IndianFootball.Com Interview: CM4 - MARK WOODGER (Research Co-ordinator at Sports Interactive)

The game Championship Manager needs no introduction to football fans across the world. The latest version of the game, CM4, has broken all records. (For further details please refer to our 'GAME ZONE' section).
We have done an interview with Mark Woodger, Research Co-ordinator at Sports Interactive, regarding his plans for India...

When and how did the idea of including the Indian league in CM4 first strike you?

India is primarily seen as a cricket loving nation, but over the last few years football has become more popular in India and that has been seen across the world by those football fans (like myself) who take an interest in the goings-on in football in different countries.
There was a lot of publicity when Baichung Bhutia came to play for Bury and we started to get emails from both the Indian community in the UK and worldwide about the addition of the Indian leagues in CM.
So with the fact that the interest football is a growing in India, Indian fans emailing us and the fact that India is a huge country with a huge population (there are certain economic factors that we must consider too), we thought the Indian Leagues would be a good and interesting addition.

What were the factors that you led you to eventually include this league over several others, more high profile ones?

Quite literally, we had a list of 52 leagues which we had got all the information needed to get their leagues into CM4. Our priority was to get the 26 existing leagues in and then 8 others that we had hoped to include in CM 01.02 but did not have the time to implement. After all those were implemented, we quite simply left it up to the coders to put in the next 16-18 leagues in the order they wanted to put them in the game in the time that we had.
I think due to the stress they were under they tended to pick the leagues that were the easiest to implement and as the Indian league was one of the simpler ones it got the go ahead.
So this is a good reason to start petitioning your Football Associations to simplify and standardise league rules if you want your leagues to appear in Championship Manager !!

We believe that the Indian football coach, Stephen Constantine had an important role to play with regards to the Indian league. Can you please tell us what was the level of his involvement, and whether he is likely to be involved in the future?

We have been in contact on and off with Stephen for several years now. He is a huge fan of the game and has always been interested in being involved in Championship Manager somehow.
We had already decided to add the Indian leagues before Stephen became the manager of the Indian national team and he contacted us and we had a meeting to see if we could work together in some way and hope to get something concrete in place in the future.
I think that Stephen has now become a national hero in India (well in the those interested in football) after guiding the Indian national team to their first trophy in many years which was a fantastic achievement. I hope this will lead to even more interest in football in India (and, of course, more interest in Championship Manager).

At the moment, only the Indian premier league is a part of CM4. Are we likely to see lower divisions and/or some of the local leagues in the game at some stage in the future?

For our next release we are not planning to expand any of the leagues to include new divisions as we feel it is important to get all the leagues implemented that we had planned for CM4 and make sure that each existing league is reflected correctly.
However, we are always looking to improve and expand our game so I would not be surprised to see the addition of the regional leagues at some point in a future release.

How important do you feel a platform like IndianFootball.Com can be in popularizing the game in India?

IndianFootball.Com is a very good website and is very informative about the Indian football scene and is of interest to Indians which live both inside and outside of India and of course to anyone who is interested in world football.
So I am sure that it could help in a big way to get Championship Manager well known to Indian football fans.

Finally, can you tell us what are your future plans regarding India?
Are we likely to see a release here at some stage in the future?

As developers and not publishers it is not in our control to decide on where to release the game, although we try to influence our publishers on all aspects of marketing from advertising through to distribution. We try to make the first move by implementing leagues and hope to achieve a pull effect whereby the game becomes popular in certain countries, our publishers will notice this popularity and won't be able to actually not release the game in those countries due to the demand.
So hopefully with the addition of the Indian Leagues, the involvement of people like Stephen Constantine and IndianFootball.Com it may quickly become a reality.

the interview was done by Abhishek Gujral per eMail (June 2003)

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