Current Services
The Dugout is a Championship Manager/Football Manager fansite, that has been around since 1999. We have a large package of different centres we offer to our visitors, containing more than 7,500 different items. Below you will find a summary of our different centres:
- Players Centre
- Tactics Centre
- Downloads Centre
- Resource Centre
- Help Centre
- Graphics Centre
- Scene Centre

Site History

The Dugout, as a Championship Manager fan site has been serving Championship Manager fans from all over the world with large quantities of information, files and other useful stuff to enhance you Championship Manager experience since November 1999.

It all started with the merger of 4 of the largest Championship Manager sites around. CM Scandinavia created and upheld by Henrik and Jarkko, CM Gamer that was the fine product of Jake and Bardi (who also came with the merger idea), ChampmanToday under the reign of Robert and Phil and CM Benelux that was being maintained by Mark (and shortly by Kim).

The development of TD (The Dugout) took only 2 months with all content from the 4 sites being combined to create the largest database of Championship Manager information the Internet had ever seen. The site was an instant success, but a success that would only last 1.5 months. As at the end of that year, the site was being denied publication without any notification or warning up front by its host in that time. So The Dugout was forced to leave and was inactive for some more than 4 months as the site had to be rebuild completely over again. While working on the new site, the crew found out that the deletion was based on a misunderstanding through a 3rd party source. The host however did not want the site back and The Dugout was left in the dark again. Sports Interactive's cavalary rushing in to aid (thanks Marc D. and Paul C.) us so we could get our content back, didn't change the situation either.

In February 2000, came the relieve for the site and an agreement with gaming network UGO was soon signed. April first made a lot of people think we tried to pull a prank on them, as we announced that date to be the re-release date of The Dugout. From that time on it only went upwards. Never having dreamt it could have become that large, as The Dugout was already a well visited fan site back then. Its first month after the re-opening produced a for that time overwhelming 300,000 pageviews. Not knowing that this was only the beginning of a great future of the site, the small number of crew that was left was soon to be astonished by remarkable visitor figures that would give them the motivation to keep heading on all this time.

The number of people working at the site slowly started to decline and soon from the original crew only 2 people were left. But support came from an unexpected corner when Osiris was added to the crew list, together with Daigle (Toni) and of course Saulo who are all still active at TD, be it that Toni had a break for a while.

In January 2001, desaster struck again as UGO was facing bankrupcy after the break down of the ad-market. It was either leave or pay abnormal amounts of money in order to keep the site running. The Dugout choose to leave and that's when the good contact between The Dugout and Soccer Gaming always had, paid of its value. In February 2001, The Dugout moved to Soccer Gaming and with that its third hosting network since its birth.

With only 3 people running the site for over 2 years, the site had its best times. The steady increase of people visiting The Dugout was reaching extraordinary figures at the end of 2001. With over 2,2 million pageviews and over 200,000 separate visitors, we were absolutely delighted.

In the mean time, the site had approached Paryce (Colin) if he would be interested in programming a new site. He accepted and after having finished the design in September 2001, work started on the new site. A development that took much longer than we ever expected and reached all the way into 2003, due to lack of time and even due to loss of motivation after having updated on a daily basis for more than 2 years.

On the 1st of March 2003, the site was finally ready to start producing and sharing Championship Manager content with the online community again. A time that would prove to be as exciting as the years before. The populairity of CM 4 completely overloaded our server with hundreds of thousands trying to reach it. This would last till a 2 of months before the release of CM 03/04, only to start over again when it hit the shelves.

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