manage anyone I support in case I get sentimental. Sad!

[thugler]

Used to love fm, but lately it's been the exact same game, made slightly worse by more tedious media features that are immediately repetitive and boring. They made the tactics worse a few years ago and they've not improved since. The match engine is pathetic for 2021. I've seen games from 10 years ago with better graphics and animations. Just drives me mad how i really want to play a good version of the game but they either can't or won't update or improve it in any meaningful way

[Chollis]

About the graphics...I understand they're a very unimportant part of what makes Footy Manager so good, and they want to make it accessible for as many people as possible no matter your hardware (as they should). But for those of us with nice machines it would be nice to click an option where the lads playing footy actually looks like something from the 21st century

[sevendaughters]

you do get less media hassle managing lower leagues, which is why i still like FM17 and adding the full Scottish pyramid.

[thugler]

About the graphics...I understand they're a very unimportant part of what makes Footy Manager so good, and they want to make it accessible for as many people as possible no matter your hardware (as they should). But for those of us with nice machines it would be nice to click an option where the lads playing footy actually looks like something from the 21st century

It's not so much the graphics, more that there's been little or no improvement to the engine for a really long time bar slightly better animations and it's usually buggy even then. The tactics don't work properly and there's always some overpowered formations. It's not a case of wanting state of the art graphics, more any progress in how it works whatsoever.

Having said that, yes in 2021 there's no reason why the graphics can't be better too. It's not just behind the times it's a decade or more behind.

[AllisonSays]

Yeah I don't really care about the graphics, I play in 2D still, but it's felt increasingly unresponsive to me over the last few years, particularly in terms of players; you sign these guys with brilliant stats and it just doesn't come across in the way that the games play out - you might win more, or whatever, but you just don't get a sense of it on the pitch, in my opinion. It's also wildly bloated with loads of inane, useless shite. They sell loads of copies every year, though, so I guess there's no motivation there for a fundamental change in direction.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

CM97/98 was the first version of the game I ever played, but I tried that out again and it's far too limited for my liking these days. It's way more basic than even the most barebones football management mobile game. You can download CM01/02 and all the patches etc. for free from www.champman0102.net. There's something on there called the Starter Kit, which is great. It works on PC or Mac (and even tablets I think), and includes loads of different databases you can choose from. Getting the game to run on a Mac was the biggest ballache for me, so it was excellent to find something that had been set up to work on everything.

Let the record show that with this post imitationleather has given me the best weekend I've had in ages.

[boki]

We had a few good ones on the Spectrum and the BBC. Or they seemed good at the time. Soccer Boss was an early one where you had the same players each time and they had fluctuating numbers - McCafferty was always the star. FA Cup 87/88, which was less skillful but it was good for a multilayer player approach and not time intensive. (The original) Football Manager too, with its rudimentary match engine. Always got excited when you saw the angle that players ran towards the goal, knowing it was guaranteed to go in.

I remember getting quite attached to a budget one (I think it was 1st Division Manager) which was no great shakes but easy to get into. Quickly figured out that you could sign the free agents and immediately sell them to raise funds, keeping the occasional mediocre one as a squad option.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

One of the early Football Manager games was my absolute favourite. Can't remember if it was 2006, 2007 or 2008, but it was around then. After that it just seemed to get increasingly more involved and took far too long to get through a season.

2005 is the one game I've played more than any other by miles. Of all computer games, not just of this series. For ease of playability it's great. Obviously it has its shit moments as well, I think 2005 has a thing like with modern Fifa where the CPU just decides it will not let you win this particular game no matter what tactical combination you throw at it.

[ElTwopo]

I only ever played one version of CM (I think it was 00/01?) and sank so much time into it I had to give it up for good. Always used to play as Wigan Athletic back when they were in League One, and always signed Taribo West as my first move as he was a free agent when you started.

Was a bit of a cheat though, as every now and then Dave Whelan would give you £10m for transfers out of the blue. Managed to win the Champions League eventually but only Roberto Martinez, Roy Carroll and Ian Kilford remained from the original squad I started with. But they were ably backed up by (Fat) Ronaldo, Roy Keane, Luis Enrique, and Carlos Quieroz as assistant manager (who I'd never heard of at that point).

Remember sinking a lot of time into On The Bench on the Speccy. And Tracksuit Manager where you just managed an international team, if I recall. All I remember from that game is that there were a lot of Portsmouth players with suspiciously high stats.

