Football Manager 2 – “Extra training”

In Kevin Toms’s Software Star, released on his Addictive Games label in 1985, you run a games publisher. You name new games, decide how to promote them (including whether to lead with Hype or Honesty) and watch their chart performance against your rivals. Those rivals are all obviously named in reference to real software companies, like Perth Hut (Melbourne House), Last Games (Ultimate) and Sigh On (Psion). Software Star says much less about the games you are making. As Bill Scolding wrote in his review for Sinclair User, “you might as well be running a whelk stall”. Kevin Toms’s focus was on process, which makes sense, because it was proving very successful for him with Football Manager.

Toms had pivoted from trying to become a board game designer, and had taken a lot of inspiration from existing board games. A game called Soccerama was one of the key influences, and its makers ASL went on to make a board game called Chartbuster which put you in charge of making hit records. It’s easy to see a potential line from that to Software Star. 

Part of the brilliance of Football Manager was the transferability of its simple and effective core. It had initially succeeded on the ZX81 back in 1982, but all its best procedural bits could be slotted easily into other formats, with updated graphics over the top, and work just as well for new audiences years later. There were challenges along the way, like figuring out how to do the match graphics in Ceefax mode for the BBC Micro, but the cumulative effect of all those versions helped Football Manager to the top of the charts in March 1985, right around when Software Star came out.

Kevin Toms used the success of Football Manager to allow him to make other games. Software Star (which reached #20, the exact number after which the game’s own charts cut off) was followed in 1987 by President. That game puts you in charge of a country and made me think of Civilization, just several steps too simplified. Toms also started releasing other people’s games through Addictive, and some of those were successful. Paul O’Malley’s platformer Boffin made the BBC Micro top 20 in September 1985, and Simon Davies’s Headcoach reached #13 on the overall charts in September 1986. Headcoach was, essentially, Football Manager but for American Football.

There are a couple of things in there that fit with what Kevin Toms did next. Broadly, he was doing an increasing amount with Addictive Games, but its biggest successes were all still very linked to Football Manager. As Toms described it in an interview by Den of Geek, ”the business was taking over”. “I realised that still it was the games that I wrote that were the bread and butter of the company, but I wasn’t writing any more, I didn’t have time”. He took some business advice, and was advised that he should focus on one or the other. With his heart more in the writing, that was where he decided to focus.

Pretty quickly, an opportunity came up to forward that goal. Prism Leisure Corporation had started in the music business as Geoff’s Records in 1980, beginning by republishing records which had been deleted, and they were now looking to buy a computer games company. Toms sold Addictive to them. He wasn’t happy with some of the resultant loss of control — in an interview for Richard Moss’s A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games he said as much about the MSX version of Football Manager and its use of predictable fixed animations, something he had gone out of his way to avoid (“At that point it would be better not to do graphics at all. I was appalled”). It freed him up to focus on making games, though. And he and Prism agreed on what to make. “They wanted me to write Football Manager 2”.

Football Manager had invented a genre, and in the intervening years the likes of The Boss/Soccer Boss (a #2 hit for Alternative in 1987), Football Director and The Double had turned up and added to it. For Football Manager 2, Kevin Toms added in some new complexities of tactics (you see your opponent’s formation and set up your players against it) and of money management, including agreeing sponsorship. He went for more sophisticated match graphics, too. “I completely, radically recreated it and altered the design. I was driven by a desire to keep inventing something new. I wanted end-to-end graphic action.” 

He also took what had worked for Football Manager over five years, its flexibility across different formats, and attempted to do it all in one go. He explained this, again for A Tale of Two Halves. “It was a difficult project because there were five languages and seven pieces of hardware. So about 35 different versions at release, and my code was in all of them. I created a kind of virtual machine interface so that my code was driving the animation […] but a group of about six other developers from across the country were drawing it.” “We communicated by dropping software on a bulletin board, collecting it overnight then combining the code. It was very, very difficult and it was nuts, really. I don’t look back on it with pleasure.”

Football Manager 2 was quite a while in the making. Computer & Video Games magazine reported on it having some kind of launch at the Personal Computer World Show in September 1987, with an appearance by then West Brom manager Ron Atkinson. The game didn’t actually come out until 17 June the following year. The smart result of the long and challenging process, though, was that all of the versions of Football Manager 2 were very much the same game, while looking much better on the machines capable of it. 

Though not enough so for everyone; Pat Winstanley wrote in Atari ST User that “It’s a shame that the ST’s facilities have not been exploited to the full. Apart from an action replay sequence and the rather more detailed graphics, there’s nothing to set it apart from 8-bit versions”. Andy Richards in the same review focused on the positives: “There’s always plenty to do and the management side is well thought out, with lots of options at each stage”. The game worked to add more while retaining the essence of the gameplay loop which had inspired the name of Addictive Games.

Back on the 8-bit machines, it mostly got a positive response. Sinclair User made the nominatively appropriate choice among their writers and got Graham Taylor to review Football Manager 2, and he summed up the comparison to the original nicely. “Would it look better and play worse? Would they dare to get away with such dodgy graphics in 1988? Would it be glossy and naff? No! It’s great! It still looks a bit tatty around the edges (couldn’t you have redesigned the character set even Kevin?) and the actual football bit […] is not exactly state of the art. However, actual gameplay is even better!”

One Crash reviewer wrote that “Kevin Toms has obviously looked at all the football strategy games around and taken what few good points they have […] strategy games are all about planning and that’s where Football Manager 2 is so good […] Real football fans everywhere will love it; it may not have mass appeal, but it’s a leader in its field.” Kevin Toms had, for now, secured the status of the Football Manager series as the football management game, rather than just the one which had started everything.

In 1990, to coincide with the World Cup in Italy, Addictive released Football Manager: World Cup Edition. This was an even more trying experience for Kevin Toms, thanks to Prism deciding to save money by removing a manager who had been overseeing a similar process for its different formats. It reviewed mostly terribly and is not fondly remembered, although it did hit #2 in the full price chart. Kevin Toms carried on working in software but took a break from writing games, and moved to New Zealand. He has made various football mobile games since, but none were Football Manager. Instead, that name got a different, unusual revival.

In 2004, Sports Interactive, the makers of the Championship Manager series, split from publishers Eidos. Championship Manager was by that time the football management game, and Eidos retained the rights to the name. So Sports Interactive decided instead to go with something straightforward and historical, and called their next game Football Manager 2005. As Kevin Toms explained for A Tale of Two Halves, he didn’t gain anything as a result. “I had tried to trademark it in the early days but the trademark expert I consulted said it was too generic”. Any gain went to Prism Leisure, though that didn’t stop them folding in 2007. Sports Interactive are still regularly releasing Football Manager games today, continuing the process of adding ever more features on to the same underlying idea.

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Sources:

• A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games, Richard Moss, Bitmap Books, 2024
• The Den Of Geek interview: Kevin Toms, Simon Brew, Den of Geek, 2008
• Interview with Kevin Toms, Ready 64, 2002
• Spectrum Software Scene – Software Star, Bill Scolding, Sinclair User No. 37, May 1985, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Fractured Light, The Games Machine No. 8, July 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• News – Kick Off, Computer & Video Games No. 73, November 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Kevin Toms post on Facebook about Football Manager 2, 2026
• Action replay!, Pat Winstanley, Atari ST User Vol. 3 No. 7, September 1988, accessed via Atari Mania
• Games review – Football Manager 2, Graham Taylor, Sinclair User No. 76, July 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Reviews – Football Manager 2, Crash No. 54, July 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Software Star, Boffin, Headcoach, Football Manager: World Cup Edition, chart histories at Computer Hits

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