Football Manager is the most realistic sports simulation video game out there. We all know that. But it’s not perfect.
Welcome back to another edition of this Fuller FM series… wait, can I call this a series? It’s is the third part now… so yeah. I think I can call it a series.
Anyway, it’s time to take a look at some more weird ‘FM Logic’. We’ve previously discussed bizarre media interactions and press interviews that make a White House news conference look like a place of sanity… and we’ve also touched on the game’s issues with transfers and player development.
Now it’s time to focus on managers – specifically, the logic that the game uses when moving AI managers between jobs. Whether they’re swapping jobs with another coach, taking over a hated rival, or being parachuted into a Championship club without any previous coaching experience, football managers in Football Manager are definitely known to make some peculiar moves.
JOB SWAPS
Let me set the scene. Romford Rovers have just sacked their manager Colin Clueless after a string of bad results, and they replace him with Telford Town’s manager Gary Goodcoach.
A week later, the Telford Town board of directors discuss who they should appoint as their new coach. One of them says, “I hear Colin Clueless is available.”
And so Colin Clueless is hired as Telford Town manager, meaning he has effectively swapped jobs with Gary Goodcoach.
This happens fairly regularly on Football Manager. A smaller club loses their manager to a bigger club – because reputation trumps everything in FM – and they decide to just bring in the guy whom he replaced.
No promotions from within, no poaching from an even smaller club, no scouring the market for a more logical candidate. They just make the laziest appointment imaginable.
As far as I’m aware, this basically never happens in real-life. I certainly can’t remember a situation in recent Premier League or English Football League history where two managers were simultaneously each other’s direct predecessor at one club and their direct successor at another.
It almost occurred in the Premier League this very summer. After their head coach Thomas Frank was poached by Tottenham Hotspur or Spurs, Brentford approached his predecessor Ange Postecoglou about the possibility of also succeeding Frank at the Gtech. They ultimately gave the job to Keith Andrews instead.
This managerial job-swapping has been happening on Football Manager for years. Indeed, the problem even goes back to Championship Manager. On my current long-term CM01/02 save, I’ll often see THREE-way job swaps – where Team A sack their manager and poach the manager of Team B, who then poach the manager of Team C, who then appoint Team A’s original manager.
I even had a FOUR-way swap in the very first season of my Football Manager 2013 save.
It started when West Ham sacked Sam Allardyce and brought in Martin O’Neill from Sunderland. After that, Sunderland hired Brian McDermott, who was replaced at Reading by the newly-sacked QPR boss Harry Redknapp.
And who succeeded Redknapp at QPR? Sam Allardyce, of course.
POST-TOURNAMENT MADNESS
I’m sure you’ve noticed that there are A LOT of big managerial movements shortly after a major tournament, such as a World Cup or a European Championship. You will see several international managers leave their jobs after poor tournaments – or, less often, because they either want a new challenge or they intend to retire from football altogether.
The problem is that these sackings only happen at the very end of the tournament – and all at the same time. Even if Thomas Tuchel has a disastrous World Cup and gets England knocked out at the Group Stage (never say never), he will still get to keep his job for a few more weeks until the World Cup Final has been played.
Because of this, a lot of job openings will spring up only a month or so before the big European leagues start their new season. Certain managers of big clubs will leave to manage an international side. If those teams who lose their managers decide to headhunt from smaller clubs, then those clubs might still be scrambling to appoint new managers only a few days before their first league game! Not ideal.
These international appointments don’t always make much sense. After Euro 2036, Lee Carsley left a comfortable position at West Ham – who had finished 14th in the previous Premier League season – to move to Sweden. Yes, SWEDEN.
Okay, so he did some fine work with England Under-21s, but over a decade had passed at this point. And in case it wasn’t already obvious, Lee Carsley is not Swedish!
Carsley’s successor at West Ham was Carl Fletcher, who had led Aberdeen to SIX consecutive Scottish Premiership titles (though to be fair, having a mega-rich Indian tycoon also helped matters). Aberdeen lost their legendary manager immediately after their first game of new Premiership campaign, and they didn’t name a successor until three more weeks had passed.
Not that it disrupted the Dons’ rhythm. They went on to win another league title under Greg Vanney.
In the wake of the same Euros, Germany brought in their third Spanish manager in as many tournament cycles – Imanol Alguacil, whose last job was at perennial La Liga strugglers Cádiz.
Alguacil also only lasted one tournament before he was sacked at the end of a disappointing 2038 World Cup and succeeded by YET ANOTHER Spaniard – Roberto Martínez, who was previously the England manager. Just imagine the Daily Mail headlines.
Meanwhile, Martínez’s successor at England was… [checks notes] Marc Schneider.
Who’s Marc Schneider? A 58-year-old Swiss guy who had never managed a national team, never worked in England, and who had never won a single trophy in an unremarkable career where his biggest achievement was qualifying Fiorentina for the Europa League. Sven-Göran Eriksson or Fabio Capello, he was not.
FROM ROTHERHAM TO BRATISLAVA
This can even happen outside of tournaments. After four years at Rotherham in which he took the Millers to the Championship, Brian Barry-Murphy walked out midway through their first season up because he wanted an international job.
Yes, okay, this sounds like when the ex-Denmark striker Jon Dahl Tomasson quit Blackburn last year to become Sweden’s head coach. But in this case, Barry-Murphy – who was born in Ireland and had spent almost his entire footballing career in England – was leaving familiar surroundings to take charge of Slovakia!
I can only presume the head of the Slovak FA was a boyhood Bury fan in the mid-2000s.
