The competition in the football management genre is not that huge, even though there are tons of fans out there. Basically there are only two combatants right now: Football Manager and FIFA Manager, with a very low performances shown by LMA and CM. But things are about to change since Beautiful Game Studios plans to get Championship Manager reborn next April.

According to Roy Meredith, general manager of the Championship Manager franchise, who talked with Gamespot, many changes are still needed to be made in order to get the football management game back on track, but the developers will spend 100% more time and resources than they spent on previous games to make that happen. Sounds really promising and I really look forward to the release, even though I still don’t have too high hopes for a successful game.

Just like Football Manager 2009, CM09 will bring us a full 3D match engine which the developers say has more than 500 animations per player (all of them motion captured). Lots of new features will be added, including new leagues and, hopefully, this time around the player data will be a bit more accurate and we’ll have more than 450 players to choose from. I’m exaggerating a bit but seriously, there’s a lot of work to be done with Championship Manager if it is to compete head to against its “brother”, Football Manager.