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Okay, so I admit that the title is maybe a little dramatic but the more I thought about it I began to realise that while it may not have ruined my life, Championship Manager has definitely had a negative effect and has probably slowed it down a bit.

Some people will look at the title and fully understand this statement. Others will be completely in the dark. Well for the latter, here goes.

Championship Manager , which is now known as Football Manager , is a football management simulation that allows the user to pick any team from any league in 51 countries and has an adjustable database of over 350,000 players.

To the untrained eye it may look like words and numbers on a screen, but for years it’s had a loyal international following that can’t wait to pick up a team and manage in the obvious places, England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France as well as in the likes of Belarus, Singapore, Hungary, Chile, and even the Icelandic third tier if they really wanted to.

Player profiles are put together using a network of professional scouts all over the world and even Everton manager David Moyes uses it to look at players after his club signed a deal with the makers SI Games.

It’s this attention to detail that gives this game authenticity and is one of the main reasons that the game is the leader in its category.

The game’s realism is also the driving force behind the addiction of playing this game. It’s claimed so many days from so many lives and it will continue to do so.

I’ve been hooked since the age of 12 and it’s frightening but somewhat comforting to say that I am now aged 24, and Championship Manager has been with me for half of my life. The truth is I don’t know whether this is a good or bad thing.

On the one hand Championship Manager or Football Manager, FM, CM, Champ, Champ Man, Champo or whatever you want to call it has given me a lot of joy. Growing up in a small town and enduring my fair share of boring days and nights I have always had something to turn to. On the other hand, I wonder what I could have achieved with all of the hours that I have thrown away on this game.

It’s probably fair to say that this game has had an effect on my life. I honestly think that time spent on the game throughout my education at school, college and then University may have affected my grades, especially when many a teacher or lecturer has said that I’ve underachieved.

Post education, the game has further delayed my progression. As an aspiring scriptwriter I spend a lot of time working on various projects trying to get my break in the industry and I do feel I work hard, but sometimes not hard enough.

While I’ve sat at my computer struggling to find the inspiration to write something noteworthy I often click on the logo for the latest version of Football Manager and waste a few days with a casual bit of escapism. It's not the greatest cure for writer's block.

So while I can’t adjust my grades, which may have sent me down a different path than I would’ve without the game, I suddenly realised that I might be able to get something back from this game. I feel like I deserve it.

My first Championship Manager was the '93/'94 edition and it came in a package with the first PC that my parents bought.

Along with Sensible Soccer, it would open up a whole new world to a fresh-faced, tubby football enthusiast who was just starting secondary school.

Early on in the game’s history you didn’t have the luxury of managing in Peru or Hong Kong, you had to make do with little old England. The database was also limited with only a handful of overseas players being available to buy on the game - the standout was Lars Bohinen who went on to play for Blackburn.

The game was fairly simple but I still got a lot of enjoyment out of it. I could never have guessed that it would go on to become the monster that it is today.

I soon realised I was a few editions behind my school friends who also played the game. I saved about eight week’s worth of pocket money and eventually bought the '96/'97 edition. The difference was amazing.

You could now manage in Italy and Scotland while a larger database of European clubs and players made the game a lot more interesting and sadly a lot more addictive. It was in this edition that I found my first Champ Man legend, Fredi Bobic, who, like many to follow, never became the world-beater that the game had predicted.

I couldn’t wait to finish school and get home to the computer and resume whichever career I had going at the time. Unfortunately, I had to share my computer with my brother and sister, meaning that every evening my time on the game felt short-lived.

As a youngster, football always occupied me, and Championship Manager was of course part of this. I often got told off for day dreaming at school and in amongst the clichéd naïve dreams of scoring the winner in a World Cup final, thoughts like “I wish my brother and sister went to boarding school” and “I reckon I can win the Champions League with my Luton Town team” often went through my head. It didn’t go unnoticed.

One dreadful night in October '97, my mother and father returned from a parent’s evening at my school. They told me that a number of my teachers spoke of how I seemed distant, mentioned my short attention span and how I regularly neglected homework. Championship Manager got the blame. It was banned in my household.

