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Over the years @eidur22 has been collecting football shirts associated with each of his favourite CM/FM saves. Here he shares the story of each one...
Thanks for sharing this Eidur22!
The one that got me addicted. Ipswich Town on CM2 96/97. I started out in Endsleigh Division One with a pretty decent side including teenagers Richard Wright and Keiron "I think that was my knee again" Dyer. I remember the elation of beating Birmingham City in the playoff semis, with goals from my top scoring forward, Alex Mathie and, I think, Jamie Scowcroft. I beat Wolves in the final and went on a spree of buying free transfers over the summer. The next year saw Andy Cole and some kid called Anders Svensson join the ranks before my PC decided it couldn't handle the game any more and wiped it from its memory. Cue another 3 hours install time and a new save with my real life side Chelsea.
I actually got to see our hero, Alex Mathie, play years later for York City in the FA Cup against Leicester City at Filbert Street. He was shite.
I actually started CM9798 with Ipswich again, but for my birthday that year, my dad bought me a full AC Milan kit, white with a black and red stripe down the centre and this encouraged me to try out a new save with the newly added Italian leagues. It was a two player game with my brother, who I think chose Barcelona as you could select three leagues at once. I was pretty young at the time, but I remember cheating when he was out of the room and signing a few Milan reserve players for his Barca side to bolster my own spending power. Not that I needed to.
The first game I sunk serious hours into. CM2 was engrossing enough for 10 year old me, but now I was 14/15 and a big statto. It was also the year that started my lifelong fascination with AS Roma. It was the year they went on to win the league in real life, but more importantly it was the year I managed a last day victory over Juventus to secure Lo Scudetto and my first top league win in any manager game ever. I can still name the side, including the signings, which is testament to the immersive qualities of the game. It seemed like every game included goals from either Totti, Montella or Batistuta, and my midfield of Nakata, Tommasi and Emerson could dominate any team. I signed Marco Di Viao from Parma in mid season, but he couldn't break into the side ahead of what Roma already had.
One thing I remember about this game that I think has been missing since, is the realistic crowd sounds and chants. It will always feel more exciting than watching the current 3D match engine, with its bright cartoonish colours and limited animations. And I'm a fan of the current games, as you'll soon see.
The shirt was very hard to come by because there was only one shop selling non-English shirts where I lived and they never seemed to have any in stock. One day, I came home from school and my dad had laid out the shirt on my bed. He said it was an early birthday present and it is one I still wear 17 years later.
After the highs of CM 00/01, I couldn't choose anyone else. The real life signings of Pelizolli and Cassano were supplemented by my own signings of Sam Dalla Bona, David Di Tommaso (RIP) and either Javier Saviola or Pippo Inzaghi, I can't remember which. I never got as into it as much as the previous years game as I was doing my GCSEs and I also discovered girls existed. That and Metal Gear Solid 2. In fact, I missed my final Geography exam because I couldn't pause the final cut scene of MGS2 and decided it would be more important to find out why Snake was calling himself Pliskin than explaining the difference between cumulonimbus and stratus cloud. I don't regret a thing.
I do have a fondness for this game though, with its new comparison feature and slicker fonts, to the point where I played it as recently as 2016, at the birth of my 3rd child. I'll get to that later.
Back to 2002 and having the obsessive personality that I do, I became totally engrossed in the real life Roma side, watching Football Italia at its new slot of 1AM, buying Italian football magazines, buying more Roma shirts, reading an Italian phrase book and eating tinned ravioli. I was becoming cultured in a sort of naive council estate way.
When Roma hammered Lazio 5-1 with a Montella double brace, I had a poster of the scoreboard pinned on to my wall and at that point I decided I needed to get behind Italy at the 2002 World Cup. It was a scary mix of obsessive compulsion, a love of football and a teenage search for identity.
Most of my Roma shirts. All because if Champ Man.
I've had to skip over CM4, although not because I didn't play it. I played it a lot! I've skipped it partly because I couldn't find the disc and partly because I played all iterations of the game as my actual real life club Chelsea - and that's boring. I loved having all that money and the like, but it became harder and harder to choose Chelsea, knowing that I'd be removing Mourinho from the post he so very deserved, so I had to find a new club. Since I'd done Roma to death and my other CM/FM go-to club Leicester City were full of rotten apples (Les Ferdinand, Darren Eadie, Trevor Benjamin, Ade Akinbiyi, Gary Rowett and my former Ipswich hero James Scowcroft) I decided to go into the lower leagues.
