Champ Man 09: Top Of The League? Feature

It's not an over-statement to say that Championship Manager's performance on the football management sim pitch for the last few years has been like watching the implosion of Leeds United from Champions League semi-finalists to League One also-rans.  The split between Eidos and developers Sports Interactive in 2004 saw the publisher retain the 'Championship Manager' brand, but little else: SI left with the player database, and a decade of know-how.  Since then, Eidos has tried to keep up with SI's Football Manager, which has proved to be more than a task in itself.  The first Champ Man title following the break, CM5, was an attempt by Eidos and its foetal SI replacement - Beautiful Game Studios - to create the Champ Man they thought SI would have produced...and for three years, such a strategy has seen the once illustrious brand become a little tarnished.

This April however, sees the dawn of a new age for the Championship Manager series with the launch of Championship Manager 09.  The release is the first incarnation since Beautiful Game Studios brought in a new General Manager in the form of ex-EA European Marketing Manager (and football fanatic), Roy Meredith.  TVG recently spoke with Meredith and saw a pre-alpha build of the new look Champ Man at first hand...

A Championship Manager?

Walking into Beautiful Game Studios for the first time, it's clear that football and Champ Man's heritage is the Wimbledon outfit's passion: trophies, a reception with astro-turf flooring, framed football shirts, decades-old boxes of Subbeuteo, and packaging from every release of Championship Manager to date, leaves you with no doubt which sport is at the heart of the studio.  So does the overt placing of Champ Man boxes from the SI glory years help to push the team on?  "I put them there to remind staff that we have a heritage, and remind myself that we have a heritage," says Meredith.

At the moment, Championship Manager 2009 is in the mid-Alpha stage of development, and is just a couple of weeks away from having its bugs exterminated.  It's only then that Meredith will finally get a real play-through of the game he's had more than a helping hand to craft - something that he's very much looking forward to.  Meredith is a true football sim aficionado, someone who has played Championship Manager for over thirteen years, and still plays both Champ Man and Football Manager every year.  On the subject of the two rival franchises, the BGS guv'nor says that there's plenty of room for both: "I don't see why people shouldn't play both games, if we can offer something that's a healthy alternative.  By having two healthy, quality, driven alternatives on the marketplace, we can actually push the genre - because that's what football management [sims] need."

Acknowledging that the brand had lost its way in recent years - Meredith pays homage to the iconic Three Lions song by comparing it to "Four years of hurt" - it doesn't take much time to see that the new BGS guv'nor really does have an Alex Ferguson-like drive to drag the franchise up by its bootstraps.  After all, that's why he's at BGS.  In his own words, "I was brought in because the franchise was on the slide.  People talk about 'mid-table mediocrity' and I think we were...it [Champ Man] was deserving of the 68/69 it was getting on Metacritic." He later adds, "Sales have slipped as the quality has slipped."

Back To The Tactics Board.

Describing the fundamentals of what Championship Manager should be all about and where the last few years had gone awry, Meredith comments that it should be, "a fun game, a quality gaming experience that when you shut it down at two in the morning you're still imagining the post-match interviews in your head.  You build up a feeling of relationships with your players.  We lost a lot of that.  We lost the fun element from it, and we really lost an idea of what our game identity was all about; we were doing stuff and not thinking it through enough.  That's no disrespect to people here because it wasn't a single person, it was an approach that we had and victims of circumstance."

Crafting an identity was something at the top of the list for Meredith, and it's why the development time between last year's effort and this new chapter in the franchise was extended to eighteen months.  "This is a cliché and it does sound bollocks, but it's part of a journey we're on.  This year is about improving it; next year is about improving it even more.  There are things we wanted to do this year that we couldn't, [but] we will do next year.  This year has to be a big leap in terms of quality because we've got to bring that back."  Crafting a focused and fresh identity isn't the only aim for Beautiful Game Studios; Champ Man 2009 is also getting a new look too.  As Meredith himself dryly puts it, "They say that first impressions don't count for much, but I tell you what, they bloody well do when you're playing Championship Manager.  If I'm asking someone to spend 48 hours solid of their life in front of a dog's dinner - which people do - you want to make sure they get a reward."

Fresh ideas and tweaks are being introduced into the presentation of Champ Man, including movement to what critics describe as amounting to nothing more than a Power Point presentation made in Excel.  Navigation is another issue that's being addressed this year:  "One of the criticisms about our game [in the past] is that you got lost.  In previous iterations, you don't know what screen you're in; are you in tactics and training, squad selection - it's probably obvious when you're in the scouting screen - but you need to know where you are in the game in order to come out and move forward."  Meredith also doesn't hold back on how recent Champ Man games have looked overall, describing them as "look[ing] like a budget football game as well to me..."

A side layout that so far resembles file management system (Meredith stresses that it's not a final design) also suggests a more streamlined answer to navigation.  Two tabs, CM Home and CM World, have also been introduced to aid navigation.  CM Home presents everything related to the gamer's club; for instance, the squad, news and media, and what's going on in the team's league.  CM World, as perhaps you've guessed, is for everything not directly related to your game like looking squads for clubs in far afield places like Algeria or Argentina (where a team called Arsenal is currently top of the second tier...no sniggering about that's where Mr Wenger's team should be).  The tabs are basically the heart of quick information flow in Champ Man, but that's not all there is.

