While I’ll readily admit that I’ve never been too convinced of the benefits of having football management games on consoles, it seems these days that they are very much a recurrent fixture, which you’d have to presume testifies to their success. With Sports Interactive’s Football Manager series leading the table in every sense, Gusto Games have been working away year by year to try and chip away what seems to some like an impossibly large gap in quality and general management experience. This year’s edition of the once-great Championship Manager series sees them certainly making some advances in the right direction, but still lagging behind.

You see, the main problem I’ve had with the Championship Manager series since it changed developers a few years back is that you’re always pretty much aware that you’re sat in front of your PC (or I suppose your Mac if you’re just plain wrong about these kinds of things) making disconnected decisions scattered across a number of spreadsheets. For various reasons the series has never drawn my attention into the ongoing season in the way that Football Manager has, and that trend continues with Championship Manager 2007.

Peeling off the levels of detail in the game – and there are many, admittedly – reveals a game mechanic at the heart of things that doesn’t beat with the same unpredictability. Part of the fun of being a manager is scouting out unknown bargains, or using real life knowledge to locate a talented lower-league player to bolster your ranks. Championship Manager 2007 almost completely wipes this away by having a rigid scale of player value that sees anyone remotely talented at lower levels being valued to suit.

On the other side of the coin, negotiating with top players is arguably far too easy, leaving you with little challenge if you want to score a top talent with your vast transfer funds. Having decided to play the game as Liverpool I decided within one day of taking over at the club that I fancied having a pop at buying Dani Alaves and Fernando Torres to give my team some added depth. Having slapped in two transfers offers right on the asking price my enquiries were accepted, contracts were offered and the players signed up and sealed within a week. Neither club seemed in any way concerned with selling their top assets, and neither player seemed worried about jumping out of comfortable surroundings and moving country. The fact that both players – worth a total of about £40 million in real terms – were easily picked up for a combined £20 million also points to teams only accepting face value for their players, even when they are stars of the team. Signing them just didn’t feel like the achievement it should have done.

With my new players nestled snugly into my starting eleven it was then time to take to the pitch. The game offers you the opportunity of watching proceedings at various speeds or watching the action unfold from a number of camera positions as strange Subbuteo-like figures make their way around a pitch. In reality it is likely that most people will select the quickest progression and opt to check out small highlights snippets as and when incidents occur, although this brings up a situation where curious non-events are selected for highlight material, such as ball floating miles wide and being placed on the spot by the ‘keeper. Initially such things are reasonably amusing, but after the fifth or sixth time you are left to wrestle with the temptation to turn the highlights off full stop, which obviously won’t help you analyse your performance to a decent degree.

Other issues include the game commentary often making little sense. The game felt it necessary to inform me that Robbie Fowler had just scored ‘his first goal for Liverpool’, whilst also telling me that my seventh goal in the 90th minute of a complete thrashing of Oxford had ‘surely sealed it’. The action occasionally feels completely separate from the text popping up on screen, with the commentary suggesting that one team is building a dangerous attack only for a highlight video to pop up showing the other team taking a shot. The resulting lack of feel for how the match is actually going makes it rather more difficult to understand where your team is performing or not, which is something that obviously hinders management to a degree.

It’s all the little errors and inconsistencies that prove to be Championship Manager 2007’s biggest problems; the way that a team will consistently attempt to buy players even if they don’t have the cash, leading to a catalogue of deals falling through at the last minute, or how a certain team won’t sell a player to one club because they are rivals, only to then go on to sell him to another team in the same division who are about a ten minute stroll down the road. It all works against the game and keeps you from ever properly absorbing yourself.

That’s not to say that the game doesn’t have positives. The media interaction and the way in which you converse with your chairman and board are pleasing, offering a heck of a lot more option than the Football Manager series. A great example of this is at the start of each campaign when a local journalist quizzes you about your hopes for each of the competitions you are entered in that season. Your answers not only form the basis of a news report detailing your expectations, but also elicit some comments from the backroom boys and supporters.

This would shine through more if it were not for the obvious problem screaming out at any Football Manager game on a console: the menu and control system. As with anything offering you multiple choices and threads from any one location, the game quickly becomes rather frustrating to navigate without the use of a trusty mouse and keyboard. Gusto have tried to implement some sort of intuitivism into proceedings by allowing the player to flick through associated screens to the one he is on with the shoulder buttons, but more often than not you either completely go past the page you need in error or spend so much time searching around for the correct button to open a menu or textbox that you get frustrated.

Therein lies the rub, really. Unless you have a knackered old computer that collapses and dies trying to run two explorer windows at once it’s always, always going to be worth your while getting the PC version of these games in comparison. On top of this, if you are into football management and need such a game on your 360, it’s really hard to recommend Championship Manager 2007 over Football Manager 2007. Whilst the series is certainly making moves in the right direction, it still lacks the addictive, believable edge that Sports Interactive have had years to sharpen. Perhaps in years to come the gap will eventually begin to narrow, but for now the difference is class is as big as ever.