After the success of Championship Manager 4 the next version, CM5, had to compete with Football Manager new release that proved to be superior. Championship Manager 2006 aimed to restore the position of the series as the best game of genre available, but failed miserably.
Comparing to older versions Championship Manager had modified match presentation engine that introduced 3D-like views from different cameras, which was technical improvement, but even comparing with the CM4 it was in a fact step back. First of all all the points of view (except for top-down) were hardly worth to use since it was almost impossible to notice the performance of the players. Additional statistics were displayed above the view, but instead of giving us more information they were just a white noise that was hard to follow or analyse while the data was changing in real time.
While it can be said that the match presentation was improved rest of the game seemed to be rushed and under-developed: available views on the players lists were disappointing and the main elements of menu were split into 3 or 4 narrow stripes within the screen, which made them hard to follow since they were changing locations between f.e. players list and the player details.
Overall a poorly made game that had only the title in-common with its predecessors - while Football Manager was introducing new elements, like running the national team, Championship Manager 2006 was still looking for the right formula to deal with the game data.
