For those that don’t know what Championship Manager (ChampMan as I will doubtless lazily start referring to it during this piece) is, I shall endeavour to explain. Basically it is a state-of-the-art, football management simulation game for the PC. It allows you to take control of virtually any club in world football you so desire and pit your wits against the finest tactical minds in the game. The game itself has become an institution amongst computer game-playing football fans and March 2003 saw the release of the 4th version of the game. The all-singing, all-dancing, ChampMan4.

This early, fledgling version of ChampMan (which I bought for £14.99 in Trago Mills, Devon – you never forget the details of your first love) had fictional computer generated players and it meant you had to sacrifice realism in favour of a keen imagination – PERFECT! I bought into the mythical players thing completely, but was more than interested when a proper accurate version of the game came out about a year later with the real players of the day in it. This was ChampMan2 and it came out in 1993 – in many ways it remains the benchmark for football simulation, the only flaw was that it was too easy.

Finally, after lots and lots of “final tweaking” and “late stage game development” the product was ready for release. Unlike many fans of the game I didn’t rush out and buy it straight away. In my opinion ChampMan had gotten too detailed and too fussy in recent years, but eventually my curiosity was aroused enough for me to part with £30.

Many icons had been moved for nothing more than cosmetic reasons and signing players seemed to have become more fiddly and less-user friendly. There seemed to be less detail in certain areas (fluent languages of players, scouting players) and more in other, superfluous areas. The game had stats coming out of its ears, whereas earlier incarnations of the game used stats simply and purposefully. Most worrying of all was that the game engine seemed to have slowed down (to a crawl at times) and had seemingly lost an element of the realism that had made the game such a joy to beging with.

ChampMan4 boasts 39 national leagues and more than 200,000 players and staff. Of course one of the main advantages of buying the new edition is that you get up to date data – Rio Ferdinand is at Man United instead of Leeds for example (sorry Deano76) – which makes things more realistic and satisfying. So why don’t I like the new game quite as much as I expected?

Don’t get me wrong, there are loads of good new features. You can choose your preferred skin (the user-interface of your preference) and there are various keyboard shortcuts, but these are cosmetic changes and not gameplay changes.

Lads and lasses who play football management sims will probably agree that ChampMan is easily the best series of games of its type. It blows LMA Manager and other such tacky simulations out of the water – however like many things in life the BIGGER and more successful something becomes the more likely it is to forget what made it so good. So let’s keep it real Eidos – when the next game comes out lets make sure the game remains as thorough as it always has been but reclaims the 10% playability and realism that it has lost along the way.