It remains an unfashionable genre, despite its huge commercial success. Premier Manager topped the PlayStation charts. Championship Manager 1 and 2, along with their respective data disks, were ever-present in the PC game charts for six or seven years. CM3, the current iteration, became the fastest-selling PC game ever in the UK earlier this year. Even EA are getting in on the act. Read a games mag, though, and you'll see little indication of that. CM3 reviews, often farmed out to external writers, were mostly complimentary, but were they lead articles? Nope. And while less popular firstperson shoot 'em ups and adventure games are forever name-checked, the management sim warrants only the occasional mention. Ironically, this is usually on the Charts page, accompanied by a "Still there!"-type comment.

As the story goes, Championship Manager was created by Oliver and Paul Collyer in an exasperated moment of extreme genius. By their own admission, they were no programmers - written in BASIC, the first CM was sloooow - but they felt frustrated that no-one had created the management game that they wanted to play, so they made their own. It was snapped up by Domark, later acquired by Eidos, and a highly-lucrative franchise was born.

Ask any knowledgeable fan of the genre and they'll tell you implicitly: the Championship Manager games are by far the best the genre has to offer. And it's true - the world has voted with its collective wallet. For players of the series, the current success of PlayStation and even N64-based titles is almost amusing. Lacking a hard drive to save to, console management games must compress and fit game data onto a tiny memory card. This means that complex features and player evolution aren't options. In many ways, console management titles have less depth and dynamics than the original Championship Manager on the Amiga; a game supplied on two floppy disks than ran on 1Mb RAM.

It's a fact: console management games are crap, while the PC-based behemoths of today are anally comprehensive and far too time consuming. Both demand a number of play hours that even the average strategy game could only dream of. In tens of thousands of living rooms and bedrooms across the country, people are scrolling through lists of statistics, searching for a star striker or promising youngsters. Thousands are dancing around the room after a play-off victory, or hurling their mouse/pad across the room after an ignoble League Cup exit.

My name is James, and I play football management games. I'm a sad bastard, and I'll gladly admit that. But I'm not the only one...