Championship Manager 2009 (PC)

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For all the work Meredith's done redrawing the game's navigation and adding variation, fans will want to know what's happened to the tactics and formations screens, since most of your time will be spent here. Squad selection is much the same but with small improvements. There are more pre-set formations, based on feedback from real ex-footballers like Brian McClair, Mervyn Day, and lower league striker Mark Nwokeji, from Dagenham and Redbridge. There will be a with ball and without ball formation system, allowing you to switch from, say, an attacking 4-3-3 to a defensive 4-5-1 when you lose the ball. You can now set four runs or feeds per player, as well as drag icons onto opposition players providing for specific instructions, like taking on a man hard (for Messi, maybe) or winding him up (useful for Rooney, perhaps). Again, it's about adding variation.

Drill training lets you give a temporary boost to player attributes, something Meredith doesn't believe fans reckon is even possible in these types of games. You'll be able to see the players practice via the new in-game match engine (more on that later), as well. Penalties, free kicks, corners, all that sort of stuff you'll be able to set, and watch, your team practice in your club's training ground. Practice matches can be set up, say between your first team and the reserves, allowing you to get to know a club you're not familiar with or see triallists, or youth players, in action before committing to a contract.

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The schedule designer, which essentially is your assistant manager, can be tweaked to give you a more hands-on approach to training. Via a chart you'll be able to see how players will improve under your crafted training regime. The idea is to find a schedule that minimises chance of injury and maximises attribute improvement. Stop the training though, and your players will quickly revert back to their original stats.

Meredeith moves on to Champ Man's database of players, and it's here that Football Manager is once again raised. "One of the key points about our database is that every single player within our database is a playable player," he explains. "There are no unplayable players within our database. This is kind of a knock towards FM, but I don't want it coming out as a knock towards FM. Play FM, go to Besiktas and you'll find at least half of the players are greyed out and you can't sign them. They're there, they're part of their database, but they haven't got stats for them. Every single player in our game has 50 stats, 50 attributes, you can sign anybody in our game for your team. If you go and look, let's say Algeria, the Algerian league, whether the Algerian league is playable or not, every single player you'd have within that would be sign-able. Bulgaria is a great example. every single player that's in Bulgaria is going into our game." Again, aggressive words.

Will Championship Manager 09 rekindle the series' glory?

Wrapping up our first look at Champ Man is a pre-recorded demonstration of the new match engine, which affords Meredith a chance to make his final comparison with Football Manager. It is the only match engine, we're told, that's built for a football management game. "There are inherent issues with buying graphical match engines that are made for playable games against what we're building," he says. "And one of those is, goalkeeper code, because you don't control the goalkeeper in a playable match engine, it doesn't do quite what you want it to do within a management engine. So there's reasons we took that decision. We did look at buying match engines and putting them onto what we'd already built. No, we want to be totally responsible for what we want to do."

Champ Man 09's match engine has been fully motion captured, with 500 animations per player (goalkeepers have about 350). Crowds and stadia are based on the real capacity of the club you've assumed control of. Weather effects are in full force - fog, rain, snow, shadow from high sun - it's all in there. Tactical overlays will let you make changes on the fly without having to take an eye off the action. It's not FIFA 09-quality graphics, of course, but it does look adequate for what we'd want from a football management sim.

And there ends Meredith's demonstration of Champ Man 09. It certainly looks like the series will be much improved, and the focus on improved navigation and variation is of course welcome. Will it be enough to dethrone Football Manager? There's no way of knowing just yet. But, in a last gasp effort to convert disbelievers, Meredith promises four features that "have never been in a football management game before". Aggressive words indeed.

Championship Manager 09 is due out for PC in April.

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