Well, he was good on Champ Man

[TheNonFlyingFrenchman]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

evilC wrote: From *ahem* a rival game and the 2008 version at that, but...

Kevin Monnet-Paquet
Henri Saivet
Benoit Costil

All three still playing, but hardly tearing it up. The one with the highest value according to TransferMarkt is Costil, at just over £7m.

(I'll never forgive Everton for coming in and triggering the release clause on Saivet, thus breaking up his partnership with Monnet-Paquet that I created in my all-conquering Charlton side!)

To be honest about Costil, he's had a convocation in France NT last year. He hasn't played in that match though.

There is a good chance he won't get a cap, but he's fairly highly-rated in France. Too bad for him that Lloris, Mandanda and Ruffier all have a higher profile, regardless of their performances (especially true about Mandanda, who is very talented but inconsistent. Both Ruffier and Lloris have been quite consistently good). So let's say he's our 4th keeper.

[Incandenza]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Three Times A Reddy wrote:

I played all of the iterations from the original CM up to (I think) FM 12. It's just too unwieldy now, even with the Classic mode. And I struggle to get it to run smoothly on an aging MacBook. I miss the days of CM3, CM Italia (and the superstar goalscoring targetman in my Fiorentina side, Marco Piovanelli), or the Diablo tactic (CM 01/02?). Would love to get them running today but I don't think any of the older ones are available for Macs.

Emulators a la DOSBox?
Virtual machines?

Trust me, there's always a way.

Crusoe, this post goes over how to do it using the program CrossOver, but there are other alternatives for Windows emulators as well! It's not the most fool-proof method, but I got it to work:

http://www.champman0102.co.uk/showthread.php?t=377

[Favourite Worst Nightmare]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Whilst we are on the subject of addictive football games, has anyone else played Jumpers For Goalposts on the (free) Mousebreaker website?

If you like football, I promise you will love this game.

You start out as a rookie striker practising in the backyard, and the aim is to score as many goals as possible and get offered a deal to play for a club. As you improve you'll be offered the chance to move onto bigger clubs.

Between matches you have the option to go out on the town. This will provide you with the opportunity to get yourself a hot girlfriend and get your name in the paper. However your performance in training will be affected so too many nights out will see you dropped from the team.

You can also buy flash cars and houses, and various items of bling.

The earlier versions of the game are more accessible, but once you've got the hang of it try Jumpers For Goalposts-The 90's which is a thing of sheer beauty.

Be prepared to waste hours of your life.

[3 Colours Red]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

There's a vague whiff of the career mode in ISS 2000 on the Nintendo 64 about that - a game where you can lose the trust of your team-mates if one of them finds a dirty magazine in your bedroom!

[Max Payne]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

longeared wrote: John O'Flynn. A little part of me jumped for joy when he came on as a sub for Exeter against Wednesday in 2010, as I remembered all those times I'd paid £5k to get him from Peterborough's reserves in CM99/00. I was less impressed half an hour later when he scored Exeter's fifth goal.

As an Exeter fan can I say this post wins the internet for me today.

[Crusoe]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Incandenza wrote:

I played all of the iterations from the original CM up to (I think) FM 12. It's just too unwieldy now, even with the Classic mode. And I struggle to get it to run smoothly on an aging MacBook. I miss the days of CM3, CM Italia (and the superstar goalscoring targetman in my Fiorentina side, Marco Piovanelli), or the Diablo tactic (CM 01/02?). Would love to get them running today but I don't think any of the older ones are available for Macs.

Emulators a la DOSBox?
Virtual machines?

Trust me, there's always a way.

Crusoe, this post goes over how to do it using the program CrossOver, but there are other alternatives for Windows emulators as well! It's not the most fool-proof method, but I got it to work:

http://www.champman0102.co.uk/showthread.php?t=377

Cheers all, will take a look when Thameslink manage to get me home with less than a two and a half hour bloody commute.

[shackleford]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Mark Kerr was pretty damn good in the Champ Man I played in my student flat around 2003. You could sign him as Roma or Barcelona or whoever and he'd run your midfield. Five years later in real life he was getting boo'd off the pitch at Pittodrie then going out and getting into a fight outside Aberdeen's roughest nightclub. His street-fighting skills were evidently no better than his distribution - his face was so badly bruised that he missed the Dons' next game. He was club captain at the time.

