How to play Champ Manager 2006 on Mac

First, an apology. We intended to deliver these words somewhat earlier, back when we covered Football Manager Handheld. Both games are, after all, football management sims based on popular PC forebears and revised for PSP, both were released around the same time, and indeed we started our reviewing in tandem. It's just that Championship Manager 2006 has taken a little bit longer. There are three reasons for this. The first is that, well, it's rather extensive. Whereas Football Manager Handheld opted for a cut-down, retro approach, Championship Manager 2006 goes the other way. It's every bit as huge as its PC parent, covering 55 leagues from the 12 leading footballing nations. Granted you can only play with the leagues of one country at a time, but each country has all the appropriate teams in all divisions, as well as reserve teams and youth squads. Each of the resultant 25,000 players has the usual mountain of statistics spread over five screens, detailing their skills, form and happiness, and they can all be trained, transfer-listed, praised or damned in the media, fined, demoted or promoted through the ranks, loaned or sold. The transfer market is equally thorough, with a filtering system that enables you to search for specifically skilled players augmented by features like being able to scout or declare an interest in a player to unsettle them, and complex deals involving player-exchanges and sweeteners. With clubs negotiating deals or pulling out and media speculation and disgruntled footballers playing their part, Championship Manager 2006 feels real in a way that Football Manager Handheld didn't quite manage. The matches themselves are equally involved affairs. There are six different ways to view the action, ranging from quick result to textual descriptions, possession bars, and a 2D match view complete with crowd sounds. The latter is obviously the most tantalising attraction. When you're starting as a manager watching your charges (well,