Championship Manager 2007

It's a thankless task making a mobile football management sim. On PC, the genre is all about the depth, with reams of statistics, thousands of players, and intensive number-crunching to make it all work. Mobile phones simply don't have the processing oomph to provide a comparable experience, and footy management fans are a demanding bunch.

This is doubtless one of the reasons why Sega hasn't yet turned its Football Manager franchise into a mobile game.

It hasn't stopped Eidos from bringing its rival Championship Manager series to mobile, however. Last year's Championship Manager 5 Solo was well-received, capturing the spirit of the original PC game, while working within the restrictions of mobile handsets.

It had the feeling of a toe being dipped in the water, though, to see what was possible. And the new version, Championship Manager 2007, proves that intuition was correct. The game has been beefed up with bags of new features. And guess what? It's ruddy marvellous. We speak as hard-to-please veterans with many seasons of PC-based football management behind us, remember.

So, you take charge at a Premier League club based on the 2006-07 season – which is lucky for Watford fans – and you're responsible for the three T's (no, not tantrums, tabloid roasting scandals, and trousering bungs).

Okay, it's tactics, training and transfers, although there's a side-order of media management. One of the new features is press conferences, where hacks ask you questions and your answers affect team morale and the attitude of your board and fans towards you, for instance.

What's striking is the depth of it all. Players now have eight individual skill ratings (heading, shooting, stamina, pace, tackling, penalties, passing and technique) along with an overall ability rating. They also have individual fitness levels, morale and personalities, as well as ratings showing how loved (or not) they are by the fans and the media.

You can praise or fine them, ask for a coach report, stick them on the transfer list or free transfer them. Meanwhile, when searching for players, you can narrow it down by position, age, value, ability, any of the eight individual skills, or where they're based.

Another new inclusion is more English players from the lower leagues, and more European players – if you're a wheeler-dealing 'Arry Redknapp-alike, you'll love it. We have to say, it can be a bit unrealistic though; we snapped up Robinho without a hitch for Arsenal as our first signing.

Training is pretty flexible, letting you tweak your regime for goalies, defenders, midfielders and strikers to the nth degree, turning your bunch of cloggers into exponents of sexy football at its most priapic.

Tactics are still limited though, involving you telling your team which classic side you'd like them to play the same way as (for example, Leeds' 1969 hard-men, Arsenal's 2004 unbeaten champs, Spurs' 1961 double-winners and so on). It's initially unsatisfying, until you realise how much of a faff it'd be to try and recreate PC-style tactical tinkering with a mobile phone screen and keypad.

Actual matches are text-only, with the new Match Fitness stat having a big impact on your subsitutions, compared to the previous Champ Man mobile game. It lacks the graphical highlights of rival LMA Manager 2007, but we'll take the increased depth of Championship Manager 2007 and settle for text, any day.

We could bang on for hours about what else is in this game, from the various competitions through to international call-ups and the regular questions that pop up to demand your managerial decisions. There's loads to it, yet wrapped around it is an intuitive interface making it easy to get to grips with the complexity.

Finally, an intriguing addition is the Updates feature, which says it'll enable you to connect to the Champ Man WAP site to download new leagues and data updates. It sounds fab, although whether it works will depend on your operator – on our N73 on 3 UK, it just took us back to 3's games portal, rather than to the WAP site.

That might be an ambition too far, then – time will tell. But in all other respects, Championship Manager 2007 is the real deal. It's the best footy management sim on mobile by a distance, and will keep you playing for months.

Championship Manager 2007

A champion in every sense, this football management sim is on trophy-winning form
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Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)