Boston United, with all their Steve Evans baggage, were a team that sounded more fun than they actually were. As a kid, I used to holiday on the east coast and the only football ground I used to see along the way was York Street in Boston. I vowed to visit one day and I did so in 2004, but not until I'd taken them to the old Division 1 on CM4.
I carried this through to the birth of the Football Manager series in 2005 and managed to break into the Championship with a ton of free transfers, rejects and Julian Joachim. I managed to reach the playoffs in my final year, but lost out to my old CM2 foe Wolves on penalties. I used to quit/load/repeat in the CM2 days, but I just couldn't bare to do that and forced myself to save the game straight after the defeat. I left my save to rot somewhere, on some long lost hard drive, waiting to be recovered by archaeologists a thousand years from now.
I did follow Boston for a while after that, to away games at Oxford and Mansfield, as well as a visit to York Street against Northampton during the pre-Gazza days, but they really went off the radar after the financial issues a few years back. Steve Evans seems to be doing just fine though...
One of two cheats here in this album. I actually watched Djurgarden play against Malmo before taking them on in FM2006. I took them into the Champions League with Mattias Jonsson, Daniel Sjölund and a bunch of young Swedes from around the Allsvenskan, but never managed to push past the playoffs.
I had a moment in FM2007, where I'd decided to try a different game, one that went by the name of soccer. I'd started to become aware of this new sport after David Beckham had decided to sign a pre-contract with LA Galaxy and after some hours of research and plenty if coffee, I realised soccer was simply what the Americans called football. Incidentally, my research also found that soccer is actually a term as old as the game itself, used to differentiate between rugby football and association (soca) football. But let's ignore that, it's Football Manager after all.
I'd heard of American soccer players like Brian McBride, Cobi Jones and Diana Ross, as well as up and coming world hyperstars like Landon Donovan, Eddie Johnson and Freddie Adu, so I needed to broaden my horizons and see what all the fuss was about.
I was actually offered the chance to go coach in Denver as part of a scheme the MLS were running to enhance the reputation of soccer in the US, but I decided to stay at home and play as the Rapids on FM while my friend went to Denver instead. Of course, I would have chosen the real life option had it presented itself to me now as a fully grown adult, but I thought these things would happen every year, so I'll go next time. Long story short, it didn't.
My FM journey into the MLS was eye-opening though. I had no idea how fun and different it would he to the European game. Before now, I thought the draft idea was ridiculous and the league owning players was destined for failire, but it was one of the funnest games of management ever. I signed a bucket load of young Americans and won the Western Conference after a long hard battle with Houston Dynamos (lead by former Colorado, Chelsea and CM2 Ipswich Bosman signing, John Spencer). I won 2 MLS finals with the Rapids and visited the Home Depot Stadium in summer 2007 as part of an American road trip with a bunch of friends. I still follow them now and was over the moon when they clinched the real life title in 2010.
The second of my cheats here. I started a save with Lille on FM2011 after nabbing the shirt for a fiver at Sports Direct one afternoon. It's also a sign of a pattern that seems to be unravelling in this journey. Lille won the Ligue 1 in 2011, the year I took them on in the virtual world. That means that discounting Chelsea and all their honours since I've been playing CM, I've seen Roma clinch Serie A for what was only their third time ever, Boston Utd rise to their highest ever position the year after I first took them on, Colorado Rapids winning not long after my own title wins and <spoiler alert> Leicester City winning a year after I won the Premier League with them on FM15.
Just ignore the River Plate CM10 save, the FA Premier League Manager 2002 Leicester save and the less said about the Hinckley United save, the better.
This Lille save introduced me to Eden Hazard, Yohan Cabaye and Gervinho, who formed a terrifying attacking midfield with Rio Mavuba sweeping up behind. I never managed to win the league with them, but I remember having a decent run in the Champions League.
After a couple of years of mostly Chelsea saves again, I took a year off, starting in Scotland with Dunfermline. Easily the most visually offensive shirt of my collection, I managed to become obsessed enough to start speaking in a Rab C Nesbitt accent around the house for a month or so. I managed a miracle run, starting with the League 1 title and culminating in a Scottish Premier League title in only my 3rd season in charge! I signed an Argentinian regen striker who was relentless, a solid German regen defender and an exciting young Scottish regen midfielder, all regens by the way, who guided us into the Champions League and a second successive league title. I managed to reach the CL knock out rounds in a game against my old team on the save, Rapid Wien, but sadly went no further.
I moved on to 1860 Munchen in 2-Bundesliga, taking the three superstar regens with me, won the league buy failed to do anything special in the Budesliga.
