So long, Football Manager 2023. I would say it’s been a blast, but… well… it hasn’t.
It’s time for the traditional Fuller FM autumn blog update. As I usually do at this time of year, I’m going to summarise my thoughts on FM23 and round up everything I’ve posted on this here blog over the past 12 months. I’ll also reveal my plans for Football Manager 2024 – the very last Football Manager of its kind.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON FM23
If you’ve been following this blog and/or following me on social media, you’ll know just how I feel about Football Manager 2023. I wrote a lengthy review in April, which I’ll try to condense into a few paragraphs here.
I started my beta save with Real Betis in mid-October, with a view to launching a long-term career in the new year. By late November, I’d basically stopped playing FM23 altogether. I didn’t even get through two full seasons with Betis before the game’s numerous flaws – and some unrelated technical difficulties – pushed me to breaking point.
My biggest gripes were with the match engine. Top-class players would often look incompetent on the ball, frequently losing possession very softly in dangerous positions. On occasions, they could react painfully slow to passes from their team-mates, or even squander possession by spraying the ball out to the invisible man.
Players would still go for headers far too frequently and in ridiculous situations, especially when they could instead use their chest or wait for the ball to bounce before controlling it. My ‘favourite’ incident was when my centre-back played a back-pass to his goalkeeper like he was impersonating Robin van Persie at the 2014 World Cup.
Most of the hyped-up ‘new features’ failed to inspire. Rather than seeing any improvements to international management or set-pieces, we were ‘rewarded’ with new wristwatches and a manager timeline. To be fair, a licensing agreement with UEFA did improve the presentation of continental matches, even if it also meant watching Steve Bruce fumble through the Europa League Quarter Final draw.
While that part of the game did get a shiny new paint job, another change didn’t go down well with me. Much of the language used in media and player interactions was changed to be much more ‘realistic’… which is another way of saying it looks like it was written by Sheldon Cooper. Not even Panadol could cure some of the headaches FM23 gave me.
The AI continued to rely heavily on older players, because younger players’ reputations didn’t grow fast enough. High-quality players would often be overlooked at club or international level until their 23rd birthdays. Meanwhile, dual-nationality wonderkids would collect multiple caps for a ‘smaller’ nation (e.g. the United Arab Emirates, or Northern Ireland) and then suddenly stop playing for them, in delusional hope that Spain or England would call them up instead.
Even worse, the final patch brought an immersion-breaking bug that resulted in 45% of all Spanish newgens being named Iván. Imagine if half the England Under-17s team were called Nigel.
Those issues made long-term saves on FM23 unviable for me. I had no desire to start a serious long-term career on the new game, not even after I got a new PC for Christmas (the power supply in my 7-year-old Lenovo had started groaning louder than Alan Sugar watching the Women’s World Cup).
I played a throwaway one-season save with Millwall, then did an experiment with Dagenham & Redbridge – more on that later – and that was it as far as my time on FM23 was concerned.
WHAT I WROTE THIS SEASON
As you could probably tell, FM23 was the first game that I didn’t write a career story about since I launched Fuller FM in 2018. I did write an introduction for a story with FC Košice in the Slovakian second division – but I gave up on that after the final patch.
Away from FM, I also had to plan for a house move (which got postponed because estate agents cannot be trusted), deal with health and fitness problems, and mourn the loss of my grandmother. The one positive from this past year was becoming an uncle for the second time, when my niece Isabella arrived two weeks ago.
All this meant another quiet year on Fuller FM, with just 14 new posts since the last blog update. But here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to:
In March, I launched a brand new Fuller FM series – Breaking FM, where I would push Football Manager to its limits and see how it handled extreme scenarios.
For my first experiment, I saw what would happen if an English Football League had to play the maximum possible number of games in a single season. I explained how the challenge worked in Part 1, and then went through Dagenham & Redbridge’s epic 100-match season in Part 2.
This series didn’t go down as well as I was hoping for, but I’d still like to try some more experiments on FM24. If you have any ideas on how I can ‘break’ FM24, please fire away in the comments.
My most popular FM article this year was my guide to player interactions, where I gave some tips on how and when to praise/criticise players – and when to use the water bottle in team talks. I also wrote an updated guide on setting up Screen Flow in FM23, and another article explaining how you can run older Sports Interactive games on modern Windows operating systems.
More recently, I looked at what happens when you start a CM or FM save with fake players.
I also revisited a couple of older games. Last autumn, I opened up my old Football Manager 2013 to see where today’s real-life superstars were in the year 2022 (e.g. Son Heung-Min was playing for the mighty Aston Villa in the Championship). I also looked at those FM13 wonderkids who became icons in-game but had more modest careers in reality, such as Hervin Ongenda and Nick Powell.
Later on, I celebrated the 20th anniversary of Championship Manager 4 by looking at some CM4 players who were still active on FM23. Some of these players have since hung up their boots – most notably Gianluigi Buffon and Zlatan Ibrahimovic – but 56-year-old Kazuyoshi Miura will still be going strong in FM24! (Speaking of King Kazu, the J-League will be in FM24!)
