Let’s talk about a potential newgen bug I’ve found on Football Manager 2024.
In most cases, any players that FM generates – also known as ‘newgens’ – are entirely separate from and unrelated to any other player in the database. When Cristiano Ronaldo retires, he isn’t instantly replaced with another skilful Portuguese forward who has his same elite potential.
On FM24, though, some of these newly-generated players can develop… let’s call it an identity complex. Allow me to explain…
HEY, YOU LOOK FAMILIAR!
Everything in the Football Manager staff database – person, club, nation, competition, et cetera – has a Unique ID. Some custom FM skins will automatically display these IDs on the profiles, but if you’re using the default skin, here’s how you can view them:
First, open up the Preferences menu. Click inside the search box at the top and type “IDS”. Tick the box next to “Show screen IDs in Title Bar to assist skinning”. Then click the “Confirm” button to confirm the changes.
Most (but not all) newgens on FM24 will have a 10-digit Unique ID beginning with “2002”. On my current save, these start from “2002076180”.
But it turns out that these ‘Unique IDs’ are not so… well, unique.
When the FM24 beta was released in October 2023, people noticed a bug – or was it a feature? – where some newgens were being assigned the IDs of existing people in the database. If this existing player had a face in a facepack in the user’s Graphics folder, that player’s face would also be used for the newgen who got their ID.
As far as I knew, these newgens were only taking IDs from players who were not loaded into the save game. There was, thankfully, no danger of you finding a goalkeeper in your youth intake who looked exactly like Harry Kane!
This mostly affected obscure lower-league players who had their faces and IDs surgically implanted onto superstar newgens. On this 15-year holiday save, Manchester City’s Portuguese right-winger got the same ID as McKenzie Mason – a former Peterborough youngster who was a free agent on FM24 and was never loaded onto this save.
Likewise, Manchester United’s Spanish hotshot bore a striking resemblance to Joe Smyth-Ferguson – a Burnley youth reject who was last seen playing for non-league Burscough in the 2022/2023 season.
And here’s an interesting case. Real Madrid’s Portuguese inside-forward was not a Cristiano Ronaldo regen, but he ironically shared his ID with a real-life Barcelona youth player. In fact, that face belongs to João Mendes – yes, that is Ronaldinho’s son, who now plays for Burnley in real-life!
Sports Interactive were quickly made aware of this bug and ‘fixed’ it in a later patch. The fix was to add “r-“ to the start of every generated player’s Unique ID, so a newgen with the ID “2002100338” would now have it changed to “r-2002100338”.
However, FM24 does still recycle IDs of unused players and assign them to some newgens. The only difference is that if that player has a face in your facepack, it is NOT assigned to the newgen.
This is Keren Tal – one of the many ‘Faces in the Game’ who appears as a newgen player in every Football Manager save. In this save, his ID is “r-225120”. He also doesn’t have a face.
There is indeed a real player in the database with the ID “225120”. That’s Dylan Abora-Poku, who played in Yeovil’s youth team several years ago. Abora-Poku’s face does appear in my facepack, but it hasn’t been loaded for Tal. That’s good… I guess?
THE ‘REGEN’ NEWGENS
Now… what if I told you that some newgens on FM24 used the recycled IDs of OTHER newgens?
I stumbled across this a few weeks ago, while doing some testing for my new save in Sweden. I reported my findings on Threads, and now that I’ve recreated it on my current save, I’m going to explain what’s happening here.
This is the youth intake I got at Nacka FC in September 2025 – in the late stages of my second season.
Because Nacka were a Swedish 4th-division club with basic junior coaching and youth recruitment, none of these lads were very good. I only signed five of them (Adam, Dervisevic, Jarju, Wickman and Ternstedt) to youth contracts and released the rest. Those are the ones we’ll be focussing on today.
Usually, when a terrible youth player gets released, they will fail to find another club and retire within a few months. They’ll disappear from the game, and their Unique ID is never used in the save again…
…or so you’d think. Let’s fast-forward a few months, and look at that same squad again in March 2026.
Sunesson, Petersson and Sjögren have all found new clubs and are still in the game, but there are also a lot of unfamiliar names on the list.
Instead of retiring from the game, the likes of Kadrić, Romero and Zadran have just been… replaced. What’s going on?
