Welcome back to Fuller FM, where I will today be discussing something a little bit different.
While we all enjoy playing Football Manager (at least those of us who aren’t on Reddit), it can be a huge time sink. You might have to play through A LOT of matches in a single season – especially if you’re managing in Brazil, or in the English lower leagues.
Did you know there’s a hidden feature in FM that can speed up your save? It’s called the ‘Instant Result’ button, and it does what it says on the tin – just pick your team and your tactics, and the game will generate a result instantly.
But can it also make your team play better?
INTRODUCTION
First off, why would you want to ‘instant result’ your games? Surely it defeats the point of Football Manager when you aren’t managing your football team in football matches?
For many of us, FM can be an intense experience – and a time-consuming one. ‘Instant resulting’ matches can save you time in certain scenarios. Maybe you’ve got a ‘Building A Nation’ save, and you’ve reached the point where you are so dominant domestically that you want to focus on continental competitions? Or perhaps you have got nothing to play for in the last few games of the season, and you just want to get to the next one ASAP?
FM24 does not have an ‘Instant Result’ button in the default skin. You will need to install a custom skin and load it onto your game to activate the button.
First, find the skin you want to use and download it. This will typically give you an FMF file, which you will have to move into your FM skins folder at (My) Documents > Sports Interactive > Football Manager 20xx > skins.
After that, you should load up FM, go into your ‘Preferences’ and select ‘Interface’ in the dropdown menu (or just type ‘skin’ into the search bar at the top). Then you can select the skin you want to use before confirming the changes. Just wait a while for FM to load the new skin up, and then you’re ready to go.
I am using the Wannachup Instant Result skin, which is essentially the default skin but with the ‘Instant Result’ button activated. It will appear on the Team Selection screen immediately before a match (next to ‘Submit Team’), and on the playback controls when you are in a match.
If you have set up any ‘match plans’, you can set the game to automatically use one of them when you simulate the match. Personally, I have never used match plans on my FM saves, and I have no (ahem) plans to start now.
WHAT IS INSTANT RESULT?
I know what you’re going to say. Some FMers might not want the hassle of downloading a custom skin. Instead, they will just use the option to ‘Go on Holiday’ for matches they aren’t too bothered about. This is not a good idea.
When you ‘Go on Holiday’, FM acts as if you actually are on holiday. Even if you tick the options to use your default tactics and squad selection, your assistant manager will take charge of the team – and they will get the credit for any results. Don’t be surprised if you return from Magaluf and discover that your number 2 has been named Manager of the Month!
If you ‘instant result’ your matches, your assistant will manage the game for you… but, importantly, you will be credited with the result. Your assistant will also stick more rigidly with the tactics and instructions you originally selected, which is not always the case when you go on holiday.
So just pick your team, sit back, relax, and let Jason Tindall do the heavy lifting for you.
Football Manager uses two different match engines for simulating matches – the Quick Match Engine (QME), and the Full Match Engine (FME). The QME will quickly sim through matches in limited detail, with results often heavily influenced by the teams’ relative abilities and reputations.
For every match in your team’s league (and indeed any competition you have set to simulate in full detail), the game will use the more detailed FME. Your team’s matches will always be simulated with the FME – whether you play them, holiday through them, or even use ‘Instant Result’.
Once the match has finished simulating, you will get a nice little pop-up showing the match summary, your player ratings, and some basic stats:
However, there is a caveat to bear in mind before you click ‘Instant Result’. If you do this before a match, your assistant will make substitutions when they see fit…
…but if you click the button DURING a match, they won’t make ANY subs at all for the rest of the game. This is yet another bug that has been in FM since time immemorial.
So if you’re coasting to victory and don’t want to stick around until the final whistle, it might be a good idea to bring some subs on before you press that button. You don’t want all your starters to get exhausted, do you?
THE EXPERIMENT
For this experiment, I will be using my Nacka FC team from my “Nacka’s Yard” story save in Sweden. It’s the 2036 season – my 13th at the club – and we are aiming to build on a 3rd-place finish from the previous Allsvenskan campaign.
The bookmakers have only made us 8th-favourites for the Allsvenskan title, and our media prediction is 5th, but I expect us to at least finish in the top four again. Can I bring league glory to Nacka this year, or will ‘Instant Result’ do a better job than me?
For the purposes of this experiment, I am only interested in the results of our league matches, of which there are 30 in the Allsvenskan season. Cup and European ties will not be taken into consideration.
SAVE A: PLAY AS NORMAL
This is my ‘canon’ save. I play through the game as normal, saving before and after every match. As if it needs to be clarified, I only play each match once – whatever the result is at full-time is the result I take, for better or worse.
