Football Manager

Sometimes, its amazing what will set off your long term memory. Posting about the Championship Manager game on Monday reminded me of Football Manager. Or to be more precise, the original and first Football Manager which came out on the ZX Spectrum in 1982.

Although the game itself came out in 1982, my recollection of this particular event is from sometime post 1985. I know it was after 1985 as the memory was from our new home in the east end of Glasgow. Also, although I'm not sure which year this was, I know the date exactly - April 22. My birthday.

Somehow, my brother and I had managed to get some balloons which was impressive in that we weren't exactly loaded with dosh when I was a kid. Did my granny buy them for us? Or were they purchased using my brother's pocket money? Did my brother even get pocket money in those days or was he already working part time for cash? Anyway, I have no idea where those balloons came from - I only remember that we had an assortment of multicoloured balloons which we blew up and that some of them were classic round balloons while some of them were the longer sausage shaped balloons.

That night, after my grandmother had gone to bed but before our parents came home from work, we setup the ZX Spectrum in the living room. We took out the cassette tape which held the Football Manager game and put it into the cassette player and pressed play. And then we waited. And then we waited some more. And then we reset the tape player and pressed play again as it didn't manage to load properly the first time.

(You see, in those days, before you got to play a game, you needed to load it using a tape player. And, as you can imagine with analog technology being used to transmit digital data, the game didn't always load on the first attempt.)

Eventually, we got the game loaded and ready to play. Obviously, by today's standards, the game is incredibly simplistic. However, to my young mind at the time, this was the best thing since fast cars and toy soldiers. It had real life football clubs that you could become manager of. It had real players (K Keegan for the win!) albeit not in the right teams. You had to worry about the fitness of those players as some of them could get injured. In addition to the league, it also had FA cup matches. It even had a transfer market where you could buy and sell players. Surely the only thing better would be to actually take over a real club in real life!!

The game even had a match engine. After picking your players and starting the match, you would see little stick figures running around with the ball. The attacker would take the ball, run forward a couple of steps and then blast it at the goal while hoping that the opposition defenders didn't manage to get in the way. All very exciting when you're just a bairn.

Our star striker at the time was a player called Bedders who scored most of our goals. The match engine itself didn't differentiate between the player names. However, in our imagination, we always imagined him taking the ball in midfield and running with it down the bottom wing (bottom wing as its easier to score from the bottom of the screen due to the isometric viewpoint of the match engine) before planting the ball beyond the keepers reach in the top corner of the net!

And so a long term love affair with footie management games was born as we took our little team all the way from League 4 to the top of the heights of League 1. We ended up sitting in front of the television into the wee hours of the morning while screaming our lungs out and banging away with the balloons every time one of our players scored.

And we loved every second of it.