[Sam]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

I always prefer to start off either in a tiny league from where I have to work my way up (Chile or Uruguay, say), or in a lower league with the aim of taking a small club to greatness (in FM10 I got Eastwood Town to the verge of promotion into League One, and on FM13 I'm currently enjoying a highly successful career with Chemnitz, even as I continue to endure the challenge of a board who resolutely refuse to give me a meaningful transfer budget season after season).

The best two players I ever discovered were both on FM05, during a career which began at Santiago Wanderers and took in two Brazilian clubs - Figueirense, with whom I won the Copa Brasil, and then when they fired me for not being top of the league the next season (seriously, we were fourth or something and the board expectations changed literally overnight to 'win the league', so they sacked me and replaced me with the Brazil manager), a move to Atlético Mineiro - with whom I won the league the following season as Figueirense got relegated. There was then a move to Racing, hoovering up trophies, before I joined Sevilla in January 2017, with the side second bottom of La Liga and eight key players out with long-term injuries.

Casting my net around, I made a few signings, including bringing in Carbone, one of my former Figueirense strikers from Benfica - he'd fallen out with the manager there and, aged 33, was available cheap. We ended 2016-17 well clear of relegation and lifted the Copa del Rey. In 2017-18, somewhere along the line we managed to rack up a pretty high number of games in hand. I'm not sure how, especially as I normally pay close attention to such things, but I failed to notice this until a late surge in the season's final month and a bit lifted us from what had looked like a mid-table challenge for the UEFA Cup qualifying spots, to second place with one game to go. We entered the last weekend a point behind Madrid and a point ahead of Barcelona, and our last match was away... to Madrid.

The first half was tight but Madrid went in 1-0 up at the break. In the second half we rallied, equalised quickly and proceeded to pressure. Whilst all this was going on Barcelona were thrashing some unfortunate sods at home, meaning they led the table. With twenty minutes to go, Madrid broke and took a 2-1 lead, sending them back to the top of the table. We'd been pressing already but with no luck; it was clear I needed to mix things up. So with fourteen minutes to go, on went Carbone - the man who'd helped me to that Copa Brasil win, my first trophy, almost a decade before, the man who'd only been signed to help patch up a huge injury crisis eighteen months before, and who'd gracefully not complained on becoming a backup option for much of the past season. A minute later, he'd equalised. By full time, he'd scored a hat trick, we'd won 4-2 and claimed the title. I almost hit the ceiling, I was jumping up and down so much.

Later in the same career I uncovered the new Maradona. Not the new Messi, because Messi in this game never amounted to much. My scouts sent word of a kid in River Plate's reserves called Maxi Ledesma. After scouting him a bit more I agreed with River to sign him but let them keep him for a year - he'd played a sole first team game for them, and it would do his development good. Then, in the real-life world of university final exams and stuff, I completely forgot I'd done so. On the 1st August the following in-game year, a seventeen-year-old Argentine turned up at the training ground asking why I hadn't picked him up at the airport. 'Who are you?' I asked. 'Maxi Ledesma,' he replied. 'You bought me off River Plate a year ago, and said to come to training today. So here I am.' 'Ah,' said I. 'Yes, I remember now. Sorry. How many first team matches have River given you in the intervening year?' 'Three,' he said.

Still, his numbers were good so I thought why not stick him in the match squad for the European Super Cup the following day. In the 60th minute, leading 2-1 against Greuther Fürth, I sent him on. The very first thing he did was get the ball on the meeting point of halfway line and touchline, skin half of the opposing team and twat it into the top corner. He ended the game with a hat trick and an assist and we won 7-2. He then proceeded to just keep doing stuff like that all the way through the season. A year and a half after he joined Sevilla, and one week after his nineteenth birthday, he was named World Footballer Of The Year.