I’ve also seen international managers move BETWEEN nations for no logical reason. A very common occurrence early into a typical FM24 save is that Ralf Rangnick will quit a mediocre Austria national team to manage an even more mediocre national team (e.g. the Republic of Ireland or Poland).
In previous FMs, there were issues where national teams would almost always appoint managers from the same nation as them. Of course, this was unrealistic and would severely limit the options of smaller nations. But then – and this is a comically common theme with Football Manager – SI overcorrected, and now basically every nation in Europe wants a foreign manager!
This list of European national team managers in 2038 shows how ridiculous things can get. You have a German managing Spain while a Spaniard manages Germany, a Swiss fella coaches Slovenia, a Frenchman is in charge of Croatia, a Norwegian calls the shots in Serbia, and a Ukrainian heads up the Azzurri of Italy.
If I wanted to, I could scroll even further down this list and show you Simone Inzaghi at Finland, Giovanni van Bronckhorst at Bosnia & Herzegovina, and even André Villas-Boas at Latvia!
One of the few guys who’s managing the correct national team is Robbie Keane. Then again, I could have sworn Keano was a boyhood Hungary fan.
SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY
Managers in FM don’t always factor in rivalries when they take up new jobs. It’s not unheard of for a manager who has a long association with one club to suddenly turn heel and take charge of their arch-rivals.
It’s true that this does sometimes happen in real-life. For example, Rafa Benítez – Liverpool’s 2005 Champions League-winning manager – had a brief and disastrous turn at Everton 16 years later. Stefano Pioli was a Serie A winner with AC Milan after a much less successful stint with Internazionale. Fernando Santos even managed each of Portugal’s Big Three clubs at various points during the 2000s.
On my save, Roberto De Zerbi basically did a Pioli, but better. He was at Inter for six years, even winning a Serie A title in 2026. After six years away from the San Siro, he returned to take charge of AC Milan – and won two more scudetti with them.
Meanwhile, Lionel Scaloni’s career turned out more like José Mourinho’s. After winning two European competitions at Chelsea, he abruptly left before the 2031/2032 season after being poached by Manchester United – a direct transfer that not even the Special One would have the courage to do. He spent four years at Old Trafford, but only won a trophy.
Scaloni fared much better after moving to Tottenham in 2037, winning the treble in his first season. Admittedly, that was an underwhelming ‘treble’ of the Community Shield, UEFA Super Cup and League Cup… and he was sacked after six months, with Spurs floundering in the bottom half.
Several FMers have reported that they had Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola and Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp taking each other’s jobs on their saves. Obviously, they won’t do a Channel 4-style “Wife Swap” straight away… but a few years down the line, you’ll likely see Pep singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” while Jürgen rubs shoulders with the Gallagher brothers.
This swap became so prevalent, in fact, that Sports Interactive made changes to the database specifically to stop it from happening. Guardiola now has Liverpool set as one of his ‘Disliked Clubs’, making it much less likely that he ever moves to Anfield. As for Klopp…
Cursed Klopp felt so dirty about wearing sky blue in this universe that he got himself sacked 16 months later and ended his career as a scout… at Newcastle. By the way, Klopp also managed Bayern Munich in this save.
To be fair, maybe it is just a tribalistic British mindset that you shouldn’t go to bed with your rivals. I cannot ever imagine Steven Gerrard becoming Everton manager or Brendan Rodgers taking charge of Rangers, but perhaps coaches from other parts of the world aren’t as reluctant to manage their old foes. Let me know your thoughts on this.
WHO ARE YOU?
There may not always be enough managers in the game to go around – especially in the lower leagues – so Football Manager periodically generates new ones. These ‘newgen’ managers will then start getting jobs in the National League North/South or other part-time leagues.
Of course, not every budding football manager starts their career as a manager. Many of them start off in coaching or analyst roles and gradually work their way up – like Will Still, who was a video analyst at Sint-Truiden before he became that FM IRL guy.
Unfortunately, there are no back stories with these newgen managers. They just enter the save game with no prior experience, and then one day, somebody tells them, “Congratulations, you are now manager of Kettering Town!” Of course, that does sound like every single person who has ever played a Football Manager save.
You could just create a back story in your head that would explain why some nobody is now calling the shots at Latimer Park. Maybe he had previously coached Kettering’s Under-16s or a local non-league club in Northamptonshire, or perhaps he was dating the chairman’s daughter. But the next example below is a little tougher to explain away…
James Wake randomly spawned into my save with elite coaching attributes and an empty CV. Some time later, he got his first ever role in professional football – earning 35 grand per week as manager of Championship high-flyers Middlesbrough.
Admittedly, there is one minor detail to bear in mind…
James Wake was born in Middlesbrough. But since when has being from the area been enough qualification to manage your hometown club? Chris Rea is also a Middlesbrough boy, and yet I highly doubt he was on the shortlist to replace Michael Carrick this summer!
Also, FM’s AI is neither dumb enough nor smart enough to give managers jobs purely based on where they were born. Kettering’s manager from my previous example was actually born in Oldham – nearly a 3-hour drive north-west.
Wake did enjoy a successful career at Boro, taking them up into the Premier League in 2032. Over the next few years, he would continue his career at Nottingham Forest, then win the Conference League with Fulham… before finally taking charge of a little Spanish club named Real Madrid. Not bad for a nobody.
That was another big ol’ list of logical bugs and issues that I’d like Sports Interactive to sort out for the next Football Manager. At least find a way to stop the job-swapping, guys – it’s been going on for about 25 years now!
What other bizarre managerial movements have you seen on your Football Manager saves? Please share them in a comment below. You can also find me on Bluesky and Threads.
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