Championship Manager 01/02 In 2026 – December 2025 Data Update, Lüssenhoff & Blackbox Effect

A basic blackbox turns input into output according to the rules which are unknown to the user.

What is even more interesting in the real life though are processes where we can suspect some general rules, but the complexity and amount of factors makes us uncertain about the answer. That’s exactly what happens in CM. Your winger is underperforming, what can be the cause? Maybe marker opponent? Maybe his attributes taken together are not as great as you think? Maybe the relationship between tactics? Maybe rainy weather? Maybe just random low form? Or maybe a bug in the match engine? 

With a naked eye and human amount of time, the complexity is often too high to come up with a definite answer to most questions… unless a rule is simple and the lever on the output is huge. For example in the recent Football Manager editions it was found that certain attributes are way more important than the other… (spoiler). CM is better balanced in this regard.

Consequently, there is a massive confirmation bias issue. Irrelevant or even negative real impact changes are believed to bring success. Indeed, it wouldn’t take much effort to make 100+ episodes of “Mythbusters” about different plausible CM theories.

For example in one of the seasons which I played with Man City I faced PSG in the UCL and the match look completely unwinnable no matter how I picked the squad (in other words I lost ~8 reloads). So I built a tactic designed specially to counter 4-2-3-1 formation which they used. Three defenders in the back, defensive midfielder, front built in a way to seize the spaces between opponent defenders. With the new tactic the match was under my control, clean 2:0 without much counterplay. I finished the season with my tactic and got solid results.

Later I launched a benchmark test against 4-2-3-1 for the original tactic and 9 variants, including the one which gave me the clean win… Original tactic performed better than all alternatives by a lot! Without validation I might have claimed I found a great tactic, which would have joined the shelf of theories which worked for somebody but “not you”. Maybe the question wasn’t 4-2-3-1, but PSG, or maybe it was pure luck? Man can only make hypothesis. 

CM 01/02 remains a great blackbox for all players after 25 years of reverse engineering (CM source code is still unavailable), various benchmarks and experiments. At least for new players, because maybe some knowledge got lost in the process or maybe people who know more prefer to be silent…

Do you know a better blackbox than CM made by human for human? So many factors contributed here: the character of sports manager games, the fact that 99% of players uses single mode rather than compete against each other (in which case the best strategies are figured out and validated much better), a robust match engine design with occasional bugs discovered. 

Life is a blackbox too, but the outcome is uncertain. We can define own objectives in our lives, but the real objective is unknown. One can be rich and happy or poor and depressed; achieve great things or achieve nothing. But at the end of the day, does it really matter for the world? And does the world matter?  One can only try to answer this question and it also seems reasonable to give others more time to do so by not starting a nuclear war or something.