In my most recent post, I revisited the Championship Manager and Football Manager magazines that were published between 2002 and 2004 – and archived the cover CDs from all eight issues. I’m hoping to archive the magazines themselves in the future, when time allows.
I also opened an archive of all my old FM and CM stories from the official SI forums, written between 2014 and 2019. These are all available to download and read at your leisure.
Lastly, I wrote a retro review of Ultimate Soccer Manager 98 – the much-loved Sierra management game from the late 1990s. I haven’t covered any other football management games recently, but I’m always open to suggestions, whether they’re retro or modern.
FM24 & THE FUTURE
As I’ve hinted at before, Football Manager 2024 will be the last of its kind. Big changes are on the way when Football Manager 2025 switches to the Unity game engine with a new user interface, but that doesn’t mean FM24 will be just another season update. Indeed, it seems SI are determined to make FM24 the most polished and complete version yet.
Back in June, it was announced that we could import our FM23 saves into FM24 and continue our adventures on the new game. But if you want to start afresh on the latest data, you now have three ‘game modes’ to choose from:
- ‘Original’ is the game mode we’re used to, with players starting at the club they currently play for in real-life. For example, Jérémy Doku will start at Manchester City.
- In ‘Real World’, players start at the club they were playing for on the date your save began, and then they’ll move to their new club on the same date as they did in reality. If you start on 10 July, Doku will begin at Rennes before signing for Manchester City on 24 August.
- In ‘Your World’, players start at the club they were playing for on the date you save began… but all future transfers are cancelled, allowing you to change history. If you start on 10 July, Doku will start at Rennes and stay there, unless City or another club put in a new offer for him. I’m sure Chelsea could use another wonderkid forward in their team…
SI claim to have improved their transfer AI, with managers considering their tactics more when looking for new signings, and prioritising potential over current ability when seeking backup options. Meanwhile, if you are still struggling to shift any unwanted players (hello, Erik), you can use ‘intermediaries’ to try and drum up offers, in return for a small chunk of the transfer fee.
Set-pieces have had a long-overdue revamp, which looks smoother and more intuitive than dragging shirts onto a pitch and watching them disappear. Expect less frustration when it comes to player interactions too, with improved logic hopefully meaning fewer praise-related tantrums – and new ‘targets’ allowing you to give your star players extra incentives to perform.
And there are the usual match engine upgrades, with SI making a big deal out of ‘inverted full-backs’ and ‘positional play’, as popularised by Pep Guardiola and his sky-blue machines. On a visual level, the lighting and pitch textures look more realistic and less washed-out. As always, though, we can’t pass judgement on these exciting changes until we actually play the game…
My first save on FM24 will be with Millwall. They are my second team, and the club I have managed the most in Football Manager, so it makes sense to go back to them for the final game of this FM era.
Since appointing Gary Rowett as manager in 2019, Millwall have consistently challenged for the EFL Championship play-offs, only to fall short each time. My plan is to lead the Lions into the Premier League for the first time (they did play in the old First Division briefly in the 1980s) while largely sticking to their direct, counter-attacking principles.
This save will also be a tribute to former Millwall owner John Berylson, who tragically died in a car crash in Massachusetts this summer. Berylson saved the club from financial ruin in 2007 and was almost universally loved by Lions supporters – which is more than can be said of some foreign investors at other EFL clubs.
Since Elon Musk is now trying to destroy ‘Twitter’, I will not be tweeting (no, sorry, X-ing) save updates there anymore. Instead, the plan is to post one or two updates here per season.
Right now, I have no idea how long the Millwall save will last – it might end after a couple of seasons; it might continue all the way until FM25 comes out. But if all goes well, I would like to eventually move on to a longer-term save… in Sweden.
Specifically, the club I plan on managing is Nacka FC. Based in a suburb of Stockholm, Nacka have enjoyed a meteoric rise through Sweden’s football pyramid since their formation in 2015, being promoted FIVE times in their first eight seasons. They now play in Division 2 Södra Svealand, with is at the 4th tier of the Swedish league system.
Whether this save happens will depend on various things – not least FM24 actually being a fun game to play. After years of stagnation and frustration, all I want is for long-term saves to be enjoyable again.
Fuller FM will continue regardless, so you can expect to see more guides, discussions, experiments and reviews over the coming season. And with Championship Manager 3 celebrating its 25th birthday next year, I’m almost certain I will revisit the game that got me hooked on this series in the first place!
Whether you’ve been reading Fuller FM for the last five years or the last five minutes, thank you very much for stopping by. There will be more Football Manager and Championship Manager content on the way soon!
Lastly, a reminder that you can still find me on ‘Twitter’ – at least until Musk’s ego explodes – and on Threads. I can also announce that Fuller FM is now on Bluesky as well.
Fuller FM 
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