The other one was Richard Griffiths, a wildcard I named in the 2022 World Cup squad (I was managing England part time whilst also at Sevilla), purely on the basis of an attribute search I'd run - I didn't realise until I was putting together the XI for the opening match that he had yet to make his first team debut, and had only ever played for Arsenal reserves. He scored ten seconds into the opening match and finished the World Cup with ten goals and six assists - from central midfield. We won the World Cup, he was named Player of the Tournament, and then went back to Arsenal to a hero's welcome... and another year of playing for the reserves. Milan then signed him, and he barely played there either. None of this put me off including him again for Euro 2024 and watching smugly from the sidelines as he powered England to victory in that as well. By mid-2025 he had more international caps (and goals) than first team club appearances.

[KGR]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Enjoyed that Richard Griffiths story a lot.

[Various Artist]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Me too, in fact three fabulous FM stories in one there Sam, thanks for sharing. Carbone was a proper fairytale, Griffiths is just surreal in the dichotomy between his beyond stellar international performances and his domestic inertia. And as for Ledesma — did all that stuff with the "not picking him up at the airport" really happen in-game?? What a player — what became of him afterward, did he dominate world football for a decade, or did he end up washed up and past it by 23?

[Sam]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Velvet Android wrote: And as for Ledesma — did all that stuff with the "not picking him up at the airport" really happen in-game?? What a player — what became of him afterward, did he dominate world football for a decade, or did he end up washed up and past it by 23?

No, of course not, that was only how it went in my own head - but I did genuinely completely and totally forget I'd arranged to sign him, and only remembered who he was when I had a look at the history in his profile.

As for what happened to him, tragically we'll never know; I got about four or five years out him and then the inertia of getting a bit bored of winning everything (with Griffiths helping, I lifted another World Cup and another Euro with England, whilst at Sevilla we won 11 European Cups in 12 years, only a penalty defeat to Inter in one of the finals preventing us from a perfect record), and upgraded to FM... 07, I think it would have been.

[Sam]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

I could add Hugo Cardona to my list, from my current career with Chemntiz. A Guatemalan striker who we signed from Municipal for the 2019-20 season. He was 24 years old and making quite a big jump from the Guatemalan Primera to 2. Bundesliga, but for €5,000 I felt we could afford the gamble (though at the time, we didn't have much money so it did remain a gamble).

Prior to us signing him he'd been a regular one-in-two goalscorer in Guatemala, so it was something of a surprise when in his first season in Germany he scored 23 and grabbed 4 assists in 29 league games to lead us to promotion. Then when entered the top flight he kept doing it; he was our top scorer in our maiden 1. Bundesliga season, and stayed with the club even though he couldn't prevent our relegation that year. We disappointed the following term but he didn't, and two years after going down we were back up, and have stayed in the top flight ever since.

In total he was with us for 3 seasons in 2. Bundesliga and 5 in 1. Bundesliga, leaving on a free transfer (but no ill will) at the age of 32 when he rightly felt he deserved more of a pay rise than the board were willing to sanction. He left for Fulham. At one point a couple of years previously, this striker - who again, I'd signed for €5k - was valued at €18.25m.

In all competitions (league, Pokal and continental) he played 278 matches for Chemnitz and scored 158 goals. It's not quite Gerd Müller, but it's not bad for an initial €5k spend. He left in 2027, and when we opened a much-needed new stadium in 2032, the game decided all on its own to call it the Cardona Stadion. I was very pleased about that as one of my mates and various folk on Twitter have complained that they've had new stadia named after themselves, and felt like naming it after a player would have been nicer.

The season after we opened the stadium I offered him a job as Director of Football, which he still has today. It's an entirely ceremonial role in this game - which is just as well because his actual staff ratings numbers are awful - but I felt it would be good to have a genuine club legend around the place.

(Incidentally, unlike the other players I mentioned earlier, this guy actually exists in real life, although he appears to be a midfielder rather than a target man centre forward. Here's his profile on a website called BeSoccer.)

[beak]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Sam wrote: he was named Player of the Tournament, and then went back to Arsenal to a hero's welcome... and another year of playing for the reserves. Milan then signed him, and he barely played there either.

The game loves doing stuff like this. The last time I played a serious long-term game of it, my Newcastle defence was held together by Mateo Mohorovic, some made-up lad I'd bought from Dinamo Zagreb and had played as a first-team regular from the age of 17. His only strengths were being 6' 7", and having 20 out of 20 for tackling and natural fitness. Played seven full seasons and was one of the star performers of a team that won both domestic Cups, UEFA Cup, regular in the Champions League etc.