In 2009, I moved away from Leicester to a dying British town called Coalville. It's football team, Coalville Town, were befitting of the town's reputation, but multiple promotions and a visit to Wembley for the FA Vase final in 2011 has seen the club rise as far as one league below the base FM leagues, meaning soon I might not need to use custom databases to take charge!
For now I do though and FM2016 saw me reach the lofty heights of National League Premier, or whatever the Conference is called now. It was going great until FM2017 and I abandoned the save.
By far my most successful foreign league save ever. A completely random 'Pick a team for me' option saw me travel to Soria in Spain and so began another obsession. I studied the area, the teams history and details before taking the first meeting and for the first time since a long term 2013 save with Chelsea, I really got stuck into a save and enjoyed it.
With Numancia, I managed to secure a safe midtable finish to match preseason expectations, but only after throwing a clear advantage in 2nd place for the first few months of the season. My second year, I signed a few freebies, including loanee Angel Correa (I don't know how) and a few Chelsea youngsters and we managed to scrape a playoff place, winning the final on penalties.
After selling a fan favourte, I managed to sign a few exciting players on the cheap - Klaas Jan Huntelaar on a free as player coach, Lucas Piazon for €2m, Angel Correa on loan again, Andrea Poli for free, Brendan Galloway for €4m and a long list of other wonderkids.
In short, I managed to finish 2nd in La Liga, above Barcelona by a point. Then something else unexpected happened, I signed more players, including Bazoer and Romelu Lukaku after a nice TV payout and I won the league with a game spare after hammering Real Madrid away in the penultimate game. I also reached the CL semi finals where Real Madrid turned us over in a second leg collapse, but I'll take the title thanks.
My third year in La Liga saw me finish 2nd again, so I upped sticks and joined old favourites Roma. Juventus had won 10 straight titles, but we managed a last day victory to secure the title after a late Lazio goal saw Juvé lose 1-0.
As I've mentioned, I'm a huge Chelsea fan and have been since I was a kid in the Glenn Hoddle era, so imagine my excitement when this happened!
Then imagine the disappointment when I saw how crap the game was.
I did manage to get my name into the game as a youth player though, so every now and then I get the itch to boot up some old manager games, before realising none of them want to work on any machine post Windows XP.
And finally, as promised, the Super Cup win with Roma on CM 01/02. That and the birth of my youngest regen.
Thanks for sharing this Eidur22!
The one that got me addicted. Ipswich Town on CM2 96/97. I started out in Endsleigh Division One with a pretty decent side including teenagers Richard Wright and Keiron "I think that was my knee again" Dyer. I remember the elation of beating Birmingham City in the playoff semis, with goals from my top scoring forward, Alex Mathie and, I think, Jamie Scowcroft. I beat Wolves in the final and went on a spree of buying free transfers over the summer. The next year saw Andy Cole and some kid called Anders Svensson join the ranks before my PC decided it couldn't handle the game any more and wiped it from its memory. Cue another 3 hours install time and a new save with my real life side Chelsea.
I actually got to see our hero, Alex Mathie, play years later for York City in the FA Cup against Leicester City at Filbert Street. He was shite.
I actually started CM9798 with Ipswich again, but for my birthday that year, my dad bought me a full AC Milan kit, white with a black and red stripe down the centre and this encouraged me to try out a new save with the newly added Italian leagues. It was a two player game with my brother, who I think chose Barcelona as you could select three leagues at once. I was pretty young at the time, but I remember cheating when he was out of the room and signing a few Milan reserve players for his Barca side to bolster my own spending power. Not that I needed to.
The first game I sunk serious hours into. CM2 was engrossing enough for 10 year old me, but now I was 14/15 and a big statto. It was also the year that started my lifelong fascination with AS Roma. It was the year they went on to win the league in real life, but more importantly it was the year I managed a last day victory over Juventus to secure Lo Scudetto and my first top league win in any manager game ever. I can still name the side, including the signings, which is testament to the immersive qualities of the game. It seemed like every game included goals from either Totti, Montella or Batistuta, and my midfield of Nakata, Tommasi and Emerson could dominate any team. I signed Marco Di Viao from Parma in mid season, but he couldn't break into the side ahead of what Roma already had.
One thing I remember about this game that I think has been missing since, is the realistic crowd sounds and chants. It will always feel more exciting than watching the current 3D match engine, with its bright cartoonish colours and limited animations. And I'm a fan of the current games, as you'll soon see.
The shirt was very hard to come by because there was only one shop selling non-English shirts where I lived and they never seemed to have any in stock. One day, I came home from school and my dad had laid out the shirt on my bed. He said it was an early birthday present and it is one I still wear 17 years later.
