Some people in the Football Manager community like to lament that FM “has no competition”. But while it has indeed been a long time since Sports Interactive have had a serious rival to their crown, perhaps that might be about to change?
Having recently become disillusioned with FM, I’m now hoping that this title from Germany will win me over with its slim-lined, strategic and less serious approach to football management. Three years after making a promising debut, is it now ready for the first-team?
We Are Football 2024, this will be your day.
BACKGROUND
Gerald Köhler is a veteran when it comes to developing football management games. The 55-year-old German was the brainchild of Anstoss in the 1990s and was later poached by EA – working on their Total Club Manager and FIFA Manager series for over a decade.
In 2018, Köhler founded the Cologne-based company Winning Streak Games to work on a new title. The result was We Are Football, which debuted in June 2021 to… decent reviews. Though WAF lacked the official licences or the sophisticated match engine required to compete with Football Manager, it still won plenty of admirers for its less serious tone and its impressive attention to detail.
It certainly grew on me. Primitive ME and wonky German-to-English translations aside, I was won over by its RPG mechanics – and the fact you could manage in women’s competitions as well as men’s. I gave it a 3* rating, and I enjoyed my review save with Arsenal women so much that I played on for several more seasons.
WAF continued to receive occasional updates over the next two years. Just before the 2022 World Cup, it also got some National Teams DLC that allowed you to manage in international competitions. Some players were disgruntled that it cost almost £10 – bearing in mind that the base game had already set them back £30 – but at least it showed the developers were standing by their project.
And so we come to the follow-up: We Are Football 2024, which was released in March of this year on Steam and the Epic Games Store. The new game is slightly more expensive with a retail cost of £35, though the international management modes now come free of charge. Indeed, you can get the game at a more reasonable £15-£20 if you know where to look.
WAF 2024 has had a sleek makeover, but what else is new? Let’s find out…
STARTING OUT
The basic WAF 2024 database features 63 men’s leagues in 38 countries – and 29 women’s leagues in 19 countries. Most players are completely fictional, though players in German clubs are obviously based on real-life. For example, Bavaria Munich have an English striker named Horace King, and a Canadian left-back called Arthur Dixon.
For anyone who wants to manage the actual clubs and players, the FM-Zocker fansite has an extensive men’s database which includes over 130,000 players in 113 playable nations! Unfortunately, there isn’t an equivalent update for the women’s database, which is still pretty bare-bones.
Even more annoyingly, WAF won’t let you pick and choose specific leagues in a country – it’s literally all or nothing. This is what put me off using the FM-Zocker update, great as it is. When it came to Germany, I had to choose between loading ALL 60 leagues and 931 clubs (!!!) or just the top eight teams in the Bundesliga.
When you’ve chosen your database setup and added your manager, it’s time to pick one of the five game modes. For a short-term international challenge, you can manage in a one-off World Cup or European Championship. For a longer-term career, you can either select your own club straight away – or you can answer a questionnaire, after which the game will offer you three lower-league jobs where you can start your journey.
Instead, I went with the final option of creating my own club from scratch. I set up a team in my hometown of Romford and dropped them into the 3rd division of the English women’s leagues. They have replaced Yeovil… as if Glovers fans have suffered enough in recent years.
WHAT I LIKED
The match experience on WAF 2024 is significantly better than in the original game. For starters, we now have a 3D match engine – and it actually looks pretty nice. Player animations are pretty smooth and pleasing to watch, though stadium roof textures seem to resemble a Beach House album cover while the camera is moving.
In terms of player movements, they don’t seem to show as much tactical awareness as Football Manager, and you’ll often see howlers both in defence and attack. I also struggle to understand why it’s usually my right-back who goes clean through on goal rather than my centre-forward.
But for a first stab at a 3D engine, WAF have done a good job on the most part. There are various options that allow you to watch match highlights exactly how you want them to. Just bear in mind that it’s not possible to watch the entire match in 3D yet.
All in all, the user interface has been nicely cleaned up, and the various screens are laid out a bit better without cramming in too much information. Some of the silly Germanglish has also been fixed, so shots now produce “expected goals” rather than “deserved goals”.
