Championship Manager 2007 First Impressions

It's time once again for football management addicts to look to the horizon in anticipation. The new league season is underway, the transfer window has closed, and the latest edition of Championship Manager is nearly here. It's the third instalment in the series since Sports Interactive split with Eidos, and although new developer Beautiful Games Studios would themselves admit to a difficult start to ChampMan life, they've had a decent amount of time now to work with.

Championship Manager 2007 is the culmination of the steady progress made so far on the series, and fans will be pleased to hear that many of the improvements and suggestions that have been made in the official forums have been noted and attended to. We were recently invited to the BGS London headquarters to take a look at how the game is shaping up, and studio head David Rutter and producer Luke Didd took us through the changes.

The focus for this year's title isn't so much adding new features as it is making sure the existing ones work well. To this end, a number of the game's modules have been reworked, and the top of the list here is player morale. There are now more comprehensive options when it comes to interacting with your team, and match-day team talks have been added to give you more of an opportunity to influence the game's events.

Talks take place before the match, at half time, and once the game is over, and there are four key types of talks that you can give--ranging from aggressive to encouraging--or you can simply say nothing at all. Different players will respond to different attitudes, and as well as addressing the overall team, you can single out specific squad members for a more tailored approach.

At the next team-talk opportunity, a feedback box at the bottom of the screen will give you some indication as to how your previous words were taken. This takes the form of a line on specific players that indicates whether they reacted well or poorly to the attitude you took with them (either individually or as part of the team chat). Over time, you'll be able to get some idea of what best motivates your players and how to get the most out of them on match day.

But player happiness has wider implications than just match-day performance. If you've singled out a player for abuse, which he feels is unjustified, he may become unhappy. If this happens, an icon will be displayed next to his name on the squad screen, and options to talk to him and sort the problem out will be available. However, even promises of a new contract a few months down the line might not be enough to satisfy some players you've really upset.

If you do decide that a new contract is the only way to cheer someone up, you'll need to be a little careful here, as well. If you withdraw a contract offer once negotiations have begun, that sends a message to the player in itself, and there may be additional consequences.

One of the key additions to the game, in response to many requests from the fans, is the inclusion of another tier of the English football pyramid. It will now be possible to manage teams from the English Conference North or South, opening up whole new challenges for people who prefer to start their management life at a particularly low and difficult level. Here, as in real life, resources will be sparse and the transfer market largely irrelevant apart from wheeler-dealing in free transfers. And for anybody harbouring dreams of taking their local team from the Conference North to Champion's League glory, the official word is that it's technically possible but extremely unlikely. No doubt that won't prevent people from trying, however.

Tactics within the game have also received an upgrade. When you've chosen your formation and picked your team, you can decide whether or not to single out specific opposition players for special treatment. On the chalkboard, man-marking is as simple as dragging one of your players over to one of your opponent's, and it's possible to tell your team to wind up, harass, or even go in hard on any members of the other team.

These latter tactical options can yield effective rewards. Hassling inexperienced defenders may result in a poor pass back, being overly aggressive on an injury-prone player could lead to an injury, and winding up a particularly volatile member of the opposition might mean bookings, or worse. But be warned: Your team can get a reputation if these options are overused, and 22-man brawls on the pitch are possible, so you may end up on the receiving end of a ban or two.

One of the main areas needing improvement from previous versions of the game is the match engine. Possibly the hardest element to get right, the engine dictates whether the game is authentic or unrealistic. Because football fans are used to watching real matches, have a good idea of just how they ebb and flow, and what decisions players in any given situation would make, a football management game's match engine has to replicate real life very closely.

Luckily for CM fans, this year's edition looks, on even the brief showing we had, to have been successfully updated. Passing movements were solid, with interceptions, deflections, and bobbles, and there was a decent variety of goals to be seen, as well. The 3D engine, with graphics that feature Subbuteo-like players rather than real people, gives a good idea of overall team movement, and it's great seeing shots crash in off the post or free kicks dip just over the bar. It remains to be seen whether the game has succeeded fully in this area, but it's certainly an improvement.

The biggest single addition to the game is probably the match-analysis tool. Anybody who follows top-flight football closely may have heard of computer-assisted data-capture tools such as ProZone, which monitor players' movements on the pitch and re-create the game virtually. From there, top managers like Arsene Wenger or Steve McClaren can break the game down into a series of statistics and monitor exactly what went well and what didn't.

The benefits of this kind of system are fairly obvious, and CM2007's match-analysis tool works in much the same way. Seen from a top-down view, you can view records of all of the passes, crosses, tackles, and shots made in a game for each team, and you can even break them down into those that were successful and those that weren't. From there, you'll also be able to replay the match to see how those situations came about and then try and work out what you might need to improve.

For example, in one of the matches we saw, the number of successful crosses was low. We didn't notice this by watching the match highlights, but it was as clear as day from the additional data on the analysis tool. With that in mind, it enabled us to think about whether our wingers needed more crossing training, whether they were putting in the right kind of crosses (low, middle or high), and whether playing a crossing game was appropriate with the forwards we had on the pitch. Alternatively, it might mean the opposition defenders were particularly good in this area, but by using the analysis tool, suddenly we were presented with relevant and useful feedback options that weren't previously available unless we watched the entire 90-minute match--and even then we might not have picked it up.

By the time the game is released, which should be within the next couple of months, player-transfer data will all be up to date as of the August transfer window, and no doubt further tweaks will have been made. We'll keep an eye on any further developments and bring you a review in due course.