Football Manager 2024 has been out for close to two months now, and this game cycle is well and truly in full swing.
Regular Fuller FM readers may remember back in April that I wrote a pretty brutal review of Football Manager 2023 – canning its lack of innovation, chaotic match engine, and pretty much everything else. It was clear that a lot more would be expected from FM24, especially when Sports Interactive labelled it “a love letter to football” and “the last of its kind”.
This will be the final version of Football Manager before the series enters an exciting new chapter, but how is it looking right now? After over 100 hours of playing the game, I feel that now’s a good time to deliver my thoughts on FM24…
NEW FEATURES
After a disappointing lack of meaningful new features on FM23, SI have shown more ambition for FM24. The first big announcement was that you could import your old FM23 saves into FM24 and pick up from where you’d left off.
I loaded up my Real Betis beta save from last year and finished the second season, which I had abandoned halfway through. The conversion process ran smoothly and almost everything carried over as expected (except you cannot rewatch matches played on FM23). I would give this feature a thumbs-up.
If you wish to start afresh, there are three game modes on FM24: Original, Real World and Your World. In case you need reminding:
- Original is the game mode we’re already used to – with Harry Kane starting off at his new club Bayern München.
- In Real World, transfers happen at the same time as they did in real life – so Kane will move from Tottenham to Bayern on 12 August.
- In Your World, all future transfers are cancelled – so Kane will start at Tottenham, but you can still try to bring him to PSG, Real Madrid, Birmingham or whoever.
Transfer activity has received a little more attention. If other clubs are interested in one of your players, you can see how strong their interest is, and why they perhaps won’t make an offer yet. If you’re still struggling to sell a player you don’t need anymore, you can use an intermediary to try and bring in some offers – at a cost.
Player interactions have been improved too – with players giving clearer positive, negative or neutral responses to your praise, criticism or suggestions.
You are encouraged to speak to your players more often, particularly after poor performances. You cannot fine players for poor performances anymore, but criticism can be used to motivate them – and perhaps even increase their Determination or Work Rate. Whether you threaten them with a hairdryer or express your dissatisfaction in a gentler manner… well, that’s up to you.
If a player is regularly struggling to perform in matches or in training, you can try to inspire them by setting them targets, usually in return for reassurances about their future. For example, you can promise to make a striker a Regular Starter next season if they score 15 goals in the current campaign.
Fans of Japanese football will be thrilled that all three divisions of the J-League are playable on FM for the first time. There are still some licencing issues that mean certain players are missing (e.g. Juan Mata at Vissel Kobe), but this is still A LOT more than us FMers were getting when Konami held the exclusive J-League rights.
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT FM24
My single favourite new feature is the set-piece editor, which SI have ripped out and rebuilt. You can set specific roles for each set-piece routine, and these will be assigned based on priority lists rather than by positions. Never again will you have to wonder why your giant defender is staying behind when you win an attacking corner.
If you still can’t be bothered setting up set-pieces, you can now hire a Set-Piece Coach to manage these instead. This is a relatively new role in football, so there aren’t many specialist set-piece coaches in real-life, so don’t be surprised if the best one you find is a newgen.
At this point, I would suggest that corner kicks might actually be too effective. In my third and final season at Millwall, we scored 20 league goals from corners – with my 6ft 7in captain Jake Cooper heading in 13 of them. By contrast, goals from free-kicks (direct or indirect) are surprisingly rare.
The introduction of ‘positional play’ makes tactics feel more realistic. You can now have a John Stones-style Libero step up from central defence into midfield when your team has the ball. While Inverted Wing-Backs have been a thing in FM for a while now, a player in the new Inverted Full-Back can shift inside into central defence while your team is on the attack.
Whenever people say that they want to create separate formations when their team is in or out of possession, I point out that this already happens. The starting formation dictates your defensive shape, while the roles and duties largely dictate your attacking shape.
Another thing worth noting is that goalkeepers can now get injured in matches. Okay, these were extremely rare occurrences on FM23 – but they are much more frequent on FM24. I had to sub off an injured Matija Šarkić twice in three seasons.
This change hasn’t been entirely welcomed by some people in the community who cry about there being too many injuries already (I’d say there aren’t enough injuries in the base game). They seem to forget that goalies aren’t ironmen; they can sometimes break a finger or a wrist while making a save.
I must also add that the game is much better optimised now, with processing through days and weeks being much quicker. I haven’t done any in-depth comparisons, but I’d say it’s between 5% and 10% quicker.
Apparently, one big change is that FM24 does not load every single club into your save. It doesn’t waste time processing what happens at dozens of obscure amateur teams in Djibouti, etc. This means you can probably afford to load more leagues and/or players into your new save.
WHAT I DON’T LIKE
In this part of the review, I could just regurgitate a lot of what I wrote on FM23. For a game that SI were trumpeting as “the most complete version of Football Manager to date”, FM24 looks as clean and polished as Martin Keown.
Discussions with agents are still so wordy that they give me migraines. Custom views still break ridiculously easily. Journalists still ask the same inane questions about rival managers putting their reserves up for sale – or demanding my thoughts on Chris Wood scoring his 49th goal for New Zealand against the Wallis & Futuna Islands.
