21 years ago today sortitoutsi.net was born. Happy Birthday to us!

This is the story of how it came to be the website you all know and love today with echoes of what we’re experiencing with FM25.

CM4 - A huge rewrite of the game that got delayed until March

Sort It Out SI first came to be in December 2003. This was a strange time for the series, back then the game was called Championship Manager rather than Football Manager and as we with most Decembers we were all a few seasons deep into CM03/04 which had been released a couple of months earlier. But there was a simmering of discontent within the community. Was everyone just annoyed that this latest release was just yet another expensive update, a criticism we still hear every year today? Essentially yes, but this time was worse, much worse. You see the release of CM03/04 had come just 6 months after the release of its predecessor CM4.

So why were the release dates so close together? CM4 had originally been scheduled for release in October 2002 with bold claims of it being a huge rewrite that would introduce a 2D Match Engine for the first time, but it seems SI had bitten off more than they could chew and the usual release date window came and went.

Sound familiar?

Instead of a single delay like this year CM4 received repeated delays for months. Studio Director Miles Jacobson (who’s still there today!) made a flurry of public statements that the game would be released the following February, but those dates came and went, much to the dismay of the online CM Community. SI even released an update to CM01/02 to update the squads and database for the 02/03 season to try and tide fans over.

So history hasn’t quite repeated itself.

CM4 did eventually hit the shelves on March 28th 2003 and became the fastest selling PC game of all time in the UK, nearly doubling the sales of second place “Command & Conquer: Generals” and had rave reviews to boot. But these reviews were unfounded. Apparently the reviewers had received buggy copies but were assured that those bugs would be fixed by release.

They weren’t.

And so CM4 was released to the world as a horrible buggy mess. The officials forums began to fill with bug reports and one day after release Sports Interactive had already released “Enhancement Pack 1” a fancy name for a bug fix which contained things like:

• “Fixed ridiculous wages being given to all players at top clubs after a season or so”
• “When a person's contract expires and no response is made to the news item, you now don't get the same news every day from then on.”
• “Found happy medium between "loads of disallowed goals" in beta demo and "none" in v4.0.1”
• “Less stupidly wayward goal kicks”
• “Fixed fairly common bug where full back would throw ball to centre back who would be robbed for run in at goal”

At least you’ve got to appreciate the brutally honest way SI wrote change lists back then.

I’m pretty sure that the last one is still in the game though…

“Enhancement Pack 2” was released just 2 weeks after that on April 11th. Enhancement Pack 3 a month after that on May 5th and 4 and 5 followed June 30th and July 27th. Back then we were all on dial up as well, so the estimated time to download the 45mb Enhancement Pack was 4.5 hours. It would cost 1p a minute, so each update cost you about £2.50 and there were 5 of them meaning you had to shell out another £12.50 on top of the price of the game. That’s assuming you managed to get each in one go and your mother didn’t need to use the telephone for 4 hours. If she did? Forget it, you’d have to disconnect, reconnect and start again.

It was a difficult time to be a fan of the series. The forums were inundated with bug reports and even just downloading the Enhancement Packs was a task that could take an entire weekend. Throughout this time, throughout all the 6 months of delays and all the updates, a new meme started to catch on in the official SI Forums. Everyone began signing off their posts with the same, frustrated line; “sort it out si”. This chorus of disenchantment echoed throughout forums, IRC Channels and where all the cool kids were; MSN Messenger.

And so in 2003, when Caleyjag and Cleon decided to start a new Championship Manager Fansite, what better name could they choose than the words that were already on everyone’s lips? Sort It Out SI.

And it’s stuck.

(The site did once attempt to rebrand itself as “Glory Hunters” but more on that later.)

CM03/04 - A Graphic Success

Anyone you talk to from the time will tell you that CM4 was a disaster, but by CM03/04 alot of those bugs had been ironed out and what we were left with was a fantastic game.

It was what CM4 should have been.

The enhancements that CM4 brought were immense, it’s difficult to even describe how revolutionary the changes were to people who take it all granted for now with FM22. The 2D Match Engine got all the publicity, before CM4 we just had to deal with flashing text and a possession bar, but the real jump was in the graphics. In CM01/02 the only graphical add ons you could get were custom menu bars, these were small files that changed the colour and background of the sidebar while leaving the rest of the game as it was. But with CM4 and now CM03/04 you could customise the entire skin as well as adding Logos, Faces, Kits and Backgrounds, content that you still find here at sortitoutsi today.

You’ll find some people moaning that FM has barely changed since, but honestly that’s just a testament to how good this game was once all the stupid bugs had been ironed out. It’s a game that’s only needed incremental changes for 21 years while keeping the fundamentals the same and for all the people who moan each year, the truth is it’s still an amazing game that we all love and continues to grow, FM24 was the games biggest ever year and you only need to look at how much the FM Youtube Community is booming to see it’s bigger than ever.

CM4 was a tough time for the community, but it was worth it, its release lit a fire under the community and we’ve never looked back since.

I’m not holding out much hope for FM25, but if you want something to hold out hope for, let it be that FM26 repeats the incredible success of CM03/04.