I will then use the league results and table from this save and compare them to what happens when I use ‘Instant Result’.
SAVE B: INSTANT RESULT EACH MATCH SEPARATELY
I will reload a save from immediately before each league match. My tactics, starting XI and substitutes will therefore always be the same as they were for the equivalent match in Save A (the ‘canon’ save).
However, instead of clicking ‘Submit Team’ to play the match, I will click ‘Instant Result’ to quickly generate a result. I will then record the results as well as some key statistics. I will only produce one ‘Instant Result’ for each match.
As I am reloading and instanting each match separately, Save B technically consists of 30 individual saves rather than just one. That means I cannot produce a complete league table for Save B, but I can compare the results with those on the other two saves to estimate where Nacka might have finished.
SAVE C: INSTANT RESULT THE ENTIRE SEASON
I will reload a save from immediately before the first league match of the season, at home to AFC Eskilstuna. I will delegate training and media responsibilities to my assistant manager. I will then ‘Instant Result’ through the entire season within the same save.
I will select the same starting tactic for each match as I had in Save A and Save B. However, as the players available to me may not always be the same due to injuries and suspensions, I will click ‘Quick Pick’ to have my assistant pick the starting XI and substitutes.
THE RESULTS
SAVE A: PLAY AS NORMAL
WON: 18. DRAWN: 4. LOST: 8.
GOALS FOR: 53. GOALS AGAINST: 28. GOAL DIFFERENCE: +25. POINTS: 58.
| NACKA SHOTS | 335 | OPPOSITION SHOTS | 250 |
| NACKA SHOTS ON TARGET | 148 | OPP. SHOTS ON TARGET | 94 |
| NACKA SHOT ACCURACY | 44.2% | OPP. SHOT ACCURACY | 37.6% |
| NACKA CONVERSION RATE | 15.8% | OPP. CONVERSION RATE | 11.2% |
| NACKA FOULS | 379 | OPPOSITION FOULS | 392 |
| NACKA POSSESSION | 49.95% | OPPOSITION POSSESSION | 50.05% |
If you’ve been following my Nacka story, you’ll probably remember how we got on.
After a solid if unspectacular start to the season, we went top of the table in August… only to hit a rough patch when European qualifiers took priority. Though we recovered well to finish the season on a six-match winning streak, we ultimately finished 2nd – just one agonising point short of the title.
We conceded only 28 goals across the 30 matches, which is solid. Scoring 53 at the other end is good, but I find that you often need to average at least two goals per match to be serious championship material. Room for improvement there.
We slipped up at home a few times – losing to Malmö, Djurgården and Helsingborg – but it was an early-season defeat at eventual champions Elfsborg that ultimately cost us the most. Could ‘Instant Result’ have turned any of those crucial losses into a draw… or even a win?
SAVE B: INSTANT RESULT EACH MATCH SEPARATELY
WON: 19. DRAWN: 5. LOST: 6.
GOALS FOR: 63. GOALS AGAINST: 30. GOAL DIFFERENCE: +33. POINTS: 62.
| NACKA SHOTS | 317 | OPPOSITION SHOTS | 252 |
| NACKA SHOTS ON TARGET | 138 | OPP. SHOTS ON TARGET | 94 |
| NACKA SHOT ACCURACY | 43.5% | OPP. SHOT ACCURACY | 37.3% |
| NACKA CONVERSION RATE | 19.9% | OPP. CONVERSION RATE | 11.9% |
| NACKA FOULS | 301 | OPPOSITION FOULS | 411 |
| NACKA POSSESSION | 49.63% | OPPOSITION POSSESSION | 50.37% |
When I decided to ‘instant result’ each match on an individual basis, the results were indeed slightly better. We added four points to our original total – and our final haul of 62 points would have been enough to win the league title on any of the other two saves.
We won 11 of the first 14 matches that I instanted, and never lost back-to-back matches. We also converted a few defeats into draws – and at home to Djurgården in September, that magic button even flipped a 2-1 loss to a 2-1 win. However, we also lost a couple of home games against Hammarby and Norrköping that I originally won by myself, so it perhaps wasn’t that magic.
Our team was certainly more clinical in front of goal compared to the original save. Despite having 18 fewer shots, they scored 10 more goals, with our shot conversion rate shooting up to almost 20%. And while we only scored more than once in 15 games when I played them, simulating the matches saw us find the net at least twice on 22 occasions.