After the highs of CM 00/01, I couldn't choose anyone else. The real life signings of Pelizolli and Cassano were supplemented by my own signings of Sam Dalla Bona, David Di Tommaso (RIP) and either Javier Saviola or Pippo Inzaghi, I can't remember which. I never got as into it as much as the previous years game as I was doing my GCSEs and I also discovered girls existed. That and Metal Gear Solid 2. In fact, I missed my final Geography exam because I couldn't pause the final cut scene of MGS2 and decided it would be more important to find out why Snake was calling himself Pliskin than explaining the difference between cumulonimbus and stratus cloud. I don't regret a thing.
I do have a fondness for this game though, with its new comparison feature and slicker fonts, to the point where I played it as recently as 2016, at the birth of my 3rd child. I'll get to that later.
Back to 2002 and having the obsessive personality that I do, I became totally engrossed in the real life Roma side, watching Football Italia at its new slot of 1AM, buying Italian football magazines, buying more Roma shirts, reading an Italian phrase book and eating tinned ravioli. I was becoming cultured in a sort of naive council estate way.
When Roma hammered Lazio 5-1 with a Montella double brace, I had a poster of the scoreboard pinned on to my wall and at that point I decided I needed to get behind Italy at the 2002 World Cup. It was a scary mix of obsessive compulsion, a love of football and a teenage search for identity.
Most of my Roma shirts. All because if Champ Man.
I've had to skip over CM4, although not because I didn't play it. I played it a lot! I've skipped it partly because I couldn't find the disc and partly because I played all iterations of the game as my actual real life club Chelsea - and that's boring. I loved having all that money and the like, but it became harder and harder to choose Chelsea, knowing that I'd be removing Mourinho from the post he so very deserved, so I had to find a new club. Since I'd done Roma to death and my other CM/FM go-to club Leicester City were full of rotten apples (Les Ferdinand, Darren Eadie, Trevor Benjamin, Ade Akinbiyi, Gary Rowett and my former Ipswich hero James Scowcroft) I decided to go into the lower leagues.
Boston United, with all their Steve Evans baggage, were a team that sounded more fun than they actually were. As a kid, I used to holiday on the east coast and the only football ground I used to see along the way was York Street in Boston. I vowed to visit one day and I did so in 2004, but not until I'd taken them to the old Division 1 on CM4.
I carried this through to the birth of the Football Manager series in 2005 and managed to break into the Championship with a ton of free transfers, rejects and Julian Joachim. I managed to reach the playoffs in my final year, but lost out to my old CM2 foe Wolves on penalties. I used to quit/load/repeat in the CM2 days, but I just couldn't bare to do that and forced myself to save the game straight after the defeat. I left my save to rot somewhere, on some long lost hard drive, waiting to be recovered by archaeologists a thousand years from now.
I did follow Boston for a while after that, to away games at Oxford and Mansfield, as well as a visit to York Street against Northampton during the pre-Gazza days, but they really went off the radar after the financial issues a few years back. Steve Evans seems to be doing just fine though...
One of two cheats here in this album. I actually watched Djurgarden play against Malmo before taking them on in FM2006. I took them into the Champions League with Mattias Jonsson, Daniel Sjölund and a bunch of young Swedes from around the Allsvenskan, but never managed to push past the playoffs.
I had a moment in FM2007, where I'd decided to try a different game, one that went by the name of soccer. I'd started to become aware of this new sport after David Beckham had decided to sign a pre-contract with LA Galaxy and after some hours of research and plenty if coffee, I realised soccer was simply what the Americans called football. Incidentally, my research also found that soccer is actually a term as old as the game itself, used to differentiate between rugby football and association (soca) football. But let's ignore that, it's Football Manager after all.
I'd heard of American soccer players like Brian McBride, Cobi Jones and Diana Ross, as well as up and coming world hyperstars like Landon Donovan, Eddie Johnson and Freddie Adu, so I needed to broaden my horizons and see what all the fuss was about.
I was actually offered the chance to go coach in Denver as part of a scheme the MLS were running to enhance the reputation of soccer in the US, but I decided to stay at home and play as the Rapids on FM while my friend went to Denver instead. Of course, I would have chosen the real life option had it presented itself to me now as a fully grown adult, but I thought these things would happen every year, so I'll go next time. Long story short, it didn't.