Data + Meaning = ?

The flow of information continues when it comes to a player's status, which rotates between whether he's injured, wanted by a third party, or if his contract is up, all displayed on the squad tables.  It continues with a Sky Sports News style rotating window of information, detailing the major leagues, top goal scorers, and other stats.  It's all a very quick and efficient way of finding out details like league position - something that perhaps hasn't been as obvious in the past.  Not only that, but with a detail 'Mail and Media' system that allows gamers to track the performance of individual players on a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly basis, or receive emails about injuries to promising youth players even when the youth team mail is filtered out, Champ Man 2009's flow of information seems all-encompassing.  The Media tool furthers this, offering related stories according to the main back page story.  For instance, if it's a story about David Beckham, then there'll also be related stories according to AC Milan, MLS, and England.  This is also something that can be filtered out however, so you can dampen down any fears of drowning in a wealth of information.

The depth and accuracy of information also helps aid decision-making, the crux of an ethos that's being permeated throughout the gameplay:  "Every decision in the game has to have a cause and consequence.  People want negative things.  If you forget to play your striker when he returns from injury, you want your team not to score goals.  It has to be transparent."  The flow of information is something that the BGS General Manager aims to improve in this year's iteration, and in future years too:  "What I want to do is make people think about the information they're getting, because that's what leads you into making a decision.  If it starts triggering a number of different thoughts, and you're receiving information in a number of different ways, it'll build up different things which will have different consequences...This year we don't want a lot of repetition; we want a lot of variation in everything you do."  Improvements to the match engine is something included in that desire to create greater variety, with more animations and a variety in how tactics are played out each time, something that Meredith feels adds both "depth and accessibility."

The number of league tiers in this year's outing is another area where depth is being added, with the seventh tier of English football (the Isthmian, Northern Premier, and Southern Premier), the third tier of German football, and the reintroduction of the Home Leagues like the Welsh Premiership, offering an even wider amount of choice for players.  The re-emergence of the Home Leagues to Championship Manager points towards the importance of the franchise's community to BGS, and the studio's willingness to listen.  A poll on the official website posed the question, but it wasn't until a petition was started from within the community for the likes of the Welsh and Irish Premiers to be reinstated that BGS realised it had to be one of key features for 2009.

Three or four other features are also scheduled to be unveiled in a matter of weeks, with most of them new to Champ Man (and according to Meredith) are new to the franchise and the genre; but for now, the BGS GM is keeping them close to his chest.  TVG will keep you posted on them when they're formally announced.

A Tale Of Two Managers.

Like its rival from SEGA and Sports Interactive, the community also forms a key part in ensuring the database is kept up-to-date and accurate, with armies of volunteer research networks.  As Meredith himself puts it, "Most, up to 90%, of the data you'll see is researched by volunteers, which is then triple-checked before it goes into the game."  BGS is also shortly to announce a tie-in with a company that delivers football data, solidifying its goal of crafting a detailed and progressive database from Champ Man 2009 onwards.  In an important differentiation, it's also worth pointing out that none of the players in the game will be 'greyed out'; all could potentially be signed for your team.  But why is that important?  "If you want to play a game, you want to unearth someone that nobody else has heard of...and sign him.  If we've researched him, he's got a full set of stats, and he's 'signable' - work permits and contracts permitting."

Championship Manager 2009 may be a giant step forward, a huge electric shock to a brand that's lost its way in recent times, but what about the future?  Meredith confirms that despite actively looking at the potential of taking the franchise into the online space properly (a CM Online has previously been farmed out), he really wants to ensure that the core PC game is where he wants it.  Looking ahead to what BGS has in store for Champ Man 2010, he's not afraid to say that the bar is being raised - substantially so:  "It's a never-ending journey.  This [Championship Manager 2009] is where I wanted to be right now.  CM10 will be as much, if not more, of a leap than this is...[However, Champ Man 2009] is a perfect step; it's what we needed to achieve...[but] when we started to plan CM10, it was like 'what if we'd done this in CM09?  That has to go into CM10.  I don't ever want to get to 'Mission Accomplished'; I don't want to look beyond CM11 and CM12."

Speaking of the future, has BGS set its sights on taking back gamers who left after the Eidos/SI split to play the new Football Manager, or is it aiming to introduce new players into the football sim genre?  "I think the first people we have to consider when we're making a game are the audience which is already playing, and making something that excites them; that the franchise they've invested loyalty in is moving forward...When you say 'take them back', I'm not particularly bothered in stealing customers from FM.  I do want people to play both games - they sell more than us so I'm naturally going to say that...If everybody who buys our game goes and buys FM, I'm quite happy as long as long as they play our game too."

TVG would like to thank Roy Meredith at Beautiful Game Studios for taking the time out and chat to us about the re-birth of a gaming icon.  Championship Manager 2009 is scheduled to arrive on PC in April, but you can read TVG's preview on the title right now.