Championship Manager had its MCCM (Mind Compression: Championship Manager) program and that same program has also been adapted to Football Manager 2005. Mind Compression: Football Manager 2005 (MCFM) is a program designed to aid you in your quest for glory. Not, however, in any way that is considered decent, as it enables the user to cheat in quite a few different ways! But it’s not all bad news…

Unlike FM Scout, where you can only observe, MCFM allows you to edit a lot of data. Its most used feature is undoubtedly that of editing a club’s finances. From being £8,000,000 down in debts you can give your club vast amounts of little green pieces of paper, to attract big names and transform your club over night from Conference Peanut to Premiership Melon, money-wise. Miss the old Leeds United? This is your way to help them back on their feet!

            A club’s wage structure can also be changed, because what use is billions of pounds in transfers when all you have to offer in wages is £300 a week? This means that regardless of whether a player is actually interested, you will sign him because of the incredible wages you can offer. David Beckham to Port Vale? For £1,000,000 a week he’s yours!

The power to change how money flows in your team is one that attracts many gamers. I freely admit that I was once one of these. But what you gradually learn by overusing this feature is that the game becomes fantastically dull. You can sign the best players in the world, thus winning every trophy every season. The challenge is gone, the game is ruined, and you find that watching paint dry or grass grow suddenly becomes much more exiting. You promise yourself that never again will you indulge in unscrupulous save-game editor activities. But money isn’t everything. This program offers more than just the odd cash swindle…

When building a team, you should always build for the future. Finding the players that will secure your top rankings in leagues and cups for years to come is very important. The best managers would use their scouts to find these players, the average managers, one such as myself, would partly do this and partly use FM Scout, or in some cases just stick to FM Scout alone. The impatient ones that have no time for such petty nonsense will in fact use MCFM and simply change the values of their own players. By changing the players’ potential ability’ they will eventually become Pelés and Cantonas and you will be the God of football forever. If you are even more cynical you will not only alter those particular values amongst your youngsters but also alter the player values of the senior players. This is as just as dodgy as putting a couple of zeros at the end of your club’s finances. Serious gamers will frown at you for doing something like that and pretend not to know you when you pass them in the street.

Another fun feature of this program is that it allows you to magically heal all your players. This way they can always be healthy and you will never have to think about when your star striker will be back from a serious leg-injury. Your players will ping back up again, just like those Italians after being treated with that magic sponge… The only thing MCFM doesn’t help you with regarding players being unavailable is that it cannot change suspensions. But then again no other save-game editor lets you do this either, so there is no reason to be all whingey about it.

‘This sounds like a neat gizmo, matie, but how can I change my stadium’s capacity?’ I hear you say. The answer is: You can’t. This is one of the few things I expected to find in the program. If you can edit everything else, why can’t you improve your stadium? Having said that, you can change the minimum, the maximum and the average attendance, which should help you somewhat. By having an average very close to your full capacity, chances are that if there is money in the kitty your board will decide to increase the number of uncomfortable plastic seats.

That pretty much covers the ‘what is’. Now let us move on to how to use it. This is the more boring, technical bit so bear with me!

First of all, you need to run Football Manager. When the save-game is loaded, you can click on ‘Load FM2005’, provided you have run MCFM, that is! Once loaded, you can search for both players and teams using the simple search mode (i.e. the white box that has the word ‘search’ under it). Once you have found a player you would like to edit, you will see that his attributes, person data and such are neatly categorised into four; ‘name’, ‘general’, ‘general playing information’ and  ‘playing attributes’. A club, however, will only be categorised into three, which are ‘general’, ‘general club information’, under which you will find its finances, and thirdly and last, ‘stadium’.

The only positive side of this program is that it enables you to make the game more realistic, in the way that when a club has gone bankrupt you can quickly change its financial status in your save-game. I tried this only yesterday, by giving Manchester United £640mill in debts. Three months later, however, after selling off most players, a new board game in and deleted my remaining debts. This is the only acceptable way of using the MCFM if you want the respect of the hardcore FM gamers. You have been thoroughly warned! Happy cheating!

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