A release on the Macintosh platform was cancelled prior to release, again giving headway to its rival Football Manager, which was made available for Mac as standard on a dual format CD-ROM (with the PC Windows version).

Even though Beautiful Game Studios published a downloadable patch on the day of release, many users felt that Championship Manager 5 was unplayable.

Key problems included difficulties transferring players (either in or out of a club) and a very unrealistic match engine.

Perhaps one of the biggest issues discovered by people purchasing Championship Manager 5 was the fact that the player database was not particularly reliable.

Beautiful Game Studios had employed a professional firm to create much of the player database and they had apparently failed despite the best efforts of the in-house research team.