Championship Manager 2010 Review

Training Ground

There’s also the addition of a number of extra training options, with a special nod going to the new set piece creator, which allows you to fine tune free kicks. You can literally tweak everything from where the taker sends the ball to where every single individual player moves during the ensuing scramble.

There’s lots of tactical tinkering to be had, but you’ll constantly be fighting both your free kick taker’s variable skills and your own player’s inability. In over 150 practise free kicks, our team managed to convert four into goals, and the whole process left us feeling frustratingly powerless in regards to the actual consequences on the pitch – a problem that isn’t limited to just the training screens either.

While plenty of depth has been added in some areas, much-needed improvements and new features have been utterly ignored in others. There’s no press conference system for example, so no way to engage other teams in mind games or publically praise or lambast opponents.


Tthere’s also no way to individually interact with players off the pitch other than altering their training regimes, with the game lacking the ability to build up a strikers shaking conference or fire a player up for big game outside of the almost instantly stale team talks.

Team talks themselves are disappointingly wooden, with the same cardboard cut out phrases never giving you the feeling of being in the changing room bollocking your team of overpaid layabouts for going in 3-0 down at half time. Instead of questioning a team’s pride and breaking out the hair dryer treatment, you’re choosing to either “aggressively” or “calmly” criticise them for “conceding goals” or “poor defending.”

While the option to give individual team talks to your defence, midfield or attack as well as individual players is a great one, your choice of words always seem to lack the satisfaction of even pretend-yelling at your assembled team of failures.


Champ Man’s real failing when it comes to making you feel out of control though is it’s range of match tactics, which somehow manage to be incredibly varied and yet disappointingly simple in scope while also being frustratingly difficult to employ. To the game’s credit there’s free reign to place players anywhere on the pitch when designing your formations, with alternate tactics for when your team have or are chasing possession and with equal free reign on where you want players to move during play.

However, while the ability to tweak formations is impressive, actually altering the run of play is naught but aggravating. For example, I like my sides to play defensively before counter-attacking up the flanks and then whipping an inviting a cross into the area – a tactic that is nigh on impossible to emulate in Champ Manager 2010. Passing direction is controlled by having individual players “feed” the ball to others rather than passing through areas of the pitch, making for very rigid tactics that need to be tightly and minutely managed.