A real Champions League-style clash is coming this winter as Eidos pitches its Championship Manager 5 footie management sim against Sports Interactive's Football Manager 2005. For those unaware of the political intrigue here, Sports Interactive created Championship Manager back in the early nineties and developed the series right up until the recent CM4 Season 03/04, with Eidos as publisher. However, the two companies split up earlier this year and Eidos retained the Champ Man brand, handing over development duties to a new internal team. SI meanwhile, purchased a classic license – Football Manager – and set about building a new game around its award-winning footie database, game code and engine.
Well, I don't know about CM5 yet, but I've been playing the Football Manager beta demo all week, and I think it's going to be a truly astonishing game…
Okay, so I have to come clean here. I can't really claim to be entirely objective. I edit The Official Football Manager magazine for Future publishing – a mag dedicated to Sports Interactive's games. However, I took that job because I loved the Championship Manager series. It has stolen countless hours of my life and is responsible for some of my fondest gaming memories. I know enough about it to appear on the recently dumbed-down Mastermind among other chumps answering questions on EastEnders and Star Wars figures. So I think I can speak with some authority when I say that Football Manager 2005, looks set to be a stunning example of its faintly maligned genre. Perhaps the pinnacle achievement so far.
Just surfing around the excellent new menu system, checking out the vast player database (over 200,000 professionals, each digitally reconstructed with over 40 stats) and tinkering with the complex tactics screen has got those twangs of addiction reappearing. There are now over 50 countries to manage in and 2351 teams to control. All of the English sides have full youth and reserve teams (so have many of the major European sides), so you can judge immediately how your team is going to grow and develop over the next few years. It's nothing short of a football stat treasure trove. No wonder real managers are already approaching SI about getting access to this information base.
There are some really interesting new gameplay features in here, too. The manager mind games element looks like it might be immense fun. You can select any other manager in the FM world and release a comment to the media about him, choosing from a vast selection that let you criticise his team's recent performances, boast about your chances when your sides meet on Saturday, or even declare your admiration for him. It's all part of the psy-ops that dominates real football, and could really humanise the whole experience (even if, currently, I have no idea how it affects things on the pitch – although SI assure me it does).
With team tactics, you have truly deep and thorough control over how your side performs on the pitch. FM features slider bar controls for elements such as width, defensive line, creative freedom, etc, so you can intricately set-up your side, to either sit back and defend with a Rorke's Drift mentality, or charge up the field like maniacs, each member of the squad concentrating only on his own creative abilities. Most likely, you'll end up somewhere in between – it is up to each and every player to decide exactly where. I like the way its also possible to quickly change your tactics with a single button press. If you're desperate for a goal in the dying minutes, you can go to your tactics screen and click on a button that makes all your players hoof every last desperate pass up to your lofty danger man, for that classic route one finish.
Navigation has clearly been influenced both by Mac Os X and the latest website design theory. There are multiple ways to get around, using the main menu bar along the top, a tree-style menu on the left, and a 'bread crumbs' menu on the bottom of the screen (which traces your route to the screen you're currently on so you can easily backtrack through the game) – all of which interact and feed off each other. It'll take hours to find your own way, but when you do it should become second nature – unlike the way you had to grapple with the interface in CM3, fighting your way through illogical menu screens. The aim with the entire design is to give you as easy access as possible to the increased complexity and sheer range of gameplay components. Transfers, loans, training – all are logically presented and packed with options.
And, most importantly, it all looks like its leading to a realistic simulation of the sport itself. As Manchester City, I had a brilliant pre-season, firing in goals for fun, watching little Shaun racing along that right wing feeding Anelka with pin-point passes. But now, in the premiership, City are mis-firing, mistakes are occurring; watching the 2D match engine, I can see that gaps the size of small oceans are appearing between my stumbling back four. It's time to bring in support, time to hit that database, send out my scouts (who now act intelligently, checking out other players in the games they watch – not only the type you've asked them to study). It's time to bash out a few complex contracts, making the most of my meagre resources with sweeteners, bonuses and salary deals.
The AI-controlled Assistant Manager is there to let you know who's not pulling their weight in the current squad, who needs to be placed on extra fitness training with your toughest coach. He'll also pick your team if you ask him to, and let you know about any new stars rising through the youth and reserve ranks. I am told your trusted right-hand man may also keep you up to date on dressing room gossip – the inter-player muck-spreading that no gaffer is directly privy to. SI says that player personalities will play a bigger role than ever. It will be easy to upset the moodier members of your first XI by criticising team performances to the press, or selling one of their mates. I'm not sure if there's a, 'refuse to speak to media after important international win' option, though.
Football, increasingly, is a sport about personality and psychology, ego and expectation – games are won and lost in press conferences and on the back pages of the red tops. From my eight or so hours with this beta code, it seems SI has really caught the essence of this modern malaise – without sacrificing the purists' love of the tactical game.
So yes, I am biased. But I feel – if the game speed is kept up to scratch (it seems much faster than CM4 in this demo), and the initial release is as bug free as possible - that this is going to be the greatest management game Sports Interactive has ever written. I think maybe my social life is over.
