Before the Premier League, back in the late 80s and early 90s, the beautiful game was in a bit of a rut. This was the pre-"sexy football" era of declining attendances, hooliganism, outdated football grounds and the backdrop of a country in recession. But not in the spare room of my mum and dad's house, from which (via the medium of Football Director on the Commodore 64) my friends and I revolutionized football.
My friend Andrew had it first for his Spectrum.
And once I'd played it, I was hooked. For some reason, I could only purchase it by mail order from a computer magazine. It felt like an eternity before it arrived, and of course it had to turn up just before I left for school. I literally could not contain myself for the whole day. I was just longing for the time I could get home and try it out.
Essentially, Football Director is just like the Championship Manager/Football Manager game that we have today. All the teams from the old football leagues (1 -4) are there, and the only real difference is that the players in FD are fictitious, made up presumably using the programmers' own names. But apart from
that, it's more or less the same. You have a squad of players, each player has a rating (1-9), you have a certain amount of money, the ability to buy and sell players, select your team, and play the game.
This game wasn't easy. Although you could select any team you liked, whether they be Ipswich Town or Manchester United, you always started off in Division 4. The kind of team you got was a bit of a lottery. If you were lucky, you got a few players with a rating of 3 or 4. If you were unlucky, you got a load of no-hopers with ratings of 1 and 2. Clawing your way up those leagues was very much like it is for the lower division teams of today. The problems were two-fold. One, the game had a difficulty rating. You begin on "Easy", but as your team start winning the player ratings improve. This in turn increases the average rating of your team, and that increases the difficulty rating. So in a way you are penalised by your success. What generally happened to me is that I started off well, got better, then the difficulty rating went up and then I got thumped every week and my player ratings dropped. The second problem was cash. You start out with a pitiful amount. You need good results to boost attendances, be on TV and in turn earn money. But it always seemed that as soon as I got a bit of spare cash, there would be crowd trouble at the next match and I'd end up getting fined and losing all my hard earned lucre.
So in steps my own version of Rupert Murdoch and Sky. Now, I know you get nothing in this world by cheating, but I made a great discovery with this game. The Commodore was different from the Spectrum. Every Spectrum game seemed to have hundreds of cheats (or Pokes), whereas the Commodore had relatively few. But I discovered one all by myself. One feature of the game was that you could sell shares in the club to raise finance. However, if you sold too many, then the Board would sack you, but I realised that if you sold several billion shares, and then saved the game before you played the next match, when you reloaded the game, the board seemed to have forgotten all about the financial irregularity. And so, about 17 years before Roman Abramovitch did the same thing, I bought the league. I bought top rated players, internationals, etc; and even though £900,000 would guarantee you the best player in the league, I enjoyed gratuitously jazzing £50 million on T Huggard, and then smashing that transfer record on Derek Derekson (you could enter your own names too). From then on, with the big money injected into the game, me and my friends clocked up hours and hours as managerial supremos. Winning the league wasn't enough anymore. It had to be the double!! The treble!!! And yes we even managed the quadruple!!!! If one of us only managed to win the FA cup in a season, or had a bad run or results, then he would be sacked and the other would be installed in the hotseat. Success had to be instant for the next manager, otherwise the mood of the crowd got ugly....
The legacy of this game is still evident in us today. We often used the rhyming slang of 'Oh no we're absolutely T Huggard now' if we lost a crucial match or a key payer got injured. And we still do. If King Kev doesn't succeed at Newcastle this time around with all the millions he has been promised, and finds that he is absolutely Huggard, well me and my friends will be waiting to step up.....
