Ara 
It has been a good decade since I first heard about Championship Manager 01/02. Unlike most people, I didn’t grow up with Championship Manager or Football Manager being my first managerial experience on PC, and there’s a good reason for that: we had Brasfoot. “What the hell is Brasfoot?”, you might ask, understandably so. It’s the Brazilian equivalent of Elifoot, which is the “father of all managers”. Confusing, isn’t it? Worry not, everything will be explained in due time. Elifoot, although not popular anywhere else other than Brazil and Portugal, is (yes, it still exists!) a very simple football manager, which is simple, lightweight and you can go through several seasons in a day. The simplicity, ease of use, and low hardware demands made it very popular in Brazil because people couldn’t afford fast computers (even low-range stuff was prohibitively expensive back in the day). It didn’t take long until it became a cult title and everyone either had played it or at least heard of the game.
Brasfoot, just like Elifoot, was very easy to run, cheap, had lots of Brazilian teams (obviously), so it instantly became a fan favorite. I’d dare to say that literally every Brazilian kid that happened to enjoy football even if just a little, played Brasfoot at least once in their lifetime. I found out about Brasfoot from a friend, back in 2006. My computer couldn’t run anything too demanding, but it did run Brasfoot without breaking a sweat. I have found, at last, a game I could run and play for hours on end. And that’s exactly what I did. Hundreds of seasons, titles, relegations, frustrating 3rd places, and a good chunk of my childhood dedicated entirely to virtual football management. But after so many years playing every Brasfoot that came out and trying out so many different scenarios, be it starting with a good team and trying to dominate the championship, or with a 4th division club struggling to make ends meet, I found myself wanting more. The simplicity was not enough anymore. I wanted in-depth management, scouting, more numbers, realistic transfer windows, and so on. There was only one answer, and that would be Football Manager, which I couldn’t run. I didn’t even have enough disk space to try it out.
I don’t remember the exact circumstances of how I found out about Championship Manager 01/02, but I was certainly looking for an alternative to Football Manager. It didn’t have fancy graphics, nor did it sport a modern user interface, but it had frequent updates thanks to the champman0102 people, which meant the 10-year-old game felt fresh still. It was back when 2001 didn’t feel that nostalgic yet, as most of the stars were still around, although old and nearing retirement. Playing with the original database was unfathomable. Completely out of question. My first savegame was not a very successful run, and I got sacked within a couple of months. I was not used to the sheer complexity of CM, compared to the likes of Brasfoot and Elifoot. There was a lot more to watch out for and proper tactical knowledge was a must, which I certainly lacked (and I still do, to an extent). But I didn’t give up.
Eventually, after several attempts and discovering the magical powers of pre-made tactics that abuse the match engine, “I” figured out a winning formula that took my team to glory. From zero to hero. Not only did I have a very good – exploit – tactic, but my players were all super talented and better than everyone else thanks to a savegame editor. Yup, little me was a bit of a cheater. I just wanted to win without putting in much effort. Fun is subjective, and that was a lot of fun for the young me. I kept on winning until my save got corrupted and wouldn’t load anymore. That’s when I took my first somewhat long break from CM. Months of effort, gone. My squad, full of stars that could beat anyone, was gone. There was nothing left as if it never happened to begin with.
But one does not stay away from CM for long. I eventually found myself coming back to it and starting short term savegames. Didn’t want to invest a lot of time again only to have it all gone because of an error. So, I would play a couple of seasons with the Champman update and then call it a day. That went on for years and years. And then I got better hardware, allowing me to finally play Football Manager. At first, I thought I would never look back. Just like when I made the leap of faith from Brasfoot to Championship Manager, it felt like a huge upgrade. Lots of micromanagement, several new options, a 3d match engine, team logos, team kits, the list goes on. But then I soon found myself getting frustrated at how long it would take to go through a season. While CM used to take 4 hours on average, FM would take 40, if not more. That’s 10 times more micromanagement, waiting, and the frustration of losing the league or not getting that promotion during the last few rounds hit a lot harder, as back in the CM days it would mean maybe just a couple more hours of work and then I could finally get things to work out my way, and if it didn’t, well, what is another 4 hours? FM-wise, that would be 80 hours down the drain already. The fear of getting massively frustrated was huge, and it did happen several times. I used to play a lot of Football Manager 2019, and sometimes I ended up losing the Serie A title with AC Milan around the very last rounds because of silly mistakes. And it would hurt for days, weeks on end until I finally managed to win it again. The opposite also applied, though. Winning in Football Manager had such a weight to it, hard to explain. Almost like doing it in real life. Because you are fully aware of the struggle and how long it took you to get there. Good work pays off. Or does it? But then again, being a university student with limited time and so many other games to play and hobbies to keep up with, I just couldn’t justify that amount of time that FM would demand of me, so I quickly found myself playing CM again. It’s simpler, quicker, winning is rewarding enough and you can go through 2, 3 seasons in a day. Not to mention the fact that, despite not being the case 20 years ago, CM is very lightweight, meaning you can multitask and play it as you play another game. The hours quickly racked up.
