a brief history of footy games

So, you like footy management games do ya? Me, I've played dozens of the sods. At times its been something like an addiction … buying the newest game then playing, playing, playing and playing it again until I had mastered it. Even the really, really shit ones and boy there have been a lot of them. I first played a management sim in 1984, and I haven't looked back since. What follows is a roughly chronological listing of the games that I can, at least, remember. Many many others have faded from my memory.

I can happily relate that I am now a fully rounded individual who does not play these games for days at a time. Well, not often …..

The Spectrum Years

Football Manager… the first of its kind. Written by some bearded bloke called Kevin who actually managed to become something of a very minor celebrity on the back of this game. I first played it in 1984 on a friend's Spectrum, and became hooked. I didn't play it again for a couple of years, by which time it had lost much of its sparkle. So I upgraded to Football Manager 2 which promised "state of the art graphic match highlights!" What you actually got was a lot of stick figures running around a green blob, kicking a black blob, with horrible screechy sound effects. Occasionally, all the players would run after the ball at once and form a large black glob which would then career around the pitch like some giant mad prune-beast. Oh ye Children of the Playstation Revolution, if only I had a screenshot to show you, you don't know you're born …….

On the Bench… oh my word. How many days were lost to this game? Unlike Football Manager, which was quite a "big" release, this sneaked out on a budget label. £1.99 it was. Written totally in BASIC, it was the first game that really, really got me by the short & curlies. It was great!! But bugger me it was slow. You could literally go down the pub for a pint in the time it took to work out the results after a game, at least at the start of the season. No sound, no graphics (which was always a plus point in any Spectrum game), just sheer classic gameplay. You could edit the names of the teams or players. Even in those heady pre-Bosman days, I always had a yen for the foreign lads. My front three of Frascati, Ravioli, and Carbonari lives in legend. The first, but not the last time, that gameplay won out over fancy dan presentation. And the beginning of many a long standing tradition between me & my mate, such as sprinkling the screen with fairy dust to invoke the magic of the cup. Sounds sad? Yep, but hey, we're blokes!!

Football Director 2… this was something of a classic. Like On the Bench, a game written in BASIC but beefed up to the n^th degree. I see this now as the ancestor of Championship Manager; lots of depth, very challenging, but with a simple, text based structure and a very simple, but very effective, match sequence. In fact, now I think about it, there does seem to be 2 schools of footy management games. Those that can trace their ancestry to Football Manager and those that developed from Football Director. Well, imagine that ….. Actually, I hardly played this game as my Spectrum 128 +2A (yes, kids, that’s a HUGE 128k of memory! 32k of which was actually accessible!) wouldn't run the thing. But trust me it was, for its day, the best.

Treble Champions… this game actually took over from On The Bench as my game of choice, and lasted me right up until I dumped the Spectrum. Once I got this, OTB never got a look in! Okay it was slow, but compared to the other games I had played it whizzed along with gusto. The match screen was excellent, there was real thought given to player development, and it was actually rather challenging, especially when it came to getting out of the Conference. (The first game, I think, to feature this). I loved this game. And yet, some years later, I came across a version of it for the Amiga. I thought "Great! A chance to play that brilliant game again!" Got it home, loaded it up, played it for literally 10 minutes, never touched it again. Because from a 1990's viewpoint, it was shit. Isn't it funny how our expectations change?

The Match… okay, I hardly played this game for the simple reason that it ALWAYS crashed at the end of the first season. But it is worth a mention because of one innovative feature that, as far as I am aware, has never been resurrected. Okay it had a simple, but effective graphic match sequence with running text commentary, BUT none of the players had any visible skill ratings! The manager (i.e. you) had to enter his own estimation of their skills on the screen after watching the match itself. And if you wanted to buy another player, you had to watch a game he was playing in and see how well he did. It may not seem that wonderful, but believe me it REALLY really got you involved in the game. I would sit there with pen & paper taking notes, for god sake!

Other Spectrum Games … sad bastard I may have been but in those days there were so many games around all at only £1.99 or something each.I guarantee I have forgotten at least 5 of them! One that I actually played occasionally was Striker Manager. Again, this was a game that seems to have influenced future game development, as it had a slight resemblance to both Premier Manager and Ultimate Soccer Manager in that each player had several skills rated between 0-100 and could be played in any position. It also had a truly awful arcade penalty taking section. Oh, and you could manage teams in England, France or Italy, which was cool. International Manager could have been quite good, but was so so very difficult. I seem to remember plenty of "England 0 Venezuela 8" results. When it got to the stage that England was even getting stuffed in the Home Internationals (remember them?) I generally knocked it on the head. Then there was The Manager I think it was called. Detailed with genuine player names for once, it sadly featured one of my main bugbears - NO MATCH SEQUENCE. Yep you picked your team then it jumped straight to the results page. I don't know why this annoys me so much, but it does!

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