Sort It Out SI through the years

S Crew

Before the site was called sortitoutsi, it started out as “S-Crew” . The big sell of the site was the “Super Packs” (hence "Superpack Crew") these combined lots of little packs into a single Super Pack so people could get everything in one place. Amazingly you can still download the Superpack V2 today and some of it still works because the format and config.xml files have barely changed! But there was more to the game than just Graphics and the site transitioned again to become Sort It Out SI in December 2003. The name has always caught a few people off guard, many still believe that it’s some strange word from a non English speaking owner. There are even those who think it’s run by a bloke called Simon who sorts out all your problems. To those closest to it, the site is affectionately known as Susie, because you know, SIOSI kind of sounds like Susie…

This was S-Crew. Can you tell Caleyjag was still learning how to design websites back then?

The oldest screenshot we can find of sortitoutsi!

2004 - The Eidos Split

While CM4 had been patched and CM03/04 had been a great success, the drama wasn’t over at Sports Interactive. Shortly after CM03/04 was released they announced that they would be splitting from their producers Eidos. It was not a pretty split and Eidos took with them the name “Championship Manager”, which by now had become rooted in public consensus, while SI got to keep the database and the code.

SI undoubtedly got the better end of the deal and they managed to release the first version, FM2005, in timely fashion in November 2004.

Eidos on the other hand tried to build an entire new game from scratch on a new engine, an impossible task in less than 12 months, their first attempt, Championship Manager 5, wasn’t released until March 2005, and it was crap. You couldn’t make it up!

This gave SI and the FM name practically a free hit to establish themselves as the true king of Football Management Simulations, a crown they’ve never let slip.

Sports Interactive also knew the importance of the community support, which was now swelling following the enhanced extendability of CM03/04. Many of the sites were facing the prospect of a rebrand as sites like CM Base were forced to become FM Base. SI stepped in to help out by buying the FM versions of popular CM Sites and offering them to the owners for free. A small gesture, but one that helped secure ongoing support from the community.

2004 Get Scene - Web Hosting for the Community

Just a year after properly launching sortitoutsi, in partnership with Core FM and Footygamer, launched “Get Scene” a project that offered Cheap Web Hosting to anyone who wanted to start a Football Manager Fansite. The community spirit between fansites was strong and now it was easier than ever for anyone to get started with their own FM Fansite.

Footygamer was one of the first to take up the offer and offered a forum for popular blogs like CM Smashing, The Gaffer and The North Stand, which believe me was some of the finest writing to ever grace the CM and FM Community.

On sortitoutsi future Sports Interactive Employee Jesper Anderson joined the team and gave the new site a nice new design:

2005 - The introduction of team talks and sortitoutsi closes for the first time

Football Manager 2006 introduced Team Talks for the first time and begun the long road towards press conferences and all the other media interaction we see in the game today. Can you believe there was a time you didn’t get asked questions in FM?

But the big news as far as sortitoutsi was concerned was the fact that it closed in on July 25th 2005:

After almost 2 years, 3.4million downloads (goodness) and some absolutely superb banter sortitoutsi.net is closing.

 

The decision was a hard one taken by Cleon & Caleyjag but we both felt that the time was right to call it a day. The site has been a fantastic place to be a part of but we can no longer dedicate any more of our time to it without it affecting our personal lives.

 

We didn't feel that keeping it open and us moving on was an option either as the pull to come back would be too great. Closing completely is the only way forward for ourselves.

 

Massive massive thanks to everyone that contributed to the site over the last 2 years. This sites success depended on users submitting files, players & tactics and joining in forum discussions and I'd like to think we made a bloody good job of it while we were online.

 

On a personal note, I'm leaving this place knowing that we made a helluva good job of it. Coding the site was fantastic fun and seeing people use something I had developed gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

 

Good luck to everyone in the future with whatever they do in life.

 

Dave "Caleyjag" Murchison

(Super stud)

3.4 million downloads in 2005 was an awful lot and incredibly more expensive than it is today. Sports Interactive was even supplementing Caleyjag and Cleon for the costs for a while, yeah you heard that right, Sports Interactive used to support fansites financially, those days are long gone now, especially following the legal battles with Man Utd. But even with SI’s help the costs were still too much. Sortitoutsi closed completely but the community kept it going by moving to a free hosted forum.

The site did come back a few months later, unfortunately we can’t find the comeback announcement, but safe to say it would have been something along the lines of wanting to create the biggest and best site ever. Caleyjag had already quit in the previous summer, and probably some more times other than that, and he usually returned with an air of rambunctiousness rather than his tail between his legs.

The site also got another Jesper inspired redesign, unfortunately the images won’t load on the only version we can find. However what you’re seeing here isn’t far off what people would experience because the site would take ages to load due to the massive background and header images which were more than 10mb!!! That’s huge by today’s standards let alone 2005 internet speeds. But it was a fansite run by amateurs, they didn’t know any better.

FM2007

In 2006 Football Manager 2007 came about and introduced Feeder Clubs. Sortitoutsi got probably its most iconic design as well as a new micro site called “Play FM”. Play FM was a stand alone site dedicated to FM Challenges where people could share their careers as well as upload their stats to league tables and compare with other managers.

