Hello to you! As I may have mentioned, January 2025 signals the 10 year anniversary of this very blog. We love a milestone on here, and why the heck not. Back in 2015 I thought it might be a laugh to play and blog this wonderful game from start to finish, which is the end of the 29th season. I didn’t really expect it to get the traction it did and I’ll always be grateful for the doors this whole experience has opened for me, and of course to you for engaging with this tomfoolery.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to produce some top 10 lists of things about the game, such as bargain signings, cult heroes, fraud players and this week – blog saves!

I’m only going to consider my own blogs for this segment, not because it’s all me me me but I’d find it very difficult and a little bit unfair to pick between the many guest blogs we’ve had over the years. I’m appreciative of your work and dedication guys and I’m happy to say we have Deano, Matt, Nick, Nathan and Ross all in action throughout the week at the moment, so make sure you’re checking their wonderful writing out.

Right, let’s go. Starting with number 10…

10. Cowdenbeath (September 2022)

Episode 1 is available here

We start our countdown with a classic of the genre. The type of save you always say you’ll do but lose interest when you can’t get out of Scottish Division 2. Cowdenbeath were statistically the worst team to be in Scotland heading into 1997/98 so starting a save as them made perfect sense. The Micker, who features a lot in this countdown, played a big part in the early days paired with Tomlinson and friends and progress through the leagues was quite serene. Obviously getting all the way to the top and winning the Champions League was the aim and so being able to do that meant I could tick this particular type of save off my bucket list.

9. Blackburn Rovers (Short Story – October 2024)

Episode 1 is available here

The short story concept was something I decided to start in 2018 alongside a longer term save. Blackburn is one of the latest attempts and despite giving myself a two season safety net, I only needed three episodes.

One of the accepted facts of CM9798 is that Man Utd will win the Premier League in season 1. Not always, but I think if you did 100 sims they would win 90 or more. Therefore the challenge to knock them over with a relatively unfancied side like Blackburn was immensely satisfying.

8. Out of the box Barnsley (November 2021)

Episode 1 is available here

Another bucket list attempt here. Again it is widely accepted that keeping Barnsley in the Premier League is a top level challenge and one I attempted many times in the 90s to no avail. However, to paraphrase David Baddiel, I am strong and I have grown and took on the challenge just over 3 years ago. As a side note, Jesus H that was 3 years ago.

For extra authenticity, I used the original version of the game. Most of the blogs on the site are from the patched version of CM9798, which irons out a few bugs and it made more sense to use that when I set about completing 29 seasons and I’ve stuck with it since. I wanted Barnsley in their raw form though. Spoiler: They stayed up and went onto bigger and better things

7. Everything’s Coming up Mulhouse (August 2019)

Episode 1 is available here

I loved this save and it broke my heart a little bit that it didn’t really do that well for a long time. For me as a writer, this had everything you’d want. A good pun title, cult players like Glenn Pennyfather, some villains and a pretty good underdog story to go with it. At times it was a struggle with the results but I was writing this in the lead up to my first child being born and I had some good times playing this over the summer. Mulhouse are a small French Team in Ligue 2. They have Bobo Balde.

6. Newcastle Short Story (July 2018)

Episode 1 is available here

The original short story! This was a challenge to see if I could make a success of Newcastle without Shearer and without buying anybody else. It was meant to be a one season thing but such was my enjoyment of it went on a bit longer. I didn’t buy a single player except two regens of my players who retired. I blooded youngsters I have never played on previous saves and they were good. It obviously helps that Newcastle are my team but using players like Bjarni Gudjonsson and Chris Woodcock and seeing them develop as players was refreshing compared to my usual trait of releasing them on frees so I could buy Shearer replacements.

There’s probably some mileage in doing this with other teams.

5. Aberdeen/Waregem (November 2017)

Episode 1 is available here

Another of those “bucket list” saves is to break the Old Firm dominance up in Scotland. I had my attempt with Aberdeen and it went ridiculously well.

So much so that I packed in being Aberdeen manager and went to Belgium, taking over at Waregem. It was here that MENDOZAAAAA was found and a great Simpsons reference was upcycled. I could revisit it at some point as they never did win the Champions League…

4. The Brits Abroad (Originally 2016, brought back 2023)

Episode 1 is available here.

I loved this concept, which was to make a team of British players at Benfica and basically continue what Souness had started, only to do it better. I actually wrote this save for another website back in 2016 but wanted all of my work under one roof, so I did it all again in July 2023, initially reposting the original blogs and then adding to them as we progressed the save. I ended up also managing England and only picking the players from my Benfica side, it was great.

Kevin Gallen is a top lad and it featured the one and only time I can ever recall playing a competitive club game in July before the end of season update runs.

3. The CM9798 Academy

Episode 1 is available here.

Taking the bronze medal is the CM9798 Academy. This was a concept save where all I could buy were free transfers under the age of 23 and we started with no players. To take it from that to the very top would be and might be one of my greatest achievements on this game (or in life?) but I suppose it actually gets easier as you can start to get the decent regens and not have big club release clauses to tackle. It was a journey though and a huge challenge.

2. The original blog save! (January 2015, then May 2015)

Episode 1 is available here (or here if you want to start from the aborted version.)

Where it all began! You may have forgotten but my first attempt at completing the game collapsed on about season 13 I think it was. Saving the game to try and beat my laptop running out of charge was stupid, it ran out of charge mid save and corrupted forever. I was distraught but as much fun as I’d had with Wimbledon, Auxerre, Deportivo and others, I decided to start again.

I started at Darlington in Division 3 and after taking them as far as I could, off I went around the world to various different clubs from Norwich to Real Madrid. The big story though was Peter Beardsley’s refusal to retire, my first realisation that shortlisted players can go on forever. Obviously, I took the England job on and got the old boy a few more caps…

I did actually summarise every season here if you feel the need.

1. CM9798 Retirement Home (September 2019)

Episode 1 is available here.

Sometimes an idea is just a winner from the offset. If memory serves me right, Andrew (KOTR) actually pitched this idea to me and he couldn’t have been more right.

The concept was fairly simple – sign over 35s only and try and climb the leagues. It was easy to begin with, Division 3 and even Division 2 were not too difficult to escape but then it was hard. I mean, really hard. The Micker became a bit of a legend for me and I think it all started here, I seem to remember him scoring the winner at Stockport to keep us in Division 1 on his 43rd birthday or something. I said earlier the Academy was one of my greatest achievements but I really think this is, because eventually we managed to win the lot and to this day I’m not sure how. We got relegated numerous times and bounced back, something I’ve never done on any Champ Manager before. I spent hours scouring the transfer market for available 33+ year olds (I think I amended the rules slightly as we went through, even allowing for some “Carers” to help the old lads through as having an old goalkeeper was nothing short of stupid sometimes).

It probably helped that although this started pre-Covid, this became my lockdown save and there was a lot of interaction from people bored out of their minds who got a kick out of this save progressing. I’ve often thought about making the save into a book and dramatising it a little bit, such was it’s lunacy. Would anybody read that? Probably not. But it’s still my favourite save ever and a worthy winner.

Spare a thought for those poor saves that missed out, such as Bologna, The Retirement Academy and Kaiserslautern.

Thanks for reading! Next time I’ll be counting down my top 10 cult heroes from the various saves. Bye for now.