At one point, the inevitable happened: the players I grew up with, the squads I loved to watch and knew everything about ended up fading away, giving way to a new wave of new footballers around my age that I knew nothing about. I had already stopped following football closely, which didn’t make it any easier. Football was not the same anymore and I just couldn’t bear to watch it crumble like that. It was suddenly all about money, oil money, more specifically. Teams like Manchester City suddenly winning everything and signing the best players. Back when it was just Roman Abramovich with Chelsea, in the early 2000s, it didn’t feel dirty, for some reason. It was rather interesting to watch. But then again, it wasn’t like Chelsea was substantially better than everyone else and they didn’t even get to dominate the Premier League as City did. It just felt like historical reparation. City, on the other hand…
But the falling out comes from much earlier, back in 2006: the calciopoli scandal involving Juventus, when they got relegated. That’s when it became evident to everyone else that football was all about money these days. And it only got clearer and clearer. I just couldn’t get to appreciate it as much as I once did. My relationship with football became strictly digital, as in, PlayStation 2 games and managers, no more watching the telly. It wasn’t a problem at first because the players I grew up with were all still around. But then suddenly, a bunch of new faces started popping up and it all felt highly unfamiliar. Where did everyone else go?
That’s when I decided to play Championship Manager 01/02 with the original database for the first time, and it felt amazing. Not only because I wasn’t among a bunch of unfamiliar names, but because I knew full well which names to look for. Gianluigi Buffon, Alessandro Nesta, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard, Michael Owen, David Trezeguet, Thierry Henry, Michael Ballack, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the list goes on and on. So many names. Familiar names, at last! That was the footy I learned to love. Felt right at home. Made a save game with Liverpool and made sure to sign up all the promising lads to make a globetrotter. It didn’t take long until I was able to win pretty much everything: Premiership, FA Cup, League Cup, UCL, and so on. I mean, even my reserves were future stars. What could go wrong? Gerrard is out for 3 months with an injury? No problem! We have Lampard! Owen is out? Worry not, Tsigalko is ready to step in and score. As soon as you have enough good players allowing for good squad depth, winning becomes an easy task. Squad depth is what defines a good team in CM because injuries do happen, so you gotta make sure to have good replacements. Oh, and the calendar does make them tired, so it’s always good to have replacement parts all over. And I sure did. But such a victorious spell tends to get boring over time. It was time for yet another break.
Fast forward to 2022, I find myself playing Championship Manager 01/02 once again, but with a much older database: 93/94! And it’s not your average 1993/1994 database, because it makes sure to include all of the young stars from the late 90s such as Michael Owen, Steven Gerrard, Ronaldo, Fowler, Ronaldinho, Buffon, Nesta, Thierry Henry, Figo, Pirlo, Gattuso, Del Piero, Totti, Dyer, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, Frank Lampard, Carragher, the list goes on and on! The nostalgia is strong! I wasn’t very familiar with the 1993/1994 squads specifically, but the presence of the young stars was enough guidance to make a good squad and so far I won the Premier League 6 times, a good 3 or 4 FA Cups, 2 Champions Cup, a good 2 or 3 UEFA Cups. Quite a victorious spell so far. Oh yes, and we can’t forget the huge names from the mid-90s such as George Weah, Gabriel Batistuta, Vieira, Bebeto, Romário, Edmundo, which are relatively easy to snatch, mainly Batistuta, because Fiorentina was not a Serie A team. I signed him right away, in 93/94. Now, in 01/02, he is still as good as ever, banging at least 40 goals per season. What a legend! With the help of Robbie Fowler and James Flood, our team is unstoppable. The unlimited power of good management, I mean, foreknowledge. It’s a must-try for everyone into 90s/00s football, as it’s a good compromise between both. You get to taste the sweetness of the 90s while also experiencing the development and peak of the 00s stars, meaning it takes a lot longer than the usual CM database before it’s all full of regens, as most of the 00s stars are 14,15 years old when you start the game, and around their 20s in the early 2000s where the fun begins, sometimes younger than the regens and much more developed because they have been around for longer (in-game), meaning you get to see them all over playing for all the huge teams like you would expect them too. Feels very realistic and makes it feel familiar for a lot longer than the original database. It’s a work of art and a must-try for footy lovers.
Who could ever imagine that Championship Manager 01/02 would still be played, 21 years in the future? I sure wouldn’t have guessed. It’s the right compromise between complexity and time per season. Doesn’t feel as grindy, flows nicely, gets you addicted like nothing else, and everything can run it, even your phone or tablet. The simplicity, while a double-edged sword for various genres, fits football management like a glove. It’s the sweet spot. And the two-decade span of existence made it so there’s just so much content, patches, modifications and so on that you can virtually never run out of stuff to do. There’s also an 89/90 database which I want to try, eventually. And it’s just two examples of many. The Champman0102 team kept their database updates, so you have decades of different db updates to try out. The fun never ends! Championship Manager, like every good classic, might as well never die.
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