The cartoonish players have been replaced with more realistic AI-generated faces, similar to the NewGAN faces I use on Football Manager. As much as I actually liked the cartoon faces, I prefer the new look. That being said, the game only has about 10,000 images to choose from, so it won’t be long before you encounter two players with exactly the same face.
Lastly, I still enjoy some of the RPG elements in this series. You’ll still need a good mix of Leaders, Artists, Analysts and Team Players to get consistent results. You’ll also have to consider your players’ personality ratings (such as their Perfectionism and Agreeableness) when interacting with them or negotiating contracts. There’s plenty of strategy involved, but it’s also easier to find out what makes your players tick than on FM.
WHAT I DIDN’T
WAF 2024 still has some mind-boggling tactical settings from the original game. There are two separate settings for how aggressive you want your players to be – and on completely different screens as well. I also wish it was easier to navigate between the formation, tactics and player role screens, though I understand why you can’t have everything on the same page.
But even if you can develop a solid tactic, team strength seems to matter far too much on WAF – especially in cup games. If you get drawn against a team from just one or two divisions above you, there’s apparently nothing you can do to avoid an absolute hammering. On an earlier save with Wimbledon, my team lost 7-1 to QPR and then 8-0 to Leicester.
I’m also disappointed with the lack of attention to detail. It’s little things like the game forgetting certain settings and selections – such as the order in which I select my substitutes, which all get jumbled up before each match. Or triggering an achievement for having the top two goalscorers in the league… when my most prolific scorer was 26th in the rankings with FOUR goals.
Probably the worst thing a video game can do to me is pointlessly waste my time, and WAF is particularly poor at this. One time-waster I really didn’t enjoy was when my Romford Town team was in crisis after a few disappointing results, and I had to find a ‘mole’ who was ruining the atmosphere in the dressing room. Is this game trying to compete with Football Manager or Among Us?
And why did I even have to look for a ‘mole’ during this ‘crisis’? My team was the weakest in the division on paper, yet most of my players suddenly got upset because we were only four points clear of relegation! Imagine if the Luton squad turned against Rob Edwards because they were 17th in the Premier League!
Some of these bugs or features are just annoying, but others are serious game-breakers. I’ve read a few horror stories about managers being sacked for failing objectives, even if they met all of them comfortably. Fortunately, I didn’t experience this – but then again, I ticked the option to turn off sackings while setting up again.
WE MUST TALK ABOUT…
This ‘personal life’ fluff. For better or worse, one of FIFA Manager’s most notable features has made its way into WAF 2024. Why only focus on football when your manager can have a partner, children, and even a pet guinea pig?
You can’t have personal relationships with your own players (which is probably just as well), but you can date other staff members. During my save, the club’s head of organisation confessed that she’d fallen head over heels in love with me – but I turned down her advances. She resigned the next day.
Bizarrely, you can also give your manager a lucky charm or a ritual – which as far as I know has NO impact on the game at all. But if you wanted, you could set your manager to only change their underwear after a defeat (ewww) or sleep in their opponents’ shorts before a match (what?!). Personally, my favourite superstition is “I don’t need this”.
A much more useful feature is the ability to learn a new language, which can help you communicate better with your new foreign signings.
SUMMARY
I really wanted to enjoy We Are Football 2024 a lot more. Its match engine and RPG elements have a lot of potential, but there are too many worthless ‘features’ that don’t add to the experience – and too many niggly bugs that take away from it.
£35 is an absurd retail price to pay for WAF 2024 in its current state, especially considering FM24 only costs an extra 10 quid. I also can’t justify giving it the same 3* rating as its predecessor right now, but I hope that will change with patches and more thorough testing.
If Gerald or anyone from WSG is reading this… I appreciate you don’t want to create a stale FM clone, but you need to strip out the unnecessary bloat, and instead add some more substance to the tactical side of the game. Mole hunts are not as fun as you seem to think they are, and the lucky charms serve as much purpose as a manager timeline.
FULLER FM RATING: 2.5* – Football League.
We Are Football, and that was my opinion. If you’ve enjoyed this review and have some thoughts you’d like to share, you’re free to leave a comment below or tweet me @Fuller_FM.
Fuller FM 
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