The Championship Manager brand and game was conceived by brothers Paul and Oliver Collyer.
[1] The brothers subsequently founded a development company to take the game further, Sports Interactive, and moved to Islington, North London.
Eidos retained the name and interface, with Beautiful Game Studios taking over the development of Championship Manager.
Square Enix Europe, owners of the brand after purchasing Eidos, revived Championship Manager under the title of Champ Man in 2013.
[8] Around 80% of jobs, including the majority of the internal studio's programming department, were either cut or relocated to Eidos Shanghai, while incumbent general manager Roy Meredith retained his position.
[11] The games resulting from this partnership, Championship Manager: World of Football, was announced in July 2011.
The release of Championship Manager '93 one year later built on the original game, ported to the C programming language, adding a real life player database and other features.
The success of Championship Manager '93 spurred the release of two update disks, the first "contains every transfer, promotion, relegation and manager changes" for the beginning of the '93/'94 season which is known as "The 1993/94 Season Data Up-Date Disk".
[citation needed] The success of the franchise lead to the release of Championship Manager 2 in September 1995.
[citation needed] Released in 1997, this version of the game included nine leagues from around the world, three of which could be run simultaneously, new competition formats to follow those implemented in reality, and many more tactical options.
The changes include a fully reworked database for the 1997/98 season, backgrounds, graphical overhaul, 5 leagues, colored attributes and many small tweaks to the match engine and executable.
[16] Ten more playable leagues were introduced for this version, including Australia, Greece, Northern Ireland, Russia and Wales.
[citation needed] No new playable leagues were added to this version of Championship Manager (until a patch was later released that added South Korea's K-League to the game) allowing the developers to fine-tune the game's mechanics.
On the gameplay side, a top-down view of the match engine was included for the first time a significant shift from the imagination philosophy championed by Sports Interactive previously.
Despite its high sales, Championship Manager 4 was generally not well received by hardcore fans for several reasons.
[citation needed] The original release contained some functional bugs which in some cases rendered the game farcical—the score in matches could randomly change, and lower division clubs were able to sign superstars with ease.
However, the release date of Championship Manager 5 was put back by Eidos to March 2005, due to the extent of work required to code the game from scratch.
Championship Manager 2008 was released on 2 November 2008, with users able to play in a multiplayer mode, with more than one person on an account.
On 18 August, a "pay what you want for Championship Manager 2010" promotion was announced whereby between 18 August and 10 September a digital copy of the game could be pre-ordered from the Championship Manager store and was available for download on the day of launch, 10 September.
[25] Championship Manager 13/14, branded as Champ Man, was released on 15 October 2013 for mobile phones.