The ballad of Bjørn Heidenstrøm
How I lost my youth to Championship Manager 97/98 and why I’d do it all again.
Words: Tom Reed
The TV comedy “The Inbetweeners” perfectly captured the hinterland teenage years for English lads.
Too babyfaced at 17 to be taken seriously in the pub and too self-aware to want to hang out with your parents.
The world is your lobster but rattling the cage of nothing to do.
If “The Inbetweeners” had been filmed in the late 90’s, the characters would have been playing seminal football management simulator Championship Manager 97/98, no doubt about it.
The ultimate way to while away whole chunks of listless half-terms, huddled round a mate’s P.C in front of a flashing screen with cheap stubby bottles of Tesco Biere D’or and glory matches between Hull City and Wigan Athletic.
The premise was simple, take over a football side and and lead them to victory, for it was possible, in the world of Championship Manager, to take the likes of Northampton Town to European Cup glory, with the right tactics and player recruitment.
I was 17 in 1998 by the time I had managed to get my hands on a copy of what was known as Champ Man, shorthand in this football nerd network that somehow felt cool because you knew who Tommy Svindal Larsen was.
This was just before the dawn of the internet and mobile phone explosion, there weren’t many laptops about and playing the game meant loading a CD Rom into a cavernous computer that was so big you had to keep it in its own cabinet and feed it processed cheese slices, so it didn’t get angry.
Oasis had played Knebworth and moving onto their “All Around the World” phase and there we were with global football at our fingertips. Rivaldo and Tony fucking Battersby.
Labour swept to power in the 1997 elections a few months before Champ Man’s release but had nowhere near the effect the game had on my consciousness. I can’t recall many of Tony Blair’s cabinet but I can reel off a host of names from the football management sim par excellence.
Ibrahima Bakayoko was the king, a player with such power and finishing ability that even Tony Yeboah would have said ‘fair play’ to the Ivorian’s exploits.
Bakayoko was cack in real life but it didn’t matter at at all because CM 97/98 was a beautiful lurid Hades where unearthing underrated gems was perfectly possible and you were only a couple of signings away from a run up the leagues.
While Bakayoko was the player all serious managers wanted to get, a little known Norwegian called Bjørn Heidenstrøm was the one to make a team tick. A bit part operator for Leyton Orient in real life, this centre-mid provided the sustenance, the chicken balti in your Indian takeaway, where others were the throwaway bag of salad.
Bjørn Heidenstrøm was at least a seven out of ten each week, a mr reliable who let others shine.
Championship Manager’s rating system was faultless and comforting. Six out of ten or below was a performance of concern, seven was a good shift and eight and nine standout showings. A rating of ten was just the bollocks and worthy of a virtual high-five from me as a gaffer that I couldn’t give but would definitely have done so in a Glenn Hoddle Umbro Bench coat if I could (circa Chelsea ‘94).
I learned the “proper numbers” for players through Championship Manager, from the 10 that every kid wanted to be when the shirts were handed to the 2 and 3 for the right and left backs. The 7 and 11 for your out and out wingers.
There were no “false nines” in those days, just real nines and if you weren’t performing I’d ship you out and replace you with Tom Youngs sunshine.
The tactics were beautifully basic in a game still tied to the long ball and you could make real changes to the outcome of matches by throwing a striker on and making him go through the middle with the little dotted run lines that were as about as complicated as it got.
And what strikers we had in 97/98, what goal poachers, what goal hangers and net sniffers that would sell their granny and her Ford Fiesta to notch at Gillingham away.
Youngs, the ultra versatile Cambridge United forward who could play right, left and centre and would guarantee you 25 goals a season, especially at lower league level. Roger Boli (Basil’s Brother) who played over 200 games for French side Lens but then somehow found himself at Walsall in the Midlands. He scored one of the best overhead kicks of all time for the Saddlers v Southend in real life and was a must buy for anyone on CM 97/98 who wanted some proper goalscoring flair.
Rory Delap was known for his long throws but in the game was a killer finisher and that distortion between CM 97/98 and what went on in this realm was its beauty and its joy.
The game offered a route into the exotic that was out of reach for fans outside the top flight and using the “Minor Team” function you could sign random Brazilians named “Claudio” and “Darci” for a pittance and watch them do Samba walks through crumbling Carlisle defences.
At the upper levels, there was a Barca geezer who you might know as Luis Enrique but us Champ Man fiends only recognise as Martinez Luis Enrique, a man who could play every role from front to back and whom you wanted to be your dad as he could probably fry up a plate of chips while fixing your bike at the same time.
The player editor function was a real boon for growing egotists as you could edit yourself into the game and give yourself the top rating of 20 for everything and watch the goals fly in. This came a cropper when my friend edited the top players into WWE wrestlers, meaning Erik Nevland became Papa Shango and after a while i forgot who was who. I have a vague memory of Sonny Anderson becoming The Undertaker.
The game had a micro-level democratising effect for us council estate kids, opening up a world of football that was mostly out of reach. The team names remain alluring to this day, from Svindal Larsen’s Stabæk with its intermingling a and e, to Ham-Kam, Cruz Azul and Thai Farmers Bank. We wondered if fans of these clubs were loading up a Leyton Orient save and marvelling at the Heidenstrøm-Alex Inglethorpe midfield combination with the same eyes we did.
We managed Paris St Germain till we nodded off, fixated on the unstoppable Patrice Loko, the sun god Rai and the winger Jerome Leroy who we imagined had the ball glued to his feet while winking at Parisienne models on the sideline.
Only months later, the lure of nightclub lights took over the retina flash of the goalscoring screen on CM 97/98, our lives were moving apace like the way we sped up the game to get to the next match.
We made a pilgrimage a couple of years later to the Parc des Princes but Patrice Loko was no more, Rai had descended to another plain and it was mainly the Boulogne Boys and the Supras Auteuil trying to kill each other on the metro. There was no Paul Le Guen to hold it together.
On an Interrail trip in Prague we drank with some Swedes and the lingua franca was Tommy Svindal Larsen, the player who would progress in the game like we all wanted our lives to.
It didn’t matter that Svindal Larsen was actually Norwegian in our haze of absinthe and Red Bull because they knew who he was, of course they did, the legend.
I gave up my CM addiction around the 01/02 edition when it all got too involved and you had to manage the player’s training and my mate Paul at uni played for 12000 consecutive hours and regenerated a player called Homeboy Santana.
When I hear of fully grown adults losing days to playing what is now known as Football Manager, I cut them some slack.
It’s self-care for fragile male egos, the chance to directly influence life that is hard to manage, like a Tom Youngs knockdown to a strike partner who can’t quite cut it.
Those eyes are blinking now, the curry’s gone cold and your mate is asleep on the floor.
Soon it’ll all be over, you’ll be old and your kids won’t know who Ibrahima Bakayoko is.
Tom Reed is Terrace Edition Editor and can be found on Twitter: @tomreedwriting
For all your CM 97/98 needs, check out @cm9798 on Twitter or www.cm9798.co.uk