We also had slightly less possession and conceded fewer fouls, while our opponents were a little bit dirtier. All in all, the Instant Result appears to have made this team play better. Now I’m worrying I might be out of a job soon!
SAVE C: INSTANT RESULT THE ENTIRE SEASON
WON: 14. DRAWN: 3. LOST: 13.
GOALS FOR: 58. GOALS AGAINST: 49. GOAL DIFFERENCE: +9. POINTS: 45.
| NACKA SHOTS | 280 | OPPOSITION SHOTS | 307 |
| NACKA SHOTS ON TARGET | 132 | OPP. SHOTS ON TARGET | 143 |
| NACKA SHOT ACCURACY | 47.1% | OPP. SHOT ACCURACY | 46.6% |
| NACKA CONVERSION RATE | 20.7% | OPP. CONVERSION RATE | 16.0% |
| NACKA FOULS | 291 | OPPOSITION FOULS | 351 |
| NACKA POSSESSION | 48.68% | OPPOSITION POSSESSION | 51.32% |
But here is proof that you can’t rely on Instant Result alone to get victories. You need to pay attention to the rest of the game as well.
In this universe, I was holidaying between matches and letting my assistant ‘quick pick’ the team. The former had an adverse effect on team morale because I was not addressing any player concerns in a timely manner. The latter meant my assistant was constantly picking the same players for each match, which eventually knackered our regular starting XI and left everyone else short of match fitness.
As a result, Nacka underperformed in this running of the 2036 season. Things began to derail in May, when we lost at home to Halmstad and away to Häcken – two matches that we won on each of the previous ‘saves’. Although we had a five-game winning streak after the mid-season break, we then lost seven of our next eight – a run that shows what can happen if morale goes down the toilet and you don’t attempt to mitigate it.
Having been down in 11th place by the end of September, Nacka eventually climbed back up to 8th but were well adrift of European qualification. We were also nine points worse off than when I managed the team properly.
Interestingly, this Nacka team scored 58 goals (the most in the division) but conceded 49 (only the bottom three fared worse). Shooting accuracy was generally better – both for us and for our opponents – when I instanted matches compared to when I actually played them. There were also fewer fouls across the board.
IN CONCLUSION…
So what can we conclude? Does instanting your FM matches lead to better attacking play – at least in terms of shooting – and cleaner tackling? Can the ‘Instant Result’ button give you a better chance of winning potentially close matches? Can it even make the difference between winning a league championship and narrowly missing out?
I’m not sure we can take that much from this experiment. I think the ‘more goals’ and ‘fewer fouls’ phenomena is a case of ‘correlation does not mean causation’.
As I explained earlier, FM still uses the Full Match Engine whether you play your matches or ‘instant’ them. I don’t believe there’s anything under the hood that would change how matches play out. As much as people like to complain that the AI loves to screw them over or make them look like idiots, your presence at (or absence from) games doesn’t necessarily make them easier or harder to win.
If the ‘Instant Result’ button had put your matches through the Quick Match Engine instead, there would likely be more significant and fascinating differences in the statistics. Indeed, it might be interesting to take a closer look at QME statistics in another experiment. What do you reckon, folks?
And as anyone who’s reloaded their save after a bad result knows, replaying the same match multiple times can lead to different results – even if the starting line-ups and formations stay the same. Certain pre-match scenarios can make a particular outcome more likely (e.g. one team has much better morale, the other team is missing several key players)… but nothing is guaranteed.
I could replay our home game against Landskrona 100 times, and even though Landskrona have a much weaker team than us, I would still expect them to win at least a few of the simulations. This doesn’t mean Football Manager is a poor simulation, or that nothing you do actually matters.
Imagine a Groundhog Day scenario where Bournemouth played against Crystal Palace every week. You would not expect one team to consistently defeat the other, but any stroke of (mis)fortune or tactical genius can absolutely make a difference in any given match.
Although I still prefer the thrill of watching the impact of my tactical changes play out in real time, I have no problem with other FMers using the ‘Instant Result’ button. I don’t think it’s the cheating mechanic or ‘Click Here To Win’ button that some people seem to believe it is. And anyway, FM is a single-player game, so play it however you like.
So has this entire article been a waste of time? Probably… or maybe I’m just running out of article ideas because I’m really desperate for a new Football Manager game. Please, Sports Interactive, just give us something!
What are your thoughts on the Instant Result button? Do you use it on your saves – and if so, how often? Let me know by dropping a comment below, or contact me on Bluesky or Threads.
P.S. If you’re as sad as me and want to look closer at the data I used for this experiment, you can find my Excel workbook here. Have at it.
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