Our ode to the beautiful game continues ahead of the big day on Saturday. I mean, it’s not that big, it’s just the 29th anniversary. Anyway, one of the biggest influences on my spare time over the past 10 years is here to explain his love of the game. Over to you, Ross Bell.

Championship Manager 97/98 will always be the one that started it all.

There are certain games that never really leave you. You might forget the results of countless matches or the names of half the players you signed, but one familiar screenshot can transport you straight back to a different time.

For me, that means 1998, sitting in my parents’ conservatory, glued to a computer screen and convinced I’d discovered the secrets of football management.

The game was Championship Manager 97/98, and it was never just a game.

There were players to scout, transfers to negotiate, tactics to tweak and matches to win. Every signing had the potential to transform my team, while every defeat demanded an investigation into what had gone wrong.

I wasn’t just playing a football game. I was running a football club.

The beauty of Championship Manager 97/98 was how little it needed to bring that world to life. There were no elaborate graphics or cinematic celebrations. There were text screens, numbers, fixtures and results.

The rest happened in your imagination.

It was football management stripped back to its essentials, and I absolutely loved it.

Here’s a detail that sums up my obsession better than almost anything else.

I didn’t rely on the game’s statistics to keep track of my goalscorers. I had a notepad for that.

I’d record who had scored, building my own handwritten record of the season. The game already had all this information, of course, but apparently its built-in statistics department wasn’t enough for me.

I needed my own.

Every goal mattered. Every name went down on paper. I wanted to document what was happening in my little football universe rather than simply trust the computer to do it.

Looking back, it’s wonderfully ridiculous. I was effectively running a second database alongside the actual game, complete with my own record-keeping system.

Perhaps I was destined for a career in football statistics. Perhaps I was just a teenage lad taking things far too seriously.

Either way, those records made the achievements feel tangible. They gave me something physical to associate with the countless hours spent building my team.

And I wasn’t finished there.

At the end of the season, I’d go to the squad screen and print out the team’s goals and player values.

My mates at school needed to know what I’d achieved. I wanted them to see the goalscorers, the squad values and the players who had helped me build what was, in my completely unbiased opinion, a footballing powerhouse.

I wasn’t just telling them about my Championship Manager team. I was presenting the evidence.

Today, people share screenshots of their Football Manager saves online. Back then, I was taking printouts to school.

I like to think I was an early pioneer of football gaming content creation. Others might argue I needed to find something else to talk about with my mates.

Both explanations are probably fair.

My mates were going to hear about my team whether they wanted to or not.

If 1998 was the year of obsessive record-keeping, 1999 was the year I probably should have started thinking about my future.

I was supposed to be revising for my GCSEs.

Instead, I was playing an unhealthy amount of Championship Manager.

I’m not suggesting the game was entirely responsible for my subsequent GCSE failures. That would be unfair. But I certainly wasn’t helping myself by spending hours managing a virtual football club when I should have been studying for actual examinations.

Somewhere, there was probably a textbook gathering dust while I decided whether to strengthen my midfield or invest in another striker.

Chemistry? Couldn’t tell you.

The market value of my starting eleven? Now we’re talking.

The irony is that I was perfectly capable of keeping detailed records, assessing performances and planning ahead. I was simply applying those skills to a computer game rather than my schoolwork.

If only my GCSE examiners had allowed me to answer questions about squad rotation, transfer budgets and the importance of a reliable goalscorer.

I might have achieved a completely different set of results.

Instead, I failed my GCSEs, having given Championship Manager considerably more attention than revision ever received.

It’s easy to dismiss affection for old games as nostalgia. We remember being younger, having fewer responsibilities and being able to lose ourselves in something for hours.

But Championship Manager 97/98 represents a specific period in my life.

I can picture the screen, the endless fixtures and the excitement of seeing whether a carefully planned season would come together. I can remember taking my statistics to school, eager to show my mates what I’d achieved.

And I can look back at 1999 and wonder what might have happened if I’d devoted even half as much energy to my GCSE revision as I did to managing my virtual football club.

Perhaps I’d have passed more exams.

At least my team was doing well.

I can’t remember every match I played, every signing I made or every trophy I won. But I remember the feeling of being completely absorbed in the season, then taking the evidence to school to show my mates.

I remember a time when I should have been revising for my GCSEs but was far more interested in what was happening on my computer screen.

Championship Manager 97/98 gave me countless hours of entertainment, but its real legacy is the memories attached to it.

It encouraged imagination, rewarded obsession and made a football club that existed only on a computer feel important.

I might not have passed my GCSEs, but somewhere in that computer was a football club thriving under my leadership.

And if the board had ever questioned my priorities, I could have shown them the printouts.

You can watch Ross play CM9798 on the Four Pixels Pod YouTube channel! Here’s the latest episode of Naughty Boys FC