Championship Manager 2010 Preview [PC]

13 Aug 2009 at 14:07:54 by Peter Parrish

Would-be football bosses following the development of this forthcoming entry in the Championship Manager series will no doubt have noticed that 2009 has become 2010. Originally scheduled for an April 2009 release, the title was held back for extra training and will now make its full debut on September 11th. In advance of the half-season demo (to be released this Friday), I put the preview code through its paces.

I've always fancied managing on the coast, so I opted for Whitby Town of the Northern Premier League in England. Knowledgeable types will be aware that this is the seventh tier of English football - sitting below the Football Conference. This depth of data means anybody hoping to take a supporter-operated club like AFC Wimbledon or FC United of Manchester to league glory will get their chance. For those wishing to start life at the very top, the traditional powerhouses of English football are also there to control.

Indeed, the English leagues are some distance ahead in playable team numbers (226), than other popular footballing nations like Italy (132) and Spain (106) - though these will go as far down as the Lega Pro Seconda Divisione C and Segunda Division B respectively.

My first major task as Whitby's enthusiastic new boss was to renew some rapidly expiring contracts. This was a challenge, as the meagre wage budget could not cope with the fresh demands of my bloated squad. The difficulty of balancing the books at a semi-pro club was being starkly highlighted, and during this task I got to see how Championship Manager 2010 handled finances and man-management.

While negotiating with players, I was able (through a series of drop-down dialogue options) to address concerns about squad status and even to appeal to their sense of decency by explaining that the club simply didn't have the resources to meet their demands. This nod towards treating the players as real people rather than pure statistics was welcome, and gave the sense that I was able to do more than simply offer and re-offer basic contracts. A little less helpful was the lack of a function with which to compare more than two players at once - something I really needed when trying to judge which of the six central defenders I could afford to let go. I could also find no way to petition the board for a touch more wage money; an option I think would be useful when just £25/week away from being able to hold on to a key player.

With the squad trimmed, placated and boosted by a couple of promising youngsters, it was time to run them ragged on the training field. As well as a traditional scheduling system, players can be put through a series of drills. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the ability to play out a full 11 vs 11 training match - an excellent resource for fiddling with eccentric new formations outside of official matches. Individual drills (such as shooting, passing and sprints) can also be set up and viewed in the match engine. What isn't yet clear from these is what effects they can have on players and whether it's necessary to sit through watching them (frankly, not the most interesting occupation) in order for these effects to take place.

For those wanting a quicker fix to their squad's weaknesses than the steady grind of the training pitch, the transfer market may hold the answers. Here, Championship Manager 2010 looks to be trying something a little bit different. Every club in the game has a scouting network - essentially a map of the world, colour-coded according to how much information the club has about a certain nation. This information will only increase through direct investment in the scouting network. The health of the scouting network is reflected in the transfer market, with the effect that player statistics from nations of which the club has very little knowledge are obscured or only displayed with a large margin of error. Crucially though, this effect is mitigated when it comes to global stars and other well known players. For example, Whitby Town had no scouting presence in Italy - but the goalkeeping skills of Gianluigi Buffon could be accessed without any problems.

Of course even the best players will struggle without tactical guidance, and Championship Manager 2010 offers the usual landslide of formation options, the ability to dictate player runs and focused passing; plus a plethora of individual tactical instructions such as directing wingers to track back when not in possession, or letting your flouncing midfield maestro off the hook when it comes to closing people down. A helpful overlay function shows the positional differences of players when in and out of possession of the ball. You can even tell your players to target particularly volatile members of opposition with a merciless wind-up campaign. The only troubling oversight I could find here was the ability to instruct a defender to man-mark, but apparently not who to man-mark.

Your best laid plans play out in Championship Manager's 3D match engine (or 2D overhead blimp-o-vision for those averse to such things.) Developed in-house and boasting hundreds of frames of animation, this is where the actual football happens. For the most part it seemed quite solid - I saw some nice moves put together and I saw some horrendous errors (not at all out of place for a team in the Northern Premier.) However, there did appear one or two issues with the match engine that can hopefully be put down to this being preview code. It would sometimes take players unnaturally large amounts of time to react to the ball, to the extent that both defenders and forwards would leave it sat around for a few seconds. These strange pauses unnaturally broke up a lot of the fluidity of play. Goalkeepers too seem to have some odd behavioural issues, sometimes going on crazed runs out of their box in futile pursuit of a distant striker. These oddities need to be fixed before the September release.

If the residual match engine kinks can be ironed out, however, there's much that looks promising. The multiple dialogue options for man-management impressed me, as did the somewhat novel approach to scouting. Other features such as training routines and the ability to create and drill your team in unique free kick and corner routines need further investigation, but also have potential. Post-game tactical analysis from ProZone looks likely to sate even the most stat-hungry desires, while more casual players should be able to get by on the in-match advice offered by assistant mangers, along the lines of 'x is being given a lot of time on the ball, they're standing off him.'

Keep an eye on IncGamers.com for news of Friday's demo, in which you'll be able to guide a team from England, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Scotland, Spain or Turkey through half a season of the full game.

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