The first player to be replaced was right-winger Francisco Romero, who retired in January. At the same time, Ayrton Acosta – a 15-year-old Uruguayan striker at Nacional – entered the game with Romero’s old ID. Huh.
Several more Nacka rejects were ‘replaced’ when most European clubs received their youth intakes in March. Central midfielder Petter Zadran turned into a Gibraltarian centre-back at Lincoln Red Imps, while left-back Amar Kadrić was also replaced by a centre-half – at Celtic. (Sorry if I’ve brought back any bad memories, Brendan.)
Right-back Valerio Pesci did at least keep his Italian heritage when he regenerated as a forward at AC Milan.
Most interestingly, here’s Qadr Chawapiwa – a Manchester City striker who’s been labelled the next Michael Owen, which probably means he’s about to run over a rabbit. If you’re wondering why this Zimbabwe-born Englishman looks like a generic white Swede, it’s because he’s using the recycled ID of our former youth left-winger Jacob Rodlert.
By the time the 2026 season started, there were three players (Hägglund, Lindeberg-Lindvet and Zettergren) who were still free agents in the game, and who hadn’t yet been replaced. I decided to add them to my shortlist and follow them on my Social Feed (finally, a use for the Social Feed!) so I could see exactly what happened to them when they inevitably retired.
Hägglund was first to go, retiring in mid-May. He then disappeared from the game, and his ID remained untaken for a month. And then the German non-league club TeBe Berlin randomly got a new intake in mid-June, which included a 26-year-old Brazilian centre-back named André who took Hägglund’s identity.
Lindeberg-Lindvet and Zettergren stuck around until mid-September, when they made room for a new Swedish youth intake. Curiously, these were the Social Media messages I received about their retirements:
Who the hell are Andreas Fredriksson and Thomas Masuta? As you’ve probably guessed by now, they’re the youth players from Malmö FF who’ve taken the IDs of Lindeberg-Lindvet and Zettergren respectively.
FM has just straight up done a ‘Find & Replace’ job, substituting our rejects’ names for Malmö’s newgens. The telltale sign is that the journalist’s tweet BlueSky post says Masuta has retired at the age of 17. Zettergren was 17 when he retired; Masuta is 15.
I should add that those three ex-Nacka players were all removed from my shortlist as soon as they retired – and their ‘regens’ weren’t automatically added to the shortlist. So at least FM recognises to some extent that they are different players.
These players are, however, added to your ‘Not Interested’ list if their predecessors were already on there. Any youth intake trialists that you don’t sign permanently will (by default) go onto the ‘Not Interested’ list for a year. Sure enough, exactly one year after they were released, three of my former youth players – and five of the ‘regens’ – were removed from this list.
Nacka’s 2025 youth intake has changed an awful lot in 12 months. Eight of the players are still going strong, but the other eight have all been replaced by doppelgangers – some as far afield as Gibraltar and Uruguay.
AN INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM
Here’s another newgen bug that has been reported quite a bit during FM24’s life cycle.
Sometimes, a newgen will be called up to a youth national team that they have no links to whatsoever. For example, a French newgen based in France – who has no dual nationalities – might suddenly find themselves in the Austria Under-19s squad, or a born-and-bred Bosnian might wind up playing for Moldova.
I suspected that this might be related to the newgen ‘replacement’ issue I’ve just talked about… so I did some more tests on a different save. I loaded 33 top European leagues – and every European national team player – and holidayed until March 2024.
In early March, there are five unattached players in the Armenia Under-21s squad. I’ve put one of these players on my shortlist; he’s the one whose name is in orange. I want you to remember that name for later.
Two weeks later, let’s look at the Armenia U21 squad again. Notice that there’s now a trio of 15-year-old ‘Armenian’ lads with very un-Armenian names and nationalities. Where did they come from?
Left-back Razmik Aleksanyan – the guy on my shortlist – started as a free agent and retired in March after failing to find a club. He was in the Armenia U21 squad up until his retirement, at which point a Turkish midfielder named Eşref Altuntaş generated into the game and immediately took his place.
Interestingly, midfielder Michael Aslanyan was not in the Armenia national set-up when he retired. His ID was taken by a Gibraltarian centre-back named Ted Campbell, who entered the game on 13 March. As far as I can tell, the Armenia U21 squad wasn’t named until the following day, so the game must have somehow factored in Aslanyan’s nationality when it called up Campbell.