And when I left Newcastle, he didn't play a first team game for another six years. Not one. He hung around Newcastle reserves until his contract expired, dropped two divisions to Wigan and they didn't pick him either. By then he was valued at something like 30,000 pounds, and earning 2,500 a week.

Eventually I pitched up back at Newcastle and signed him for some peppercorn fee, placed him immediately back in the first team and he carried on like he'd never been away. Daft game.

[Crusoe]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Sorry to resurrect a dead thread with a tangent, but does anyone know where I can get CM 03-04 for a Mac? Hoping to avoid having to get it for Windows and then mucking about with Crossover or Wine or whatever else I'd need.

[beak]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Thanks for resurrecting this dead thread with your tangent: provoked me to post the news that former CM star Freddy Adu has just signed for a mid-table Finnish team. One might say that such a steep decline has left him in his KuPS.

[evilC]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

I love these stories, Sam! It seems you get even more involved in your game than I do in my FIFA Manager 08.

Tell me, though - how do you manage to remember the histories of your players in such detail? Do you write these things down, or do you just have a photographic memory. I only remember players' career details - let alone game details - if I look them up in the games' database.

I understand how some scars can run deep, though. I'll never forgive Everton and Henri Saivet, after the former triggered a release clause in the latter's contract and took him away from me (Charlton), breaking up his burgeoning strike partnership with compatriot Kevin Monnet-Paquet. He went on to have an ordinary career with Everton, Whilst Monnet-Pacquet became a phenomenon for us, then Marseille, then Fiorentina.

I'm currently at the start of the 2026-27 season and am super-excited because I've just managed to bag the world's best forward - one Cesar Krupoviesa - from champions Arsenal. He's in the twilight of his career now, but still has superhuman stats and I'm looking forward to pairing him up front with my young Haitian phenomenon Remi Robin. After a couple of years I probably won't renew his contract, but I've got another prodigy in the youth squad who will be old enough for the seniors by then and should also team up nicely with Robin - a Brazilian by the unlikely name of Victor Kardec. Anyway...

Talking of computer-generated-player names, have any of you ever been tempted to buy players purely on the basis of their silly names? Only there's a free-agent goalkeeper currently in my game who has the magnificent moniker of Max Ham! (He was previously with Bolton, where he played 73 games in the reserves, it says 'ere. I probably won't, though, as he's 26 and I only ever sign youngsters ...usually!)

Right - I'm off to continue with my unending series of pre-season friendlies. We got held to an uncharacteristic 0-0 draw last time out by Leyton so I'm looking to exact a horrible revenge on Grays and then Woking!

[Incandenza]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Crusoe wrote: Sorry to resurrect a dead thread with a tangent, but does anyone know where I can get CM 03-04 for a Mac? Hoping to avoid having to get it for Windows and then mucking about with Crossover or Wine or whatever else I'd need.

Hmm, not sure. I'll have a look around.

edit: found this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/CHAMPIONSHIP-MANAGER-4-APPLE-MAC-MEGA-RARE-FAST-POST-football-management-sim-/121592421058?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item1c4f79 1ac2

[Crusoe]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Cheers Inca, although I probably should've said I was looking for something digital - only an external drive on my laptop and I think it may be dead.

[Incandenza]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Hmm, maybe it's on a torrent site? I think you'd have to do a virtual drive to boot the game, even if I have no idea what that really means.

[evilC]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

A search (using DuckDuckGo) threw up this site:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/6565/championship-manager-03-04

I'm not a Mac user, so I can't test the download, but I can say that the download does at least start. (It's in .sit format - a stuffit compressed file.)

[Crusoe]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Cheers Clive, but it's only a patch rather than the full game, and it's the Power PC rather than Intel version. Which suggests sadly there won't be a usable Mac version for an Intel Mac.

[evilC]

Well, he was good on Champ Man

Ah, I suspected as much (re the patch). There seemed to be a lot of results, though, so it may be that it's worth you spending some time sifting through them.