Football Manager 2024: Your guide to starting a new game

Posted by Delta Gatti on Monday, May 27, 2024

Football Manager is back. The world’s most successful football simulation is in its 20th iteration* and once again millions of fans around the world can load it up, stare at it for a bit and say: “Erm…Where do I start?”

Football Manager is now a little like base jumping in that novices who rush in tend to fail very quickly compared with those who prepare appropriately. This is not a toy. This is Skynet in sportswear. This is a sentient spreadsheet that read a book about Napoleon at the weekend and now wants to test out some ideas on you. It’s not like the old days. You can’t just keep pressing ‘continue’ and rushing to the next game.

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In order to do everything – and I mean everything – before you first press continue, you’ll need about six hours. Seriously.

Now, there are some people who will not blink at this. And I, for one, salute their Buddhist-like patience. But you and I, dear reader, we are not those people. We have stuff going on. We have lives. We might have partners; we might have children. We don’t mind risking a virtual job. But all things considered, we’d rather like to keep our actual job.

So, how do you maintain a healthy balance? How do you give yourself the best foundation for many hours of quiet contemplation and satisfaction? And in what order should you do everything?

*(31st, if you include the games released under the Championship Manager brand)

What do you want?

Before you do anything else, have a long think about the sort of game you want to play. In the old days of Championship Manager, you could fire it up and just figure it out on the hoof, switching tactics, buying players and smashing through half a season in an evening. No more. You’re investing a lot of time in this, so consider your options carefully.

Should you start at the top and manage Real Madrid? Or should you wander into the lowest tier of Scottish football with no coaching badges and scrap your way up the ladder? There’s no wrong answer. You have to ask yourself what you really want. Real Madrid is fun and a good confidence builder, but it can get very dull very quickly. The no-badge challenge is brutal and it might be several seasons before you encounter any sort of success, but the feeling of accomplishment is unsurpassed.

Whichever way you go, you have to think of each job as a real project. You have to remember that everything connects to everything in this game. If you want to usurp David Moyes and rebuild West Ham as an imperious possession team, pinging the ball around with impunity, that’s fine. But it’s not just a question of setting the appropriate tactics. You’ll need players with passing skills and good off-the-ball movement (among other things), you’ll need coaches with high levels of technical expertise, you’ll need to check that possession football training sessions are scheduled. And over many hours and several seasons, your vision will come to life. Hopefully.

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You’ll also have to recognise that a massive ideological shift might be difficult to pull off in one pre-season and accept the risks in doing so. If it goes wrong, you could soon have nothing more to do than press continue for weeks on end until the game deigns to award you the Charlton Athletic job.

Keep asking yourself: what do I want to achieve and is this how I will achieve it?

Delegate or dominate

Football Manager enables you to control almost every aspect of managing a football club, but it doesn’t insist upon it. With judicious use of the Staff Responsibility section, you can outsource the things that don’t interest you.

Don’t like journalists? Neither did Sir Alex Ferguson. Get your assistant to do the press conferences. Can’t be bothered with training? Neither could Brian Clough. It never held him back.

Personally, I don’t want to spend my time setting up scouting missions. I hand it all to my recruitment team and then I check in every month or so to see if they’ve found anyone good. That leaves me with more time to manage the under-18 and under-21 squads. Which is a perfectly normal thing for a middle-aged man to do…

Tactical masterplan

If you’ve followed the first instruction and you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, it should be easy to lay it out on the tactics board. You can do this manually with a Clean Slate or you can use one of the plug-and-play options. These tactics won’t be perfect, but you should think of them like a doctor; they have pledged to do no harm and you can always adapt them as you go.

Just make sure that whatever you do aligns with your wider plan. If you’re going Gegenpress, you need fit, willing players, you need good fitness coaches, and you need a pre-season regime of endurance work. If you’re going Route One, you need a big target man. If you’re going Fluid or Direct Counter-Attack, you need quick players.

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If you prepare multiple tactics (always a good idea; I like to have a Park The Bus prepared to shut down tight games), make sure the main one is set as your primary tactic. Then you won’t have to worry about training for a while.

Vincent Kompany proved with Burnley that it’s possible to swiftly turn a football team from one contrasting playing style to another, and the same is true in Football Manager. But you might need to quickly bring in players capable of carrying out your orders. Sometimes it can be better just to stabilise and effect change gradually.

Set pieces used to be valuable but time-consuming, but they’re easier in Football Manager 2024 because you can just hire a coach who will do it all for you. Word to the wise: short corners seem to be particularly effective for a technically accomplished team…

Squad Planner

So, you’ve stuck your coloured magnets on the whiteboard. Now it’s time to scribble down some names. In the old days, I would literally do this whenever I started a save. Give me an A4 pad, a sharpened pencil and a pot of tea, I’ll give you two players in every position for now, next year and the year after that. Now I only need the tea and the Squad Planner.

This is why you do everything in this order – the Squad Planner will recognise the tactic you’ve chosen and give you ratings for the players in every position, so you can quickly identify your weak spots.

But the best thing about the planner is the way you can easily drop in names from your youth teams to illustrate what you think your team will look like further down the line,  or from your shortlist to see what difference some fresh blood will make. But you haven’t got a shortlist yet. For that, you’ll need a recruitment focus.

Recruitment

Assuming you haven’t disabled Player Attribute Masking (and what sort of monster would do that?), then you’ll need to send scouts to report back on promising players.

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You can search from the players you would realistically know, but at the start of this game, this might not be a very long list. By setting a Recruitment Focus, you can effectively say: “Please find me an out-and-out striker who is under the age of 27 and can kick the ball in the net, find him urgently or we will all be out of a job.”

The scouts will then trundle around the world, watching games and reporting back intermittently. And because you’ve used the Squad Planner so shrewdly, you’ll have spotted that your left-back is 32, the back-up option is 34 and the kids in the youth team should start considering an alternative career. So you can set up a search for a young left-back, too. It’s good to delegate.

Continue

And that’s it. That’s all the stuff you have to do to safely press continue for the first time. Of course, you could do more. You could go through your entire squad one by one, pressing CTRL+K to make little notes on them that will stay for the whole game so that you’ll recognise discarded under-18 players if you later bump into them in the early rounds of the FA Cup. You could start looking at the fixtures and clicking to attend some interesting games around Europe. It can be quite pleasant to just wander over to Spain for the first Clasico, or to take in an