The Original Football Manager
Back to 1982
The Original Football Manager
The original football management sim was a game created for the old TRS-80 way back in the early 1980s. Its first release was for Sinclair’s ZX80 and ZX81 in 1982 as a text based game, after which it was eventually ported to the ZX Spectrum.
The interesting thing about that ZX Spectrum version of the game is that it included animated match highlights. In fact, that was listed as one of the biggest advantages of the game:
Interestingly, you were required to start in the 4th division regardless of the team you chose. It’s also interesting to know that the match highlights are listed here as being in “3D,” which is a really funny description if you actually watch clips of the game:
While it’s really not much to write home about today, the interesting thing is that the game actually featured a graphical match engine — something that was conspicuously absent when Championship Manager was first released a decade later.