Before breaking up its partnership with original publishers, Eidos Interactive, the game now called Football Manager was originally known as Championship Manager.
In the early years of the millennium, the game was arguably at the peak of its popularity, with thousands becoming dangerously addicted to it.
The countless hours wasted spent sitting in front of a PC playing the greatest ever football-management simulation games is something that many of us can relate to.
Now, with the release of the latest instalment of Football Manager just around the corner, here’s a look back at some of the things we learned.
1. Your education was not as important
No matter how many times your parents told you, your Junior Cert was never going to come anywhere close to the joy of experiencing Cherno Samba or Freddy Adu tear your virtual-reality opponent to pieces.
When you were in front of that screen, your real-life future simply didn’t matter.
2. Why bother chasing girls when this was all you’d ever need?
The later years of secondary school are difficult ones for boys. Hormones are flying everywhere, yet the girls of your age will only even consider the older boys that had already passed their driving tests.
But who gave a shit? Championship Manager more than filled up for the void.
3. We all struggled to remember who a player played for because of CM
Such was our levels of commitment to the game, very often the line between the simulated world of our game and the real-life football became blurred.
It wasn’t uncommon to wrongly forget that a player represented a certain team because he’d be signed by one of your rivals on the game – or that Ibrahima Bakayoko was actually good.
4. Using the editor made you feel dirty
Let’s be honest, as much as we loved the game, it could be utterly infuriating at times. There was always a temptation to cheat, and most of us did.
By using the editor, you could attach unlimited funds to the team of your choice and switch a few players over if you so wished. It made winning much easier, but after a few days the realisation of what you’d done started to creep in.
5. There was something satisfying about playing for so long, you didn’t recognise any of the players
If you put in enough time, it was possible to reach far off dates in the future like ‘2015’, where the only recognisable players were that overrated Rooney kid that Everton fans keep banging on about and some lad called Milner at Leeds that would be the one to take them to Premier League glory.
The majority of other players were regens, and there was something immensely satisfying in knowing that you were the Marty McFly of the Championship Manager world.
Nowadays some people have even created Twitter profiles for their favourite regens.
