Published in 1982 on Spectrum original Football Manager, although shares name with modern games, had nothing to do with them. Except for inspiring every single one of them. Creators of Championship Manager and Football Manager grew up playing this game that does not look impressive in today standards, but back then it was a big deal.
At that point I should say that Football Manager used the typical scenario - select Division 4 team and fight for the promotion to top level and later for championship, but back then it wasn’t typical scenario, because there were no such games on personal computers. Of course Football Manager took inspiration from PBM games of the era (Play-By-Mail) that were popular in United Kingdom, but adding simple animations as match highlights was something spectacular when you realize what were the hardware limitations in 1982.
Game itself is simple - select team, view match highlights, respond to transfer market offers, get economy report and repeat, but at the same time you have options that were not always available in later titles, like loans and editor that allowed you to change the team names and player names. Again - today is not such a big deal, but when you browse through some of the 1990s games they not always had such features.
Original Football Manager was a very well devised game that gave the inspiration to modern football manager games (FM series took the name from this 1982 title), set standards that could be seen in next 20-30 years of the genre. Just see if you can spot the similarity of match highlights in The Manager / Bundesliga Manager, transfer offers in Championship Manager, formation points calculations in many titles. This 1982 game is the prototype that created the football management genre in today form.
