The third installment of the Premier Manager games offered a standard scenario (we start in the amateur Vauxhall Conference and fight for promotion to professional divisions), decent graphics and a wide range of club management options.
One of the main attractions was the possibility of hiring many co-workers (assistant manager, coaches, scouts, junior coach) and assigning tasks to them, which decreased the workload on our shoulders. The improvement / expansion of the stadium and the signing sponsorship contracts were increasing the ways we could improve out club - a better stadium meant more revenue from tickets, but at the same time such investments consumed money that we could not spend on transfers.
Transfer negotiations also looked a bit different than in most games -
many clubs could make offers for players (open offers) and in
subsequent rounds they could raise them, but at the end the player made
the decision which club he wanted to move to (which resulted in making
it very hard to sing a decent player for amateur conference team).
In
general a complicated game, the match presentation was perhaps not the
best one, but it was possible to very precisely determine the positions
of the players on the field depending on which sector the ball was in,
and then during the match watch how it works.
Premier Manager 3 was not an easy game to like, but you have to appreciate its level of development and range of options in this football manager.
Championship Manager, the first game of the franchise, wasn't perhaps an impressive game when you take a look at the screens below - just lines of text, simple numbers to show the values, game engine wasn't giving much info or match statistics, but in a way it was a timeless classic that hardly had any competitions in years to come.
your squad list
Why? It isn't easy to explain really. On surface it was just another football manager, nothing special about it, but once you started to play it became obvious it is something special. For start you didn't have to start from the bottom of the league and work your way to the top, you could have just take a team from Premiership and fight for the title in your first season.
player details
What is more you could have play in up to 4 players (not at the same time, but in rounds), but the real thing with Championship Manager began when your was doing poorly, because you could have been actually fired. What is so special about it? The little thing - you still could go on playing. No, not running a team any more, but you were still in the game and you could have apply for position in another team. Of course if you did not gained enough reputation in your previous club it could have been tough to find another job, but not impossible.
Another thing was with the players - their skills were shown in form of values between 1 and 20 and while in the matches you could not see their actual statistics or events the overall ratings were really showing how good they were. I know it does not sound like much, but for example you could have gone to the top scorer ranking, select any of the lower divisions and buy player who were at the top of the list (if his club would allow). Of course he would need time to adapt to your level of the competition, but it was almost guaranteed that once player shows a talent he can play well in different club as well.
your club staff
Same story with the youth players - it was possible to use them as emergency replacement players if you had problems with setting up the lineup for the match, but if they had enough talent they could have been valuable team members in the matches. To stretch it further if you would give them a chance as youth players to take part in the first team they would be a bit better once they reach age to play as professional.
foreign players list
Those were just simple examples of tiny little bits that made Championship Manager a legend - they were not spectacular, they were not significant on first glance, but once you invested some time in the game you began to realize that almost nothing in the game was actually random and each of your decision could have consequences in years to come.
Of course time have changed and today first version of Championship Manager can hardly compete with modern football manager games, but it is important to see how little it takes to create a really great game even without much of the graphics or 3D match preview.
Santa Monica FC Online is a brand new online football manager described by its creators as compact online football / soccer manager game
for those, who are tired of waiting for next round in their favourite
online multiplayer soccer manager game or are just casual players.
How does it work? In SMFC Online you don't have to wait for other players - you can
play as many matches as you want, whenever you want, without any limits.
For each game original set of clubs and players will be generated for
you.
While the game is minimalistic it contains most of the typical options
of big online soccer games: running your own club, dealing on transfer
list, play in league and cup matches, take care of training, economy,
stadium. You can start your team in any of over 180 countries around the world and face the procedurally generated opponents.
You can start each game with different starting parameters settings (there are over 100,000 combinations), which means the game will be different each time you play it. You can also use in-game editor to adapt the clubs and players in your game to your expectations.
