Football Manager 2010: talking Torquay

Though I’m a massive Manchester United fan, I’ve never been particularly inclined to play them during a Championship Manager/Football Manager campaign. That would be like playing as Goliath (in full-faced armoured headgear) in battles mostly against hapless Davids. Victory will follow victory but it all feels hollow.

CM/FM is at its very best when it’s about the little guys. It’s about taking a team anchored at the bottom of the league with no pedigree and with players no one’s heard of, beating expectations and leading them to dizzying heights. It’s the allure of infinite possibility.

Years and years ago, I looked at the English league standings and discovered the bottom-most club in the lowest league (then Division 4) was a club known as Torquay United. I knew nothing about Torquay. I didn’t know where it was located, how big it was, how old it was, what its history was yet to my mind, this football club was the quintessential underdog, the no-hopers.

I chose that club when playing CM for the first time. This was the primitive CM2 96/97 edition, which included digitised commentary by Clive Tyldesley. There was no 3D graphics engine to display matches, not even a 2D match display. It was all text and Tyldesley. It didn’t take me long to tire of the digitised commentary but I had it on long enough to learn Torquay wasn’t actually pronounced “Toh-kweh.”

This would be the ultimate challenge, I thought, a true test of managerial skill. Let’s see how far I can take this “Toh-kee,” this little club I knew nothing about, the one with the odds stacked against them. What a campaign it turned out to be, one of my all-time favourites, right up there with Panzer General, Steel Panthers and UFO: Enemy Unknown. It took me five seasons to lead this unfashionable club from Division Three to the Premier League after which the Gulls dominated the upper echelons for seasons to come. This was fantasy football at its most fantastical, of course, but it was so exhilarating an experience I didn’t care one whit about the sheer absurdity of it all.

In subsequent CM/FM campaigns, I kept returning to the club, forming an odd relationship with it. I’ve never followed the actual team nor been compelled to see them in action yet I’ve come to know and like the players through these games.

There’s a kind of nobility about playing in the lower leagues. You really do have to play for the love of the game since there’s very little money down there. The weekly wage for a lowly Manchester United squad player could pay for Torquay’s first team, reserves, youth team, coaching staff and still have money left over for an expensive vice or two.

There’s no glamour down there. There’s no media circus around you, breathlessly reporting every trivial detail. The world doesn’t care who you’re dating, which club you staggered out drunkedly from last night, what exotic name you foisted on your firstborn, what tattoos you have.

But the lower leagues can produce some truly great stories which deserve wider attention. I’ve never met Chris Todd and probably wouldn’t recognise him if I saw him but if he was pointed out to me, I’d go up to him, shake his hand and let him know he definitely deserved higher Bravery, Composure, Determination and Influence ratings in Football Manager 2010.

You never cheer harder than when you’re cheering for the little guy defying the odds and beating expectations.

It’s true in Football Manager and it holds true in life as well.