I spoke to the Collyer brothers about FM/CM. Here's what they said

Interview with Paul and Oliver Collyer on all things Football Manager

http://factor-tech.com/feature/how-two-teenage-brothers-turned-a-legion-of-football-fans-into-football-managers/

Nice article- well done

Great article. As someone who's owned almost every C/FM ever, they are legends. We all have stories, moments in our lives, teams we actually support, that are all thanks to those two guys and a vision.

Myself, and the Champions League trophy adorning the cabinet of FC Fylkir, thank you.

Great article, thanks for posting.

Does anybody know any more about the story of EA turning down an early version of the game?

Great article, thanks for posting.

Does anybody know any more about the story of EA turning down an early version of the game?

I have to admit the PS note at the bottom of the rejection letter about the virus intrigued me.

Good read though.

Fantastic read, thanks for posting.

I wonder if the friends that used to come round on a Saturday afternoon to play the game get a free copy every year?

Bit amusing to see Domark described as a small UK based publisher. They were at the time one of the bigger game companies in Europe.

“We played lots of management games in the early 1980s, and although we spent a lot of time playing them, there was a certain dissatisfaction with the way that the game was angled at the user,” says Paul Collyer. “We would prefer to be in a world and these games tended to make you the centre of the world.”

That's still FM summed up. There was that book published three, four years ago, "Football Manager stole my life", in them they printed some resume attached to that European Championship pitch eventually neglected by EA, plus the design documents. Literally all of it could be from current FM. You may shudder the day the guys retire, as who knows, maybe there will be artificial difficulty levels artificially bumping the AI (rotten cheats!!!) so that you would play by some special rules indeed. How about somebody getting a deal done with EA/Konami to shoehorn management into what clearly is an arcade game because pretty graphics. In a sense, this has arguably been the only case where this entire management thing has worked, somewhat and thought out through. For every weird thing and research guy handing out "runs forward no matter what" traits to players as if everybody was Lucio in his prime, if you're getting used to it you could actually attend any match and say, ah, so he's employing a play maker here or target man there (odd choice in Götze though!), and look at that insanely high line of that Guardiola bloke, w00t!

For all the additionally and intentionally focus in club management on Total Club Manager etc. it wasn't until 2010ish for instance until the grounds of the other clubs were even "simulated" on Fifa Man, all the benefits would be entirely to the user's, and if he would retire from his job to return later, he'd find it was all "reset"! Would of never happen here, even right in the early ones, everything simulated on even grounds, including the press conferences stored for all eternity for all the managers. FM 2012 even had a curious bug where you on occasion got to see the private conversations between AI managers and their players -- used to follow Arnautovic as he always had a fallout no matter where he went. It's a hugely fascinating world you may optionally take a part in. No wonder why CM/FM had been such a resource hog for older machines though.

What struck me as remarkable is how almost any major series of football management games has grass roots, so to speak, guys getting into the business first doing "small games for friends" or something they would program in their spare time to publish in magazines. On The Ball in Germany was no different, and prior to that Bundesliga Manager (discontinued in ca. 2000), that initially was also a 2 man job. The lead designer of On The Ball was still the lead designer behind Fifa Manager too until it had been disbanded four, three years ago. Maybe it takes a special kind of dedicated person to do that thing, maybe the days were publishers were still somewhat interested in largely text-based primarily PC games is over (plus licensing hell), though that with all text has been changing mind. That said Paul saying he couldn't play more than a couple pre-season friendlies into the thing without noticing all the warts puts me a little off of playing my next match now, so. Couldn't you have invited Miles to correct him how fantastically it all is? Pretty good quotes, overall, good job on getting them.

edit: Any chance you could take a look at European Champions? I have Dosbox, an original C64, an Amiga, probably even the Amstrad someplace.