This also proves my earlier theory wrong – and that real players who have been loaded into the game CAN, in fact, be ‘replaced’ by these ‘regens’. This doesn’t just affect unloaded players or newgens.
However, there is nothing that would explain why the Austrian left-back Michael Bettenstaedt is in the squad. He’s a completely newly-generated player, and there is no player (either in the FM24 database or earlier in this save) with the same ID as him.
He is also – and I can’t stress this enough – NOT Armenian.
During the March international break, Armenia Under-21s played in two friendly matches against North Macedonia and Kosovo. Bettenstaedt started both matches, while Altuntaş and Campbell each came on as substitutes in the Kosovo game.
Also, did you notice that the players’ Under-21s caps have been assigned to their actual nationalities rather than to Armenia? So it appears that Bettenstaedt has two caps for Austria Under-21s, while Campbell and Altuntaş apparently have a single U21 cap each for Gibraltar and Türkiye respectively.
This is the kind of statistical bug that would really annoy some hardcore FMers.
Of course, it’s not just Armenia that’s affected. There’s a random Hungarian in the Liechtenstein Under-19s squad, while a hot German prospect is turning out for the Republic of Ireland. We also have a couple of Russian spies who’ve infiltrated the Bosnia & Herzegovina and Latvia youth teams.
I then holidayed a further year – to March 2025 – and found a couple of Greek players in the Gibraltarian youth teams. It seems that this bug mostly occurs during the March international breaks, when long-time free agents are retiring from the game, and most European clubs are receiving their youth intakes.
I’ve seen some weird international bugs across Football Manager’s history, but players playing for the wrong nations? That’s probably the most serious one I’ve ever come across.
ARE THESE REGENS?
No, they’re not.
As if it needs explaining again, regens on the old Championship Manager series were regenerations of older players who had recently retired. They would usually (but not always) have the same positions and nationalities of the original players, and they would share some mental and hidden attributes. They would just have different names and be born several years later.
For example, on my Championship Manager 01/02 save, Hristo Stoichkov retired in 2003 and was soon replaced by another versatile left-footed Bulgarian forward with 190 Potential Ability.
As far as I can tell, these ‘regenerated’ newgens have nothing consistently in common with the players they replace. On my earlier tests, I saw a few players who ‘regenerated’ with the same nationalities and positions, but that was just a coincidence.
As if you need further proof, I opened up FM Genie Scout to compare my original Nacka youth players with their replacements. As you can see, all the replacements have much higher potential.
So the only thing these players have in common is their ‘Unique’ IDs.
IS THIS A BUG?
Possibly.
I’m not sure why FM24 is recycling player IDs to begin with. If every newgen was only assigned a vacant 10-digit Unique ID starting with “2002”, then by my calculations, there would be just under 925,000 Unique IDs available to them from the start of a new save.
Even on a large database with lots of leagues loaded, it would likely take MANY in-game years for the game to exhaust every ID and get to “2002999999”. But even then, surely the game could just give the next newgen Unique ID “2003000000” and continue as normal for the next million newgens?
Then again, I’m not a programmer. Maybe it’s just more economical and practical to simply recycle the IDs of players who came and went without doing anything notable in the game.
And it’s probably not that big a deal. Besides, what sane person would notice or even care if their new 5* potential striker had the same in-game ID as former Nottingham Forest youth player Keith Asare?
It would be more of a problem if the game accidentally gave newgens the IDs of more notable players. Imagine if you got a few years into a save, and you discovered that the 2022 Ballon d’Or winner was not Karim Benzema, but a random newgen from Poland who would have been 13 at the time.
Or, even worse, if your favourite newgen who led you to five Champions League titles retired from the game – and then, a month later, they were erased from history and replaced with some bloke at a newly-promoted Spanish third-division club?
Luckily, as far as I know, this hasn’t happened yet. But given Sports Interactive’s recent propensity to break systems that had worked perfectly for over a decade, perhaps this could be a bug to watch out for on Football Manager 25?
I hope you’ve found my post interesting. If you have any thoughts on this ‘bug’, feel free to drop a comment below – or you can contact me on Threads or BlueSky.
Fuller FM 
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