Ahoy-hoy. I like to think I’ve seen just about everything there is to see in CM9798, but it turns out I was wrong. Friend of the blog Adam tweeted me a while ago telling me the story of his Romania side at World Cup 98. His Romania side? How could that be?

What we do know

The game as we know it allows you to control the International sides of each of the 9 playable nations plus Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland and Wales. In order to do that, you need to select the league to load that contains your nation of choice. If you want to play as France, load the French league, so on and so forth. You also have to know the name of the manager, which can easily be got from the General Information tab on each team page, or from the editor. You’ll need to enter your name as the current manager name e.g. Glenn Hoddle if you want to be England manager.

How to select the other nations

Right, this is the clever bit. You can manage any nation in the game, you just need to make a few tweaks. Here’s how:

Load up the editor (cm2ed.exe in dosbox or drag the cm2ed icon onto the Dosbox icon) and go to load database. Go to edit database and then search records. Type in the nation you want to manage.

After selecting them from the list (note: if you search Germany you’ll get all the German clubs, just find the nation in the list, they will either be at the beginning or the end of the list from experience) you’ll need to skip to the second page. In this example, I have selected Australia

You’ll see I have highlighted the Division field – you need to edit this to be one of the divisions you are planning to load. In this case, I have chosen EPR (English Premier League) but it can really be any league you want to load, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to change anything else. Of course you can mess about with the stadium name and such if you want to but that won’t effect what we are doing here.

Click done until you get back to the main editor screen and save the database. At this point, if you know the name of the manager of your national team, you are done. If not, you need to click load database and type in mgdata. This will load the manager database. Now, I know the Australia manager here is Terry Venables, but let’s say I want to be Brazil. I need to put somebody in charge of Brazil so I can type their name in. I have chosen Steve Bruce.

You’ll see on the right hand side I have entered Brazil in the National Job field. Again, that’s all you need to do. Come out of that, save the database and then quit the editor. It’s time to load the game.

Load the game up as normal, 8MB or 16MB. Remember to select the league you have plonked your Nation of choice into – don’t worry, they won’t actually be in the Premier League. Adam has done the testing and there’s no game breaking changes in there.

Once the game loads, select your team(s) to manage. I have picked Australia and Nigeria for this example

As far as I can see, the game will load all players of a nation that has been added to the playable leagues, so you should be able to pick most nations, though obviously the more nations the bigger your database so it might take a bit longer to create the game. I did try adding San Marino, you can manage them but they have no players.

You’d have to holiday in order to continue, or you could, you know, just not manage these nations.

It’s worth pointing out that you can do this trick with all nations, so for example even though you could select the German league to play as Germany, I have moved them to EPR and loaded England, Spain and Italy. Germany is available to select:

Also note that only the European Qualifiers are in the game, so if you pick Argentina you’ve got months to wait until the World Cup but you will have a load of friendlies. For the 98 World Cup, Brazil have qualified automatically but the other South American nations are included at random, the likes of Argentina will be fine but some others are not guaranteed.

What now?

In the summer, I will be running the CM9798 World Cup. Think the CM9798 Cup we ran in October but over the summer with 16 human controlled teams. Why 16? That’s the maximum number of players allowed at one time in the game. It’s ambitious but I think it has to be done. Keep your eyes peeled for more information, I’ll need 15 friends.

Get practicing with your nations of choice and of course let me know on Twitter how you’re getting on. This is the type of thing I get excited about so please do share.