Give me some EPL info!

[Imran Siddiqui]

Well of course English players will be overrated in CM. Where do you think Marc Vaughn is from?

[FrustratedPoet]

At least the Belgian players were realistically terrible in the CM series, eh alva.

[Sir Og]

As people already suggested play Championship Manager or Football Managers as it is going to be called from now on.

Then watch some games. It is a lot more interesting

[Imran Siddiqui]

Well the thing is with CM/FM, as people have pointed out, biases sometimes come through, as they do with any rating of players. A discussion among fans, however, may give you more than one point of view, after which you can decide.

[C0ckney]

i'm an arsenal fan but i can't believe anyone (least of all a yid) is saying spurs will go down. spurs will never, ever, ever in your life go down. they are one of a number of teams, like villa, saints and everton (well maybe not this season ) who are never in any danger of winning anything but will not go down either. no ambition, no world class players, but they have a lot of support and a bit too much quality not to surivive. as one spurs director was quoted as saying after they lost 4-3 to man city in the cup last year 'it's ok, we'll get a full house in here again next week'

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

If you want to get into footy Imran, find a local pub where expats congregate to watch games.

Well that may have to wait a year. Drinking and law school shouldn't mix that much .

Especially since they haven't done anything since the year he was born (1925).

Actually in 1927, they became the first (and only) Welsh team to win the FA Cup .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_City

Oh, that's an old man's memory for you. I didn't look it up, you see, and he remembers that it was 1925, not 1927. Either way, it's a bloody long time. Basically, he's never seen them do well. They've sucked for pretty much his entire life. He's really psyched they seem to have improved enough to hang around in their current division, instead of being relegation material.

When I first got into the PL, I was fairly young and chose the teams I liked based on name. This, unfortunately, led me to cheer for Crystal Palace and Aston Villa. Doh. Then, having not paid attention for years, I spent a semester at St. Andrews and all the freshmen I lived with (the Americans got to live in the freshman dorms, yay) seemed to support ManU. So I watched a fair amount of ManU... and they were awfully good that year (1997), so they were fun to watch. Didn't like NewCastle (LOVE the beer, though )... didn't like Shearer for some reason.

I used to root for Coventry City too, when Gordon Strachan was the manager, just because I loved that guy. What an accent! The team was mediocre, but kept managing to stave off relegation at the last moment.

-Arrian

[Imran Siddiqui]

This, unfortunately, led me to cheer for Crystal Palace and Aston Villa. Doh.

Ah yes, Aston Villa... From how people react to them I guess their nickname is apt .

[duke o' york]

The main appeal of Gordon Strachan is the philosophical diatribes discourses he delivers at post-match press conferences.

[alva]

Well of course English players will be overrated in CM. Where do you think Marc Vaughn is from?

It used to be worse, until cm3, Everton would be vastly overrated because of the Collyer(sp?) brothers. That's the guys who started the game and are huge Everton supporters.

At least the Belgian players were realistically terrible in the CM series, eh alva.

Yup, great job, quite easy job it is though.
-

BTW: the FM BETA demo is coming out next month already
It should go gold Q4 !!!!

[FrustratedPoet]

[duke o' york]

I remember the Collyer brothers supporting Cambridge Utd. Or did they change allegiance since 1996 or so? In the early Championship Manager games Cambridge always had a star striker and a star defender, and if you didn't want to play at too realistic a level, then you could snap them up at nothing at the start of the season, before they went from £50k to £20m in a single season and Juventus and Barcelona ended up fighting over them at the end of that season.

[alva]

Neil Dejyothin
Sports Interactive :

We haven't set a specific release date at this time, but we are expecting the game to be out in the shops at some point during Q4 2004.

A gold demo will be available around one-month before the game is released but we will also be making available a beto demo with the Official Football Manager magazine.

The magazine should be available in September.

[alva]

Miles Jacobson
Sports Interactive MD

Well, I had said that we weren't going to make any announcements about leagues until much further down the line, and this announcement is even going to suprise most of the guys at SI, but 5 minutes ago, Sega and ourselves signed an agreement with the MLS which will not only see MLS in Football Manager 2005 (and sequals) but will also see the game released in North America through Sega, and called "MLS Manager 2005" in the US.

To say I'm excited would be an understatement

http://community.sigames.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=21019056&f=521102691&m=783202282

[Cruddy]

First, the English Premier league hasn't been going for that long. Compared to how old the Football Association is, anyway. So saying "this team was great in the 30s" is deceitful.

Second, don't expect to see all the football on Saturdays. A helluva lot of games get played on Sundays or midweek... so don't expect to get them all at one hit.

Third... English media is obsessively focussed on this issue, as it makes a convenient blind spot for hiding political and economic disasters.

Good luck with the Toon Army!

EDIT: One great place to get radio coverage is BBC 5Live and 5Live xtra. You can stream the first from the internet, not sure about the second... even if you have TV coverage, the audio those people produce is second to none, and mostly faster/better than TV commentary.

[duke o' york]

We'll need it.