Newgen faces are still pretty awful – and not just those 17-year-old boys who look like a cross between Hair Bear and Sean Bean. A lot of newgens now have weird blemishes across their faces that apparently are supposed to be birthmarks, but look more like chickenpox or sunburn or the aftermath of a chocolate factory explosion.
But hey… at least SI said they had definitely improved the transfer AI, right? I don’t think they have improved it.
Major clubs still spend ridiculous money on players they will never use regularly, even if they play well. They still hoard high-potential youngsters without having a clear plan to develop them. On the other end of the age scale, I saw Bristol City sign a 33-year-old Alexandr Kokorin, who scored a respectable 11 goals in 25 games – but was then chucked into the reserves a year later.
And while SI have tried to replicate the explosion of money in the Saudi Pro League, some of the contracts offered by Saudi clubs look a bit silly. It’s one thing seeing Al-Ahli pay £1million a week to an elite midfielder like Leon Goretzka, but it’s quite another seeing Al-Ittihad pay £825,000 a week to the Real Sociedad defender Robin Le Normand.
You also don’t see a lot of loan deals for young players – either because lower-league clubs are reluctant to bring in untested youngsters, or bigger clubs are demanding too much to loan them out.
This happened a lot to some of Manchester City’s hottest prospects on my save – like midfielder James McAtee, who spent a season on loan at Sheffield United, and then rotted in City’s Under-21s for two years before escaping to Chicago on a free transfer. The Citizens also wasted the talents of £55million man Jérémy Doku (who didn’t play a single league game in 2025/2026) and Kayky (who hasn’t played ANY competitive football for two-and-a-half years!).
Some good news is that top national teams are more inclined to call up good young players. Unfortunately, this ‘fix’ has gone too far the other way – with the likes of England and Germany calling up teenage talents from big clubs who have been loaned out to second-division teams. Instead of bringing them into the fold far too late, they now bring them through too early!
THE MATCH ENGINE
Lastly, let’s talk about the most important part of Football Manager – the match engine. If you read my FM23 review, you will remember that I had A LOT to say about the ME in that game. I’m afraid to say that things on FM24 right now aren’t that much improved.
A lot of issues from last year’s game are still there now. We still have players making unnecessary headers when it makes more sense to control the ball and/or pass with their feet. Players still seem to have little situational awareness, often running away from the ball or making no effort to get to obvious passes.
Players making standing tackles or losing the ball don’t feel quite right either. A player might be dribbling confidently up the field, and then suddenly stop as a rival defender simply nicks the ball from their feet. Or they just run away from the ball – again.
Another issue that is cropping up more often is players moving through each other (and the referee) like ghosts. The lack of a collision detection or even a functioning collision avoidance system evokes bad memories of FM12 – Carlos Fierro and all that. You’ll also see goalkeepers dive through their own side netting or posts, and sometimes even land outside the field of play!
Speaking of goalkeepers, I must reserve my strongest criticisms for the keeper animations – which are perhaps the worst they have ever been. Goalies turning their back to the ball when the opposition has a shot (as in the penalty example above) are frustratingly common. On occasions when they make a save, the ball goes in one direction when the keeper animation suggests it should have gone in the other.
We’ve also seen a return for an old FM22 grievance – unrealistically high pass completion rates (particularly among defenders) are back with a vengeance.
SI have put so much emphasis on recreating the ‘positional play’ popularised by Pep Guardiola that practically ANY team at ANY level can now play the ball from the back as effectively and fluidly as Manchester City. And they can do so under almost no pressure, even if the opposition gegenpress to the max.
Things get especially unrealistic in the lower leagues, where teams often register pass completion rates upwards of 80%. I’m not just talking about cases like when Notts County and Wrexham dominated the National League last season – even the most technically mediocre sides can hog the ball unchallenged.
SUMMARY
Let me get one thing straight – I have enjoyed playing FM24 much more than I did FM23. My beta… no, sorry, ‘Early Access’ save lasted twice as long this year, so that’s got to mean something, right?
Do I think it’s been a big enough improvement on FM23? Not really.
The set-piece overhaul is very welcome, and I appreciate that work has been done to make player interactions feel more realistic. The new game modes are quite cool too, even if this veteran FMer of almost 25 years can’t bring himself to look past playing the game the ‘original’ way.
Yet this ‘definitive’ edition doesn’t feel very definitive. The match animations still look messy and erratic for a modern video game, and so many long-standing bugs have been left unaddressed that I sense SI are purposely delaying any fixes until Football Manager 2025.
So let’s now address the elephant in the room. We have to be realistic and accept that major groundbreaking changes won’t happen until SI switch to the Unity engine for FM25. Updated graphics and a new user interface are sorely needed for a game that is showing its age – and a game which probably can’t be improved much further in its current form.
In the meantime, there’s still a lot of polishing and bug-fixing SI need to do on FM24 just to make the experience feel a lot more enjoyable. As of writing this, there are about two or three months left to go until SI release the final patch and shift all their focus to FM25. Let’s hope they deliver.
While I would recommend playing this game over FM23, it’s not a glowing recommendation by any means. If you’re still on the fence about whether to buy FM24 right now, you can always try the six-month demo first.
You can buy Football Manager 2024 right now on Steam, the Epic Games Store or with Xbox Game Pass.
Thank you for reading this review. If you’d like to leave your own thoughts on FM24, feel free to leave a comment below.
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