UNIVERSITY PRESS

There’s a game that will never grow old, and Tom Youngs is always in the team

By ZANDER MILLS

It’s late. My wife and kids are in bed. I’m alone in the living room, having spent longer than I’d like to admit working out how to get a 25-year-old computer game running on a modern laptop. When it finally loads, my heart is genuinely beating fast. The referee’s whistle. The crowd noise. The mouse cursor that becomes a football. And then finally the menu. I hit “Start new game”, pick Cambridge United – my starter team, always my starter team – and the squad list appears. Stevland Angus. Luke Guttridge. Armand Oné . And Tom Youngs.

My Championship Manager 2001-02 obsession started during my A-levels, a birthday present from my parents that immediately consumed me. I didn’t have many friends in sixth form. But when I got to university, the game gave me an instant passport. Andy across the corridor knew every bargain player from the Swedish top tier by heart. Guto texted me a running commentary of his treble-winning exploits managing Roma.

But it was Kev who matched me. Somewhere in my first year of uni when exam results didn’t really matter, we managed the same team together, starting in the morning and playing straight through – stopping only for takeaway pizza. I can still remember the smell of his room. Fusty bedding. A pile of washing in the corner that never seemed to move. At night, to keep the save alive, we slept in shifts. Kev only had two CDs. Michael Jackson’s Greatest Hits and Phil Collins. They played on repeat. We talked about daft things. Deep things too. The kind of conversations that only happen at 3 am when your defences are down and Cherno Samba has just scored a hat-trick.

Kev and I lost touch after university. But when I got the game running again all those years later, he was the first person I messaged. At some point, I couldn’t tell you exactly when, the game just quietly disappeared from my life. The disc stopped working. I didn’t notice it happen. Then, before I knew it, 20 years had flown by. I got a (proper) job. Got married. Had children. Now I think more about saving money for a new kitchen than I do how to prise Kevin Hofland away from PSV.

At some point, I couldn’t tell you exactly when, the game just quietly disappeared from my life. The disc stopped working. I didn’t notice it happen

Last year I read that Tom Youngs had died. He was only a few years older than me. Like me, he had a young family. He’d contracted MS, which was diagnosed after injury and illness had ended his playing career. Although not before he’d quietly become a legend, not on the pitch, but on a computer screen.

At the end of the BBC Sport article, almost as a footnote, it mentioned he’d trained as a journalist and written an autobiography. It was out of print. But my wife tracked down a second-hand copy and gave it to me for my birthday. The book is called What Dreams Are (Not Quite) Made Of: No fame, no fortune, just football (and Multiple Sclerosis) . There’s a chapter in it called “The Champ Man man”. Youngs knew exactly what he was on that game. He even acknowledged, with a smile, that he was better in pixels than he ever was in real life. Reading his Cambridge team-mates’ names in the pages of his autobiography sent me straight back – and within days I was online, working out how to get the game running again. Which is how, on a quiet Thursday night with my family asleep upstairs, Tom Youngs ended up alive again in my living room. Twenty-one years old. First team. Cambridge United. I play it late at night now, after the family are in bed. It gives me something I struggle to name – comfort, maybe. Respite. A feeling that not everything has to move at the speed the world currently demands.

The world feels frightening right now. Trump. Putin. The creeping normalisation of things that shouldn’t be normal. Championship Manager 2001-02 takes me back to before all of that. I’m aware of how that sounds. I don’t entirely care.

The game – specifically the 2001-02 version – feels intensely personal to my generation. It’s a small window of people for whom these names, these sounds, this mouse cursor shaped like a football, mean something special and irreplaceable. My brothers are football men too, but they’re a few years older. It doesn’t land the same way for them. When I messaged Kev after all those years, his reply came back quickly. “Have you signed Ibanez yet? He’ll fire you up the leagues.” Ibanez. A computer-generated footballer (“regen”) who never existed outside one specific save game, played in a fusty student bedroom in Sheffield sometime around 2003. Kev remembered him. Of course he did. Tom Youngs is in my Cambridge United squad. He’s there every time I load the game up – 21 years old, full of potential, blissfully unaware of everything that’s coming. I sell him. He’s worth good money to a club like Cambridge and I desperately need the transfer budget. I think he’d understand. Twenty years from now I hope I’m still messaging old friends about a game that meant more than it had any right to. And I hope my own children find something like it – their own fusty bedroom, their own Kev, their own Ibanez who never existed but who both of you remember perfectly. Some things only matter if you were exactly the right age at exactly the right moment. I was. We were. And somewhere, in a second-hand book with a brilliant title, so was Tom Youngs.