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Move over, Brian Clough - Mark Patterson puts on his manager's cap and gives it one hundred per cent.
I normally despise football management games, mainly because they offer very little that the original Football Manager didn't - and that's around 10 years old now. The newly revamped Championship Manager, however, somehow convinced me to keep playing, no matter how much I tried to hate it.
Firstly it's current. All the Premier League teams are featured along with the top European clubs. Each team has the same players as the real-life squads, with statistics reflecting their current form. This is important to football freaks like me who can't stand managing teams with players who were eligible for the '66 World Cup squad.

When you take the seat at your new desk your first job is to organise the players. As with most games of this type they're given ratings for attributes such as passing, shooting, tackling and speed. They also have contracts, disputes with the manager or other players and generally unpredictable traits. At this point you can afford to flog the trouble makers and invest your cash in some rising stars.

RESERVISTS
Another feature which I haven't seen before is the inclusion of reserve teams. Where the first team players have ratings for their skills, clicking on a reserve player just gives you a comment such as 'promising' or 'fair'. Using one of these is risky, but if you're hit with an injury crisis it's usually the only place to turn.
The transfer market is the best place to pick up new talent. Amateur managers might just scout the market and see if there's anything they like, while the pros employ scouts. This motley crew have proficiency ratings depending on how successful they are. All you need to do is tell them what position you want the player to fill, how skilful they should be, which divisions to look in and what age range to look at. They'll obligingly go away and a week later report back with a list of every player who fits the bill, whether they're transfer listed or unhappy at their current club.

The team's tactics have to be set before a match if you don't want your players to end up milling around like lost sheep. This feature goes into some depth, as you have to assign each player to the position they're best suited to, choose the formation, style of play and whether or not your team hold back or push forward. The game styles range from continental to long-ball and there's just about every formation you could ask for.
Setting the tactics is extremely time consuming to begin with and initially left me wondering if I could be bothered continuing with a full season. Fortunately the game stores your last set of tactics, so once you've found a winning game plan you rarely need to alter it.

As you can tell from the screenshots on this page, there's not much to look at in this game. There are a number of pre-set digitised background pics, including one of Ian Wright (and a good thing too). Apart from those you are faced with multitudes of menus and other unattractive text screens.
What really sets this game apart is the sheer weight of features. It does take a while to process the results, and it has some very annoying features such as showing you the entire League's transfers for that week. Apart from that there's very little to fault it.