In the absence of this game there were signs of improvement, and by the time the ban was lifted, my CM '96/'97 became outdated. It had always run slowly on my computer due to it only just meeting the game specifications and when a friend lent me CM3 , I soon realised that my computer couldn’t handle it. I was gutted.

I would continue to play CM '96/'97 until the internet really kicked off. Our old computer couldn’t handle it so a brand-new PC came along and CM '00/'01 came into my life. I started to slip again.

By now my brother was in college, my sister was also in secondary school and it was clear that one computer wasn’t enough for me with my CM addiction.

Somehow I negotiated a deal to have my birthday and Christmas presents for a few years all in one go and along with some money that I had saved I managed to get my own computer.

Not only did I discover porn, I also discovered that monumental nine-hour stints on Championship Manager could easily happen.

Maybe you could blame lack of sleep from playing the game, maybe just the hours playing on my solo game and my network game, perhaps it was spending classes passing notes between other victims about our current Champ teams or maybe I just wasn’t bright enough, but revision for my GCSE’s went out of the window. I barely passed getting the borderline results that I needed to get onto my college course.

It may not surprise you to hear that I royally screwed up my first year in college but thankfully some maturity hit me and I managed to salvage this and eventually get into University. I knew that this game had to be a thing of the past.

Many legendary Champ careers had passed, getting Cheltenham Town into the Champions League was my finest achievement and converting little known Icelandic striker Orri Freyr Oskarsson into English Footballer of the year came a close second - In his career, he scored over a goal a game for 200 games for the Robins. But that was it. I decided Champ was out of my life.

Unfortunately, house sharing and the network game was a match made in heaven. Champ stayed.

This is where I'll fast forward a few years to the week running up to my dissertation deadline. Worryingly both my housemate and I were addicted to our game and despite the most important deadline of our lives fast approaching, we couldn't stop playing the game. 

One morning in particular comes to mind when we were eating our cereal ahead of a penned in “day in the library” that then turned into a 17-hour Championship Manager session that ended in the early hours of the next morning. This ruined the next day as we both had to sleep it off. That was three days before the hand in.

Somehow we met our deadlines but neither of us did as well as we could’ve and we didn’t in our degrees either. Both ending up with a 2:2 it was kind of disappointing as neither of us were far off of a highly respectable 2:1.

The knock on effect hasn’t been so bad for him and due to my writing ambitions I haven’t been applying for many jobs. However, there was one occasion where an appealing job went out the window because I didn’t have the minimum requirement of a 2:1. I blame Champ .

As I said, this can’t be changed but I can get something back. Then it hit me. Why not make a documentary film about the game? So I am.

I’ve got an award-winning director involved, (nothing like the Oscars, but he’s very good) Ashley Parker (www.handisland.com ) and I’ve started to pull some people together to take part so it’s going well.

There are a few attempts on YouTube of the same name but I knew I could make this special. I want to talk to Championship Manager legends that failed to live up to the hype, like my friend Orri Freyr Oskarsson amongst others including Tonton Zola Moukoko, Maxim Tsigalko and Ibrahima Bakayoko and I'm intrigued to find out if their reputations on the game held them back at all. I also have so many other ideas to make this project work.

The game has been cited in 35 divorces in the last few years so maybe I can speak to the addicts and their former partners, and in the meantime, I’m going to try and find the person whose life has been affected the worst by the game.

I want to get to the bottom of urban myths such as Demetrio Albertini showing Italian national coach Giovanni Trapattoni players on Champ Man before a match against an unknown England XI as well as speaking to celebrities who are hooked, go behind the scenes at SI Games and look at gaming addiction and sport as an escape as well.

So there you have it. Hopefully Championship Manager, or Football Manager as I should really call it, will give something back to me. If you want to support the documentary then there’s a Facebook group so come and join my revolution: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=182782286950&ref=ts

Of course I could easily slip back into a career on the game and this project may subsequently be delayed. I’ll keep you posted.

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