40 Fun Facts About Championship Manager

Which TV duo received special Championship Manager copies casting them as Newcastle and Sunderland players?

Ant & Dec were handed the one-off edition of Season 01/02 on their final SMTV Live in 2001. Ant was a £50,000-a-week Newcastle star, while Dec earned £90 a week at Sunderland.

Miles Jacobson first got an early Championship Manager 2 by trading concert tickets for which Britpop band?

Blur were among the acts he had worked with in the music business before he became a tester for Sports Interactive and, by 2001, the studio's full-time boss.

Where in a Shropshire family home did two brothers write the original Championship Manager?

A bedroom was the whole studio until the game's success let the pair found Sports Interactive in 1994 and move to north London.

Which action-adventure franchise sat beside Championship Manager among the flagship series of UK publisher Eidos?

Tomb Raider was the global star of an Eidos catalogue that also held Hitman, Thief, Deus Ex and Legacy of Kain.

Which British football commentator voiced the optional spoken match commentary on the Championship Manager 2 CD-ROM?

Clive Tyldesley's voice was an optional extra beside the usual text commentary, and that 1995 game proved the last in the series to talk.

Which unusual pricing model did Eidos offer fans who pre-ordered Championship Manager 2010?

Pay what you want let buyers name any price from 1p plus a £2.50 transaction fee, and the studio's general manager said the response had exceeded expectations.

Which US publisher reportedly turned down Championship Manager in 1992 for not having enough live action?

Electronic Arts wanted action on screen, and the text-only game it passed on reportedly sold a modest 20,000 or so in its first version.

Which court decision on out-of-contract players was written into the transfer rules of Championship Manager 96/97?

The Bosman ruling of 1995 let players in the EU leave for nothing once a contract expired, so the game's managers could suddenly lose a star without a fee.

Which Japanese publisher signed Sports Interactive after the studio lost the Championship Manager name to Eidos?

Sega published the studio's rebranded Football Manager from 2004 and bought the developer outright in April 2006.

Which brothers created Championship Manager and often inserted themselves into the game as below-average players?

Paul and Oliver Collyer founded Sports Interactive in 1994 and made their in-game selves too poor to play for even the worst teams.

Typing which England manager's name as the user's own unlocked the national job in Championship Manager 96/97?

Glenn Hoddle was England manager at the time, and the cheat skipped the usual climb to a reputation good enough for a country to come calling.

Which console received the exclusive Championship Manager: Season 02/03 after a port of Season 01/02?

Microsoft Xbox owners got a version of Season 01/02 in April 2002, and its success brought the sequel seven months later, with a joypad that rumbled whenever a goal went in.

What did the first Championship Manager lack that rivals such as Premier Manager already offered in 1992?

Real footballers arrived with the 1993 follow-up; in the original every squad carried made-up names, and sides outside the four English divisions fielded men known only by shirt number.

Which Japanese company bought Eidos in 2009 and so became the owner of the Championship Manager brand?

Square Enix took over that year and within months had cut or moved abroad about 80% of the jobs at the game's in-house studio.

Which country's leagues joined England's as playable when Championship Manager 2 launched on PC in 1995?

Scotland was a PC-only extra, and for the first time the series let managers choose a league system at the start, though only one could run at a time.

What did Eidos do with Championship Manager: Season 01/02 in December 2008, seven years after release?

Eidos made it a free download, and the gift kept the 2001 edition alive, with fans issuing updated databases for it long afterwards.

The first Championship Manager launched in 1992 on the Atari ST and which other 16-bit home computer?

The Commodore Amiga was the ST's great rival of the day, and the series kept appearing on it into the mid-1990s, including the 1994 end-of-season data disk.

Which competition from outside Europe became playable for the first time in Championship Manager: Season 99/00?

Major League Soccer was the edition's headline addition, arriving alongside a World Club Championship and a database swollen past 40,000 players and staff.

A notorious Championship Manager 4 bug moved which non-league club to a stadium with over 200,000 seats?

Northwich Victoria got the giant ground in a release so buggy that scores could change at random and lower-division sides signed superstars with ease.

Which unstoppable Championship Manager: Season 01/02 striker was later widely reported to be fictional?

Tó Madeira was listed at the small Portuguese club Gouveia, and a 2016 report called him pure invention, though a later investigation claimed a player of that name had in fact existed.