This is the purple version from Play FM.

FM2008 - the end of an era and Glory Hunters

In 2007 Caley and Cleon finally gave up the reigns. This time deciding not to close the site but to hand it over to Smithjurd, who had made a name for himself as a skinner and recently started developing his own website as well.

Smithjurd set about trying to make the site his own, including changing its name. Behind the scenes work was put into to transition the site to the name “Glory Hunters” and Jesper Anderson put together a whole new design.

Glory Hunters was meant to be the greatest Football Manager website ever, but it never actually saw the light of day. Much like with CM4 so many big ideas just lead to problems and bugs. A year or more’s work was put in behind the scenes on the new site and it was nowhere near ready for release, but this meant the live site had stagnated, bugs had appeared, it slowed down to a crawl, sometimes being completely unusable. Susie was in trouble.

In the end Glory Hunters was never released, Jesper Anderson had been snapped up by Sports Interactive to work on Football Manager itself, Caleyjag and Cleon where off doing their own thing (I think by this point they had made the first ever FM Podcast “The Caleyjag and Cleon Show”) and Smithjurd had found it impossible to juggle trying to launch the new site with maintaining the existing one.

FM2009 - A new leader

After this Rob took over, which nobody would have expected after he was banned from the forums for generally being a nuisance a couple of years earlier.

Under his reins a new version of the site emerged, it was great, well at the very it would load when people visited now and people could actually download things but it was missing alot of features that had been built up in the 5 years prior. It probably wasn’t as pretty either.

October 2011 - Another disastrous rewrite

Still Susie was a hobby and the new hobby was learning how to code and that meant breaking things… alot. In October 2011 a new version was ready to be unleashed that had long been in development behind the scenes. Now we’ve already spoken about how SI bit off more than they could chew with CM4 and how Smithjurd did the same with Glory Hunters, how do you think this effort at rebuilding Susie went?

It was a complete disaster.

It was freshers week in Rob’s second year of University and he put the new site live on October 21st, the day FM12 was released. The release was rushed because there was a new stories section and he wanted everyone to start their new FM Career using the new stories section. He should have been out getting drunk like any normal fresher, but instead he was up all night coding, trying to fix the mess.

It got so bad that Rowan, who was managing the Cut Out Megapack at the time, offered his phone number and said to call if Rob needed to talk things through. He did, almost in tears, telling him he thought he was just going to delete the site because he couldn’t take the stress anymore.

It wasn’t just the stress of people complaining, a huge mistake had been made which meant people were able to get access to download files directly from our servers when they didn’t have Premium Membership. In just 24 hours a bill of $1000 had been racked, the next day it was $1800, by the third day the site was taken offline completely. Nobody involved in the site had that kind of money. If you ever wonder why we have Premium Membership and don’t let everyone download for free, this is as good an explanation as ever.

The old version of the site came back a few days later based on a backup and Rob took a much needed break from working on it for a few months.

That rewritten version of the site did eventually see the light of day. Guess when? Yep… March 2012

The Next 13 Years

Some valuable lessons were learnt from that moment in 2011, mostly to not take this site or the wider FM Community too seriously. Thankfully the site has been (mostly) stable ever since. So stable in fact it’s hard to write about next 10 years, which is crazy to think after all thats just been written about the first 8 years, but to be honest the site has not changed that much since then, the content and the staff team is much the same.

The next version of the site should start to feel alot more familiar to those of you who know it now with a focus on our awesome Graphic Megapacks.

The next version of the site only left us in October 2020.

During this time we were able to partner with SEGA and become official resellers of the game. We used this to give back to the community by offering the game at exactly the cost price, no profit to us, so you could all get the game as cheap as possible.

Our Collaborative Online Data Update (which was actually started by Caleyjag) has taken off and is now bigger than ever with 6,073 different people having contributed changes, something which would never have been possible with the game’s own Offline Pre Game Editor.

And of course our Graphic Megapacks continued to grow and grow and grow.

I’m actually going to end the article here without going into too much detail about the period 2011-2024. I didn’t really know what to write when I first started on this birthday article and to be honest I got carried away and what you’re reading now is a much trimmed down version. The bits i've left in focus on a few key moments that really impacted the site and they all happened in that early period. The 13 years since have been relatively stable, we’ve just been ticking away producing the same amazing content year on year.

For those who visit the site now and weren’t here over the past 21 years you probably can’t comprehend what it used to be. It was an absolute monster and some of its users and staff were nothing short of fanatical. Today it is not the site it was, but that’s okay, because what it was burnt a lot of people out far more than any hobby ever should have. Now we have a massive team of moderators many of whom have also been here for 21 years or more and running the site is now something we can all do in our free time as a hobby that doesn’t take over our lives. All the content and the downloads are amazing, but I think that should be considered the proudest achievement of the site, it’s the real reason the site is still here after all this time.

The community is so, so different now, especially with the world of YouTube and people celebrating going full time playing Football Manager as a job. It’s hard to imagine that would ever have been possible. But that’s only a small part of the community, there are still millions of people playing the game casually just for fun. Hopefully this site can continue being a place those people can call home for another 21 years.