Football Manager 2005

From Football Manager - NeoWiki

Box Art

Background

After splitting from publishers Eidos it was announced that Sports Interactive, producers of the Championship Manager game, had acquired the brand and would henceforth release their games under the "Football Manager" name, whilst the Championship Manager series will go on, but no longer be related to Sports Interactive. The first game in the Football Manager series was FM 2005.

Release

Football Manager 2005 was released in the UK on November 4th, 2004 - closely followed by releases in many other countries around the world - and it became the 5th fastest selling PC game of all time (according to Eurogamer). The Macintosh version of the game comes on the same dual format disk as the PC version, so its sales are also included.

Success

Football Manager 2005 was the first in it's kind which offered complete control of a team from the Youth team straight through to the First team. It was unparalled and was dominant over Champions Manager which seemed to falter. It saw one of the first uses of the 2D pitch which was the main selling point of Football Manager 2005, and it still is used to this very day despite fierce calls for a 3D pitch. It became the 5th best selling game and the quality is showed was high above Eidos's Championship manager.

For the first time ever you could take control of a team and see the action unfold infront of your very own eyes and it also offered us the chance to see what was happening rather than a simple line of commentary. It was unparalled in it's coverage of leagues which included 51 nations and over 100 leagues.

Copyright

Similar to the Pro Evolution Soccer series it has faced Copyright issues every year for the right to hosts some leagues and nations. This is why the Japanese J-League is not featured in the game and why for the past few years the German and sometimes Holland and Japanese national leagues have been unplayable unless certain parts of the game were deleted. Along with the nations above not being playable there were a host of other Copyright issues:

• Oliver Kahn was known as Jens Munstermann
• All French clubs names were changed to the City they were in
• The Japanese league was renamed the N-Ligue and all clubs given fictional names
• The names of the Champions League and [Uefa Cup]] were changed due to Copyright issues

Reviews

Despite these minor flaws it still recieved rave reviews from many of the top gaming critics.

Major portions of this page were written by: Validation