Maxim Tsigalko, a goal machine in Championship Manager: Season 01/02, was capped twice by which country?

Belarus picked him twice in 2003 and he scored on his debut, but a knee injury ended the Dinamo Minsk striker's career at 26, long after gamers had made him a legend.

Cherno Samba became a Championship Manager cult hero while a teenage striker at which London club?

Millwall turned down a £2 million Liverpool offer for him as a schoolboy, yet his Football League debut came years later, for Plymouth Argyle.

Tonton Zola Moukoko, a Championship Manager legend, was a teenage prospect at which English club?

Derby County signed him at 15, and he reportedly turned down AC Milan to turn professional there, but he went home to Sweden in 2002 after family problems.

Which military term fits the attribute masking that hid unfamiliar players in Championship Manager: Season 01/02?

Fog of war meant a manager saw full details only for players he would plausibly know about, which made a good scouting network worth its wages.

The first Championship Manager was written in which programming language, later judged ill-suited to fast games?

BASIC is poorly suited to high-performance games, and the following year's sequel was ported to C.

Which British publisher, later merged into Eidos, released the first Championship Manager in 1992?

Domark took its name from founders Dominic Wheatley and Mark Strachan, and its mid-1990s merger created the Eidos label that the series wore for more than a decade.

Which French manager lent his name to the 1993 French adaptation of the first Championship Manager?

Guy Roux ran Auxerre for more than 40 years, and the 1993 game bearing his name, built by Ubisoft and Intelek on the brothers' work, spawned sequels as late as 2002.

What did Championship Manager 4 add in 2003, ending the series' reliance on text and imagination?

A 2D pitch view showed each match from above, and anticipation for it helped the game become the UK's fastest-selling PC title up to that time.

Which in-house Eidos team took over Championship Manager after Sports Interactive left in 2003?

Beautiful Game Studios was set up in 2003 and unveiled the next January, by which time its former partner was preparing a rival game for a new publisher.

Sports Interactive's successor to Championship Manager took its title from a 1982 game by which designer?

Kevin Toms launched Football Manager in 1982 on his own Addictive Games label, founding the genre that the brothers' series would later dominate.

What did Sports Interactive keep after the 2003 split, when Eidos held on to the Championship Manager name?

Its source code and data let the developer ship Football Manager 2005 within a year, while the publisher was left with a famous name and nothing to run it on.

Which branded match-analysis tool supplied the post-match statistics in Championship Manager 2007 and 2008?

ProZone gave managers a breakdown of every team and player once the whistle blew, and GameSpot praised it while saying the match engine needed work.

Under which shortened name was Championship Manager revived for phones and tablets in 2013?

Champ Man releases followed almost yearly on iOS and Android until the services behind all of them were switched off in May 2018.

Which since-abolished trophy was one of three top European prizes in the first Championship Manager?

The Cup Winners' Cup sat beside every big domestic knockout of the day, including the Anglo-Italian tournament, in a game whose four English divisions held 20 clubs each.

One of the first Championship Manager's most innovative ideas was grading what from 0 to 10 after every match?

Each player's performance fed a running mean for the season, so a manager could see at a glance who was in form and who needed dropping.

What did Sports Interactive deliberately leave out of Championship Manager 97/98, the UK's top-selling PC game of 1997?

An anti-piracy disc check was omitted so friends could pass the game around, a gamble on winning fans before the next generation of the series launched.

Which euphemism did Sports Interactive use for the patches that fixed Championship Manager 4's many bugs?

Enhancement Packs proved a short-lived label, dropped for later releases after an edition that ran slowly even on machines that had handled its predecessors.

Mark Collis and Ferah Orosco, the first invented super-players in Championship Manager, were placed at which club?

Cambridge United got the pair, a striker and a defender, when the developers slipped them into an end-of-season update disk in 1994.

A Championship Manager 2006 glitch gave superstar attributes to bargain players at which small English club?

Forest Green Rovers players such as Alex Meechan and Bruno Teixeira had elite numbers but cost only about £40,000, until an update patched the error.

A later patch gave Championship Manager: Season 01/02 its only new playable league, from which Asian country?

South Korea arrived by patch because the developers had held back new leagues for this edition in order to fine-tune how the game played.