Championship Manager

The Good
The transfer market worked well, apart from one detail. All the statistics you could want were stored, season by season. The player personalities were a nice touch. It was easy to move through information for clubs, players and statistics.

The Bad
Compared to other management games at the time, especially Gremlin's excellent Premier Manager, the presentation was laughable, with boxes of text representing everything, and matches played out with just some vague text comments. This also made it hard to know what you were doing wrong.

There wasn't much to do, with no training, sponsorship, ground improvements or staff hiring / firing. There wasn't as much tactical versatility as there should've been. For no apparent reason, only 80 teams were included rather than the real 92.

It was also heavily dependent on the right formation - 4-2-1-3 and home and 4-3-1-2 away would guarantee rapid promotions as long as the support man was good. Forget having to alter your tactics for different matches, there's no need.

It was almost impossible to sign overseas players, despite a specific option existing for them. Getting young player into your squad was completely random as well. There were too many tricks, such as setting a player's value at maximum and retiring him to get an extra bundle of cash.

Thanks probably to the amount of data being stored, it was prone to crashing and corrupting, although this was worse on the floppy-based Amiga version.

The Bottom Line
A very basic text-based soccer management game, obsessed with statistics and lacking realism, depth or variety. The later games really improved on this.

The Good
I don't know what to like about this game. I like soccer managers, but even at the time of its release there where much better games of this kind around.

The Bad
It got trashed where I live by all game magazines. I never played it when it came out and now played it a while ago, when it saw its light on the internet. It obviously has a huge following. I don't know why. It's spartanic in its presentation, which doesn't have to be bad. But it's not just spartanic there, it's also in the simulation and management aspect. The updated versions (CM 94) aren't better. However Championship Manager 2 was a huge step forward.

The Bottom Line
The first in a long-living highly overrated soccer manager series.

The Good
In its day, there was nothing to touch it. Football management games age faster than anything else, due to the frequent team and rules changes. However, this was massively addictive and served me well for several years until CM2 came along.

It would be very hard to go back to this now after so much has changed, but every now and then I do just to remind myself how it all started.

The Bad
To be honest, at the time I thought it was pretty much perfect.

The Bottom Line
A masterpiece. It's free to download these days, so why not do that and remember what it used to be like.