My FM journey into the MLS was eye-opening though. I had no idea how fun and different it would he to the European game. Before now, I thought the draft idea was ridiculous and the league owning players was destined for failire, but it was one of the funnest games of management ever. I signed a bucket load of young Americans and won the Western Conference after a long hard battle with Houston Dynamos (lead by former Colorado, Chelsea and CM2 Ipswich Bosman signing, John Spencer). I won 2 MLS finals with the Rapids and visited the Home Depot Stadium in summer 2007 as part of an American road trip with a bunch of friends. I still follow them now and was over the moon when they clinched the real life title in 2010.
The second of my cheats here. I started a save with Lille on FM2011 after nabbing the shirt for a fiver at Sports Direct one afternoon. It's also a sign of a pattern that seems to be unravelling in this journey. Lille won the Ligue 1 in 2011, the year I took them on in the virtual world. That means that discounting Chelsea and all their honours since I've been playing CM, I've seen Roma clinch Serie A for what was only their third time ever, Boston Utd rise to their highest ever position the year after I first took them on, Colorado Rapids winning not long after my own title wins and <spoiler alert> Leicester City winning a year after I won the Premier League with them on FM15.
Just ignore the River Plate CM10 save, the FA Premier League Manager 2002 Leicester save and the less said about the Hinckley United save, the better.
This Lille save introduced me to Eden Hazard, Yohan Cabaye and Gervinho, who formed a terrifying attacking midfield with Rio Mavuba sweeping up behind. I never managed to win the league with them, but I remember having a decent run in the Champions League.
After a couple of years of mostly Chelsea saves again, I took a year off, starting in Scotland with Dunfermline. Easily the most visually offensive shirt of my collection, I managed to become obsessed enough to start speaking in a Rab C Nesbitt accent around the house for a month or so. I managed a miracle run, starting with the League 1 title and culminating in a Scottish Premier League title in only my 3rd season in charge! I signed an Argentinian regen striker who was relentless, a solid German regen defender and an exciting young Scottish regen midfielder, all regens by the way, who guided us into the Champions League and a second successive league title. I managed to reach the CL knock out rounds in a game against my old team on the save, Rapid Wien, but sadly went no further.
I moved on to 1860 Munchen in 2-Bundesliga, taking the three superstar regens with me, won the league buy failed to do anything special in the Budesliga.
In 2009, I moved away from Leicester to a dying British town called Coalville. It's football team, Coalville Town, were befitting of the town's reputation, but multiple promotions and a visit to Wembley for the FA Vase final in 2011 has seen the club rise as far as one league below the base FM leagues, meaning soon I might not need to use custom databases to take charge!
For now I do though and FM2016 saw me reach the lofty heights of National League Premier, or whatever the Conference is called now. It was going great until FM2017 and I abandoned the save.
By far my most successful foreign league save ever. A completely random 'Pick a team for me' option saw me travel to Soria in Spain and so began another obsession. I studied the area, the teams history and details before taking the first meeting and for the first time since a long term 2013 save with Chelsea, I really got stuck into a save and enjoyed it.
With Numancia, I managed to secure a safe midtable finish to match preseason expectations, but only after throwing a clear advantage in 2nd place for the first few months of the season. My second year, I signed a few freebies, including loanee Angel Correa (I don't know how) and a few Chelsea youngsters and we managed to scrape a playoff place, winning the final on penalties.
After selling a fan favourte, I managed to sign a few exciting players on the cheap - Klaas Jan Huntelaar on a free as player coach, Lucas Piazon for €2m, Angel Correa on loan again, Andrea Poli for free, Brendan Galloway for €4m and a long list of other wonderkids.
In short, I managed to finish 2nd in La Liga, above Barcelona by a point. Then something else unexpected happened, I signed more players, including Bazoer and Romelu Lukaku after a nice TV payout and I won the league with a game spare after hammering Real Madrid away in the penultimate game. I also reached the CL semi finals where Real Madrid turned us over in a second leg collapse, but I'll take the title thanks.
My third year in La Liga saw me finish 2nd again, so I upped sticks and joined old favourites Roma. Juventus had won 10 straight titles, but we managed a last day victory to secure the title after a late Lazio goal saw Juvé lose 1-0.
As I've mentioned, I'm a huge Chelsea fan and have been since I was a kid in the Glenn Hoddle era, so imagine my excitement when this happened!
Then imagine the disappointment when I saw how crap the game was.
I did manage to get my name into the game as a youth player though, so every now and then I get the itch to boot up some old manager games, before realising none of them want to work on any machine post Windows XP.
And finally, as promised, the Super Cup win with Roma on CM 01/02. That and the birth of my youngest regen.
- Date Created
- 03 Mar 2018 02:08:35
- Date Updated
- Unknown
- Last Comment
- 16 May 2018 08:05:03
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