Another season at Fuller FM is coming to an end and… well, it’s been a weird one, hasn’t it?
In my annual blog update, I will deliver my final thoughts on Football Manager 2024. I’ll also look back on everything I’ve posted here in the past year – including a frustrating career at Millwall and an even more disastrous one in Kraków – before looking ahead to the next Football Manager game.
But first, just in case you weren’t aware, I have big news!
WE’VE MOVED!
Yes, after two years of planning (and a lot of frustration), it’s finally happened!
After living in Romford on the outskirts of London for my entire life so far, I have relocated about 175 miles north-west to Telford in Shropshire to be closer to family.
Incidentally, this now means I now live in the spiritual home county of the Football Manager series. The Collyer brothers wrote the first ever version of Championship Manager from their family home in Shropshire in the early 1990s. But I digress.
That isn’t the only major change I’ve made in recent weeks. After five-and-a-half years, I have decided to leave Twitter… or X, as its dictator insists we call it.
I’ve been wanting to get off Twitter for a while, for reasons many of you will already know. The tipping point came in July, after the horrific murders in Southport, the spread of misinformation about the culprit, and the subsequent far-right riots across the UK. Not to mention the fact that Twitter’s galaxy-brained chief effectively advocated a British civil war.
Now I’ve left that toxic hellsite, you can instead find me on Threads @Fuller_FM. The FM community over there is still pretty small, but I hope it will start to grow and flourish when the next Football Manager game comes around in November. I also have an account on BlueSky @FullerFM – just in case THAT becomes the go-to platform when Twitter inevitably implodes.
I have also set up a new email address – chris[dot]fullerfm[at]gmail[dot]com. My previous address was a vestige of FM Fairytale – my first failed attempt at running an FM blog in 2016 – so it made sense to update it to something more relevant.
Anyway, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading.
Wait a minute.
This is an annual Fuller FM blog update. Aren’t I missing something?
FINAL THOUGHTS ON FM24
Oh, yeah… this is the point where I’m supposed to talk about the game!
Football Manager 2023 was a bit of a dud in my eyes, but Football Manager 2024 was an improvement – albeit in the same sense that Rishi Sunak was technically an improvement on Liz Truss. To put it another way, I actually lasted more than a few weeks with FM24.
On the positive side, the set-piece editor got a long-overdue overhaul that made it much easier to set up your team for corners, free-kicks and throw-in routines. Personally, I thought it was a bit too effective – having a 6ft 7in giant like Jake Cooper in my Millwall team was practically a cheat code.
Positional play added a further layer of realism to tactics, allowing players in certain roles to transition seamlessly into defence or attack during specific situations. Another plus was that goalkeepers could actually get injured now and then.
But I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the match engine. Just like in FM23, players’ situational awareness left a lot to be desired; they would often away from the ball or ignore even the most obvious passes. In terms of animations, I saw plenty of cases where attacks would ghost through defenders. Even keepers would literally save penalties with their back turned!
There was also a return to the bad old days of FM22, in that even the weakest teams could play low-risk passing football and retain possession for ages because their stronger opponents just wouldn’t press them enough. The consequence was that many non-league sides would have similar pass completion rates to Manchester City or Barcelona.
This adds further credence to my theory that Sports Interactive are only interested in simulating elite football. On FM, the quality gap between Premier League and non-league is ridiculously small, and many attributes don’t seem to matter as much as they should.
Though I rated FM24 as “better than last year’s”, that praise wasn’t exactly as emphatic as the late Bruce Forsyth might have put it. Some issues didn’t become obvious until I had played the game a lot more. Ultimately, the “most complete version of Football Manager” was rushed, bug-ridden, and as clean as Jermaine Jenas’ reputation.
Despite being disappointed by the last two FMs, I’m still hopeful that Football Manager 25 will be a step in the right direction. A new user interface, new leagues, a graphics engine that doesn’t look like it’s from 1989… okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
Before we get to that, though, let’s talk about everything I wrote in this release cycle:
WHAT I WROTE THIS SEASON
With FM24 being the final game of this Football Manager era, and 2024 marking my 25th anniversary as an SI player, I decided to start off with the club I’ve managed the most. Millwall were the team I managed on my FM24 beta… no, sorry, ‘Early Access’ save. [Seriously, Chris. Just retire that joke already. -Ed]
In “Millwall Firewall”, I attempted to lead the Lions to the Premier League after several years on the fringes of the EFL Championship play-offs. We weren’t quite as crap as my good friend Burty said we were, but in those three seasons, we still couldn’t crack that elusive top six.
In truth, I fell into my old trap of pointlessly binning half the squad off each summer – replacing average players with some ever-so-slightly-above-mediocre players. I also wasted the exciting attacking talents of Aidomo Emakhu and Romain Esse by throwing them into regular first-team action before they were ready.
This story was basically a nine-chapter essay on how NOT to play Football Manager. The only credit I could give myself was that I was never completely out of my depth at Millwall (unlike Joe Edwards). However, the same could NOT be said of my next adventure…
One of my favourite YouTubers is an American pop music essayist named Todd In The Shadows. In his series “Trainwreckords”, he covers the flop albums that ended or otherwise ruined the careers of its artists (e.g. how Katy Perry became a laughing stock after her 2017 release “Witness”).
“The Cracovian Chronicles” is my personal Trainwreckord.
It started when I came across the Polish fourth-tier side Wieczysta Kraków, whose wealthy owner was funding their rise up Poland’s football pyramid. I extensively researched their journey for weeks, then built up a back-story for their new FM24 management team – sisters and lifelong Wieczysta fans Kamila and Joanna Deyna.
