CM 01/02 also built on the previous games realism, implementing the new EU-regulated transfer system, introduced in real world football in September 2001. It also featured an attribute masking mode, whereby players could only see information about footballers he or she would realistically know about.

As the football world is consumed by a new Premier League season, and while football management fans salivate over the trickle of new feature announcements for the next instalment of Football Manager, some are happier sticking with a relic of virtual football's yesteryear. For one group of Championship Manager fans, the celebrated series never advanced beyond its Season 01/02 edition. Sports Interactive never left publisher Eidos for greener pastures at Sega, Championship Manager never became Football Manager, and there was never even a 2D match engine - let alone the fancy 3D one introduced in FM 2009 - to augment the game's iconic text commentary. Champ Man 01/02 is frozen in time, a shrine to an approach to football management games that since went the way of the dodo - where realism takes a backseat to simplicity and fun.

But it's also one of the most up-to-date and well-supported football titles around today. How can this be? And why would anyone want to play a 12-year-old interactive spreadsheet? The story starts in 2003, when a contingent of forum regulars on leading fansite gave up on Championship Manager 4 and its new 2D match engine. It was too complicated, they felt, and it was slow and buggy and not at all like the game they loved. So they went back to the previous season's edition.

This is how we watched matches in the olden times. 'After a while, I realised that the game was so popular that it needed a bigger place than a sub-forum on The Dugout,' Mark Henderson recalls. He created a free phpBB forum on the 6th of October, 2005, which grew progressively larger as more Champ Man fans stumbled upon it or migrated from other communities. Forum-goers like Canadian Craig Forrest, who discovered the game through a Colombian friend in college then went online in search for help with tactics and transfers. He started at a site called Project Championship Manager, delighting in the banter and discoveries that people shared, then found Henderson and co's Champ Man community via Google. Many regulars share similar stories, with a few around from the very beginning. Scooterfan remembers the early days on The Dugout when one guy, Alex Sawczuk, produced twice yearly data updates, allowing players to keep up with the latest transfers.

'It got to a point where he didn't have the time to produce them anymore,' he says, 'and different people took up the mantle without much success.' From this spawned the idea of a separate forum with a group of people working together to continue the data updates, only more comprehensively - they wanted to cover each continent, every league, so as to 'keep everyone happy.' Not everyone ended up being happy.

After more than four years of ever-increasing size and popularity, a schism formed in the Update Team. 'Some of the members began to have differences in terms of assigning attributes and values to the players in the database,' Henderson says. 'Some agreed, some didn't.' So they split in two, with the disruptors known as the SIM team - on account of their focus on stringent accuracy - and the other team called ODB - representing the 'original database' style used by developers Sports Interactive. Henderson's relationship with the forum he created strained.

He saw division and bickering in the community, and grew frustrated with some of the behaviours and attitudes floating around. A year after the split, and around five years after starting the site, he decided to take a break. 'I actually sold the website to a chap called WelshRed and have only recently (in April) regained control,' he says. As is the way with hobby projects, WelshRed no longer has time to manage the community while Henderson now does (again). The community he returned to managing had shed its division - the SIM team folded into the ODB team in early 2012 due to personal commitments among its core members - and it was thriving. An alternate reality where Messi was born in 1976 and is equally phenomenal.

The now stands at a healthy 22 members, divided into five Board members (they're in charge), nine Coaches (they update the database), and eight Scouts (they suggest attribute values and other changes). Official Update Team releases routinely receive more than 30,000 downloads - the precise numbers and trends are hard to gauge because the statistics were reset during a server change last year - while the more experimental unofficial back-dated historical databases of 80s and 90s leagues draw significant love and attention from the regulars. There are of incredible careers told with wonderful panache and creativity, and, too, such as with only players in the English First Division or lower or within five seasons as Viking FK (while keeping four up front and only selecting Scandinavian players). I had to see for myself what all the fuss was about, so I downloaded a copy of the game (Eidos released it as freeware in 2008), installed the last official patch, grabbed the, which gives you last season's players and teams, and took up the mantle at an ailing Portsmouth, curious to see whether I could reverse their fortunes. To a player of the latest Football Manager titles, Championship Manager 01/02 seems alien, almost otherworldly. There are signs in there, of course, that it came from the same developer. The text commentary, for instance, which remains today as one part throwback and one part augmentation to the 3D match engine. Testi po uzi diagnostike lyrics.