Championship Manager: Season 01/02

Championship Manager: Season 01/02 is a football management computer game in the Sports Interactive's Championship Manager series. It was released in October 2001 exclusively for PC and for Mac in November 2001. It was also later released on Xbox in April 2002. It was released as freeware in 2008.

New features
Although never particularly expanding on the graphical side, Sports Interactive included many new features along with the usual updated database. Championship Manager 01/02 implemented the new EU regulated transfer system, introduced in September 2001, and also featured a new attribute masking mode, whereby the player could only see information about footballers they would realistically know about (also known as a fog of war).

Other new additions included the ability to send players away for surgery, player notes, player comparisons, and improved media and board interaction.

Playable leagues
This edition of Championship Manager included about a hundred fully playable leagues in twenty-six countries, and patch 3.9.67 added South Korea's K-League, its first appearance in the CM series. The full list of playable leagues in CM01/02 is as follows:

Rest of the World

 * Argentina
 * Australia
 * Brazil
 * Japan
 * South Korea
 * United States

Free release and data updates
In December 2008, Eidos Interactive made the game available for free download, and included a recommendation for users to download a users-created update patch from http://www.champman0102.co.uk. One of the most active CM forums on the net, the website still provides regular updates after transfer windows close.

Trivia
In 2001, presenters Ant & Dec, who hosted the popular Saturday morning show SMTV Live, left the show. On their last show, they received a letter (from Sports Interactive) and special edition copies of Championship Manager: Season 01/02 which saw Ant as a player for Newcastle with a contract of £50,000 a week with a value of £4.7m, and Dec as a player for Sunderland with a contract of £90 a week.

Fictional players
The first release of the game included a player named "Tó Madeira", a great striker no matter where he played. It was later revealed that Tó Madeira was not a real footballer, but in fact a fictional player created by a scout working for the game producers.