What should have been a long-term save didn’t even make it past the first season. Indeed, less than 24 hours after I published the Prologue on Fuller FM, I had an extreme case of Football Manager Burnout that ended the save almost immediately. I had only written TWO chapters.
That was partly because of frustrating results on the pitch. Despite having by far the strongest squad in the III Liga, my team of Polish internationals and former top-flight stars were languishing in 4th place – the football was turgid, and none of our goalkeepers could save anything. Even a tactical advice SOS on the SI forums could not save my save.
But I was also burnt out on content creation, after writing FM stories for a decade. I have never made a single penny from my works (fun fact: I actually lose money running this blog). Now I feel it’s time to take a step back – and get back to simply playing Football Manager for the fun of it.
Before I talk about my future plans for FM25, I want to have another look at everything else I’ve written on Fuller FM over the past 12 months.
I had a lot more fun revisiting Championship Manager 3 – which was the first SI game I ever played, and which celebrated its 25th birthday this spring. My main series was “Canzone Napoletana”, in which my goal was to lead a late-90s Napoli team from Serie B obscurity and back into Europe’s elite. (Spoiler alert: It went quite well.)
I also reviewed four other football management games from years gone by – the Sensi clone Championship Soccer, the ill-fated Championship Manager 2010, the curiously-named Ally McCoist’s Director of Football, and the also ill-fated FIFA Manager 13. Indeed, I plan to revisit the latter game once again soon… but with an updated database (and more besides).
Back on FM24, one of my first posts was a guide on what you should do on the first day of a brand new Football Manager career (perhaps Joe Edwards should have read that first before he almost got Millwall relegated). I also discussed a few common misconceptions about FM (e.g. players ask for new contracts too often, and dominating the first half should mean you dominate the second as well).
I then tried “Breaking FM” again by taking over Roma and becoming the harshest, angriest bottle-throwing football manager in history. Unfortunately, that experiment was not as popular as I hoped it would be, so the Breaking FM series will now be discontinued – and Mr Black will return to his day job at Kamp Krusty.
I did at least have some more fun with the Fuller FM Cup – a mini-tournament consisting of my eight best teams from the previous six FMs (most of which I’ve written about here). It was a thrill to see Fuller FM icons like Firas Ben Belgacem, Yunus Musah and, er, Liam Kelly going toe-to-toe once again before I move on to a new Football Manager era.
MY PLANS FOR FM25
Every two years, I start a new FM cycle by managing a top-half team in a major European league. I’ve already done Serie A (Fiorentina) on FM19, Ligue 1 (Rennes) on FM21, and La Liga (Real Betis) on FM23… so that just leaves the Bundesliga in Germany.
My first save on Football Manager 25 will be with VfB Stuttgart. ‘Die Roten’ achieved an excellent 2nd-place finish in the Bundesliga last season – between Bayer Leverkusen’s undefeated champions and Bayern München’s dethroned emperors. Having battled relegation in each of the previous two seasons, their Champions League qualification really did come out of nowhere.
Despite losing goal machine Serhou Guirassy to Borussia Dortmund in the summer, Stuttgart still have a few familiar names, such as ex-Brighton striker Deniz Undav [above] and Germany left-back Maximilian Mittelstädt. I will also be reunited with Swiss centre-back Leonidas Stergiou, who was one of my Rennes unbeatables on FM21.
Stuttgart have won five German league championships (their last coming in 2007) and were runners-up to Chelsea in the 1998 Cup Winners’ Cup Final (which, incidentally, was one of the first football matches I ever watched on TV). While I don’t expect to restore them to their former glories within only a few seasons, my goal is simply to consolidate their status as one of the country’s top clubs.
As I’ve said before, I just want to get back to playing FM for pure fun – without feeling like I should create any content. That means there’ll be no big Fuller FM story (and no Twitter updates, obviously). I might post seasonal updates on here, but that’s the most you’re going to get from this beta save.
When I’ve finished with Stuttgart, and once I feel FM25 is in a good place after the full release, I’ll be ready to crack on with my long-term save… and I’m particularly excited about this one.
FM25 will be the first game in the Football Manager series to include female players, which means this lifelong Arsenal fan will finally have the chance to manage the women’s team. Historically the most successful team in English women’s football, the Gunners have not won the Women’s Super League since 2019.
Blessed with superstars such as England captain Leah Williamson and Switzerland midfielder Lia Wälti [above], and Spain’s World Cup winners Laia Codina and Mariona Caldentey, Arsenal are primed to end their title drought. Defending champions Chelsea are in a state of flux after legendary manager Emma Hayes moved across the pond (which I doubt she regrets), but the Gunners will also have to contend with Manchester City for WSL supremacy.
Though no English team has ever won the Women’s Champions League, Arsenal did win its predecessor – the UEFA Women’s Cup – in 2007. My ultimate goal with the Gunners is to bring that Champions League trophy to the Emirates Stadium.
Once I’ve won the CL, I’d like to pursue a new challenge on the same save – and win the Women’s World Cup with Engla- ah. Yeah. You CAN’T manage national teams on FM25. Thanks a lot, SI.
Beyond that, who knows? I still have a few save ideas I want to get to in time – my favourite being a ‘Build a Nation’ save in the Republic of Ireland with Sligo Rovers – but I’m trying not to look beyond Stuttgart or Arsenal right now.
And of course, I still have plans for Fuller FM. Besides, why else would I have bought the fullerfm.com domain name – or spent weeks reformatting all my old blog posts to give the site a consistent look?
Although there will be no new stories on Fuller FM moving forward (at least not in their current form), I still want to write Football Manager guides and discuss any topics that interest me. I will also continue reviewing any other football management games – old or new – I can get my hands on.
That’ll be all for now, folks. I’ll see you around for Football Manager 25…
Fuller FM 
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