[The Culture Bunker]

Soccer Boss was an early one where you had the same players each time and they had fluctuating numbers

Soccer Boss lingers in my memory because it was written in BASIC, so you could gawp at the code. I remember changing some of the news messages that came up, so you'd have things like "You had a big poo after the game - £400 bonus".

Tracksuit Manager was obviously the gold standard of the era due to the large number of players you could pick from - must have been every English player in the First Division (as well as the small handful playing elsewhere, like the Rangers bunch) of the time, so you'd even have the likes of Terry Gibson and Martin Hodge up for selection.

[Wayman C. McCreery]

You can download CM01/02 and all the patches etc. for free from www.champman0102.net. There's something on there called the Starter Kit, which is great. It works on PC or Mac (and even tablets I think), and includes loads of different databases you can choose from. Getting the game to run on a Mac was the biggest ballache for me, so it was excellent to find something that had been set up to work on everything.

Thanks for this. I've attempted to install this on a Mac once a month for the last two years but have never been able to figure it out. Now I'm in and it's glorious - especially being able to start in 2020 with a database from April.

Do these developers do something to copy the database from the latest FM, or do they build the whole thing from scratch? Either way, it's incredible.

The only problem I'm finding is that even with the commentary on the slowest setting it's too fast to read, though I suspect there might be a patch or setting that fixes that.

I'm done with Football Manager after upgrading my Mac OS X from 16-bit to 32-bit, making FM15 Classic impossible to load. I'd been playing the same save for five real years and about 70 seasons in the game, starting at the bottom with Hyde then managing Morecambe, Crewe, St Pauli, Paderborn and Leeds before winning everything with Hull and then doing the same with Liverpool, England, Barcelona and Newcastle.

FM Classic was great - it was very much in-depth tactics and transfers, but everything else was either excluded or simplified. I tried playing FM21 Touch (which replaced the Classic series) and I knew they'd fucked it when the first thing I was asked to do was to make an avatar. I don't think I ever made it beyond one match because it took so long to do anything - in what was supposedly the slimmed down version.

I guess there won't ever be a decent competitor because FM have got the database and thousands of researchers who give them information for free (I should know - I did it for a few seasons before realising that the time I put into it was worth more than a free copy of the game).

[Wonderful Butternut]

Do these developers do something to copy the database from the latest FM, or do they build the whole thing from scratch? Either way, it's incredible.

I assume they have a way of copying over stats and biographical from new databases to a CM0102 compatible one to create a base to work from, but it would still need a lot of tweaking and manual work because new stats have been added, others have been taken out, and some that exist in both CM0102 and a modern FM don't behave in the same way.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

The only problem I'm finding is that even with the commentary on the slowest setting it's too fast to read, though I suspect there might be a patch or setting that fixes that.

Click 'Nick's patcher' in the starter kit and you can crank the speed down to 1x or 2x (I quite like 2x with 'very slow' commentary)

[Uncle TechTip]

Soccer Boss lingers in my memory because it was written in BASIC, so you could gawp at the code. I remember changing some of the news messages that came up, so you'd have things like "You had a big poo after the game - £400 bonus".

Tracksuit Manager was obviously the gold standard of the era due to the large number of players you could pick from - must have been every English player in the First Division (as well as the small handful playing elsewhere, like the Rangers bunch) of the time, so you'd even have the likes of Terry Gibson and Martin Hodge up for selection.

Tracksuit Manager was notable as being probably the first sim to report detailed stats on players, like crossing ability, pace etc. Expect they wouldn't mark real players with less than good stats so every player ranged from good to world class.

I took England to the world cup semi on that game, after losing I didn't have the heart to start again. It took bloody ages.

Advanced Soccer Simulator was my go to on Spectrum, very basic but had good design and you could polish off a season in an hour.

[buttgammon]

I made the conscious decision to stop playing Football Manager when I started my PhD so despite being a one-time obsessive player, I haven't touched it in years. I handed my thesis in recently and want to get into it again, but the last few editions I played around the mid-2010s felt a bit stagnant, bar the updated data of course. I also wonder how my MacBook Air will handle it.

There was a particular save on FM09 or 10 that I played for years. I started off with Port Talbot, made them the dominant team in Wales, then took QPR from League 1 to the Premier League in successive seasons, went on to manage Villa (I consistently got them to the latter stages of the Champions League but we blew the league title with a late-season capitulation), then ended up with an all-conquering Real Madrid team that won basically everything all the time with a bunch of French regens.

[Wayman C. McCreery]

Click 'Nick's patcher' in the starter kit and you can crank the speed down to 1x or 2x (I quite like 2x with 'very slow' commentary)

Sorted. Thanks for that. This is brilliant.

