It is commonly held that Championship Manager ruins relationships. The most enduringly successful game in PC history, they say, encourages socially underdeveloped men to spend tens of hours glued to their monitor ignoring increasingly heated pleas from wives, girlfriends, parents and small animals. This is all nonsense.
As any true devotee will tell you, Championship Manager is a force only for good. Copies of the latest, grandest installment of the game, Championship Manager 4, began flying off the shelves last Friday morning, and already thousands will be ruminating over such important issues as the importance of natural ability against the desire for hard work, the needs of the individual against that of the collective, and how best to manage money. All while pretending to be Arsene Wenger; what could possibly be wrong with that?
A testament to the game's longevity, the first version of CM (as it's known) was released in 1992. Designed by two Shropshire brothers, Oliver and Paul Collyer, it allowed you to act as manager of a real-life English football club from the comfort of your own Amiga. That it had no actual football playing - only hundreds of pages of data to analyse - and poorer graphics than Manic Miner wasn't really a problem.
Over the past decade the game has been refined, enhanced and - it must be said - complicated. Despite each new installment, the basics of the game have remained the same: use your knowledge of football and an attention to detail to build a squad, improve it through training, and win enough matches to become the best manager in the world.
Of the main components, CM4's biggest development is in the way matches are played. For the first time you can watch the game not merely through brief flashes of text (eg "Wiltord must score... He's missed it!"), but also follow a 2D engine of animated little circles that play out manoeuvres as if on a training board, allowing you to see how your team actually plays.
This adds a whole element of fun, as watching your best players perform clever moves makes hours of checking and unchecking of tactical boxes seem worthwhile. It also, however, adds a new level of detail demanding that, if you want to get your team to play well, you have to keep an eye on everything each player does.
Playing CM4 on a laptop with a Pentium III processor meant watching the 2D game was a pretty slow business. Loading the tactics pages is also clunky, but that's the price you pay for the ever-increasing size of the game. Just as you can monitor individual movements within a match, interaction with the players is more intricate elsewhere, too. Each contract has a dozen pull-down menus, each transfer an extra level of negotiation with avaricious agents. You can also edit the training regime on a daily rather than weekly basis, and even the number of players has doubled, to 200,000.
Herein lies the crux of the game: why it creates so many obsessives, while those who don't play it deride it. As the level of detail inexorably rises, ever more time is spent poring over what basically amount to spreadsheets - surely the closest a leisure pursuit has ever got to accounting. Yet with each new edition, the game gets closer to being an accurate simulation of reality, and you in turn get closer to being M Wenger.
The best feature of CM has always been its verisimilitude. With the Collyer brothers both Everton fans, it may not have been surprising that some of the best players in early versions were to be found on Merseyside. Over the years, however, the brothers have assembled hundreds of scouts worldwide to help assess real-life players, collate the game's data and accrue a depth of football knowledge that beats that of most media pundits hands down.
It's always fun to see real-life clubs splashing big money on a player you bought in CM two years ago for peanuts. From Kieron Dyer to Jermain Defoe, Javier Saviola to David Trezeguet, you saw them first on your PC. Now the race is already on to delve into the newly stocked database and find the latest hidden stars.
That there aren't many real-life football stars who play CM perhaps isn't too surprising. On the official site there are interviews to be found with minor pros and the occasional Premiership squad player, but the biggest name to have been involved is Ray Houghton, the former Liverpool and Ireland star. Judging by Houghton's interviews it doesn't seem that he spends too much time tinkering with his training schedule. Which, in fact, is fine. Let the players stick to playing, and leave management to the pros.
