Championship Manager 2010 Review

Football Management Derby

The in-game match engine is also completely removed from the rest of game, stopping you from quickly scouting out the opposition players mid-match and adjusting your play accordingly. Is their defender liable to lash out and award you free kicks if you antagonise him? While the option to wind him up is, brilliantly, available, you don’t know if it’ll work, and that quickly starts to chafe as you feel less connected to the outcome on the pitch and mystified as to why your tactics are or aren’t working.

In my first game of season managing Bristol City I convincingly crushed Premier League opposition 3-0 in a friendly, only to go on and lose my first 3 leagues games using the exact same tactics. Where was I going wrong? What did I need to fix? I had no idea and felt powerless to stop my sides slide down the table, with the game offering no advice as to which areas of your squad needed strengthening or how to overcome particular opposing formations.

This is crucially where Champ Man 2010 differs so far from Football Manager. While previous iterations of FM have lacked the back room and training depth of Champ Man 2010, especially in regards to formation customisation, the match day experience felt that much more satisfying. Tactical tweaks that seriously changed the tide of the game like focussing passing or counter attacking could be deployed instantly leaving you with more time to motivate your side, bring in new signings and swap insults with Arsene Wenger.


Champ Man 2010 however has gone in a completely different direction, giving you just too much choice and detail when it comes to tactics and training while completely eschewing the public side of football management. There's very little of the drama and personality that makes football such a thrilling sport to follow. This is a mistake and takes away a lot of the fun of football management, replacing it with endless and mostly trite stats.

We want to forge rivalries, put off or fire up players, stir up transfer rumours to unsettle players, get into feuds with misbehaving strikers – it’s this sort of stuff that fills the back pages of newspapers every day, not that Wayne Rooney’s on-target average has gone up five percent.

What a football management game needs to do is strike the balance between stat fest and fun; between being approachable and having the tactical depth to accommodate those who want to tinker. Sadly Championship Manager 2010 accomplishes neither of these to any meaningful degree and the result, while slickly presented and doubtlessly appealing to some, fails to live up to expectations of a franchise reborn.

With BGS ignoring so much of what it means to be a football manager and focusing so fiercely on overly complex tactics and training instead, it seems certain that Championship Manager will continue to live up to its name of being the Fizzy Pop league of football management games. Let’s hope Sports Interactive can offer something better when Football Manager 2010 reaches us in October - because Championship Manager 2010 has failed to deliver something that'll last much longer than that.

Score Guide