[imitationleather]

Pleased so many of you are getting on the Starter Kit.

The 93/94 database is immense fun. Gazza is pretty much the best player in the world and Lineker can still put in a shift as a squad player. From what I understand the databases are built by a load of very dedicated and obsessive volunteers. Gawd bless em.

Unfortunately I messed up with the price inflation setting on the patcher and so everyone is spending about £125m per player in 1996, which is taking me out of the realism slightly.

[The Culture Bunker]

I think the last serious effort I put into Football Manager would have been the 2015 version, when I took Workington from Northern League to the top, and even won the FA Cup and Europa League in one season - can remember Sam Johnstone being my ultra-steady keeper and Adnan Januzaj and Wilf Zaha being the fulcrums of my attacking play*. One particularly wonderful moment was when I applied for the Man United job when they sacked van Gaal around 2021 or so, only to get knocked back with a "we consider you beneath our standard" reply. Two weeks later, they offered me the job and I was happy to tell them to get fucked.

*this will sound tragic, but for this squad, I picked up a player called Jake Jervis for next to nothing (from I'm going to say Plymouth) while my team was in the Conference, and he was still with me when we in the top flight and won the cups, and I brought him on as a sub in the finals for nonsensical sentimental reasons. In my head, I imagined him being interviewed on the pitch, in tears, and thanking me to the stars. 

[bgmnts]

I want to know what happened to Jake Jervis.

[The Culture Bunker]

I want to know what happened to Jake Jervis.

In real life, it seems he's currently aged 30 and playing in Finland.

In FM2015 terms, I'm sure he scored about 30 odd goals in my fourth and third tier promotions campaigns in a killer combo with some Norwegian lad I picked up for peanuts from (I think) Brighton, did plenty to get us in the top flight and was a valuable squad player when up there. I really wish I'd kept detailed records of all those seasons the way I used to fill in notebooks with my CM93 campaigns.

[imitationleather]

Had this manager on Championship Manager today. Portugal will be gutted if they get overlooked as Euro 2004 hosts.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

The one thing that's annoying me about CM 01/02 is that whatever database you play you're stuck with the way football worked in 2001/02, including the agonizing second Champions League group stage.

[badaids]

The one thing that's annoying me about CM 01/02 is that whatever database you play you're stuck with the way football worked in 2001/02, including the agonizing second Champions League group stage.

Unless you download the updates from champ0102.net

You can't get recent databases and tournament formats, speed up the game and choose the redesigned interface which is much better than the original one.

[Old Thrashbarg]

I was Googling for "Tony Philliskirk Premier Manager 97" to make sure I hadn't misremembered the bug that meant he (and others) got ridiculous stats after a couple of seasons. And one of the results on the first page was a post I'd made here years ago:

I did love Premier Manager 97 on PC. So many hours were sunk into that, mainly on two player games, me in charge of Newcastle and my friend in charge of Liverpool. After that first season was over it was generally a race to see which of us could sign Tony Philliskirk, a nobody who played for Cardiff at the time. For some reason, after the first season his speed rating would go from 55 out of 99 to 255 out of 99. There were some others with similarly fucked up ratings, but having an inhuman level of stamina or aggression didn't really have the same benefits as being able to run the length of the pitch and back in the same time it took the normals to reach the half way line. Watching the highlights with him zooming about all over the place, leaving everyone in his wake, was always good fun.

We probably spent even more time on CM 01/02 because it was a pretty much perfect game. I had no need to play another football management game after that, but I did give CM 4 a chance. I still found myself going back to 01/02 though.

I am tempted to revisit 01/02 with a new database at some point.

[Wentworth Smith]

Downloaded the FM2022 demo on my crap old PC and strangely works better than the last version I tried about 4 years ago. It seems to have improved a bit since then but still has the same problems and they are pretty annoying.

The main obstruction, which means I can't be bothered to go further, is that the UI is absolute shit and seems designed to obscure what you are looking for. FM2017, the last I played with any regularity, has much simpler options and fewer clicks for searching for players and the like and the new way of setting up tactics... ugh.

[BlodwynPig]

I'm still playing Championship Manager 01/02. Not even taking the piss. Last week I loaded up a 93/94 database that someone made and have been caning that.

How's the PhD coming along?

[Wonderful Butternut]

How long has this been in the series?


Fair play on it, obviously, but I'm just surprised I haven't heard any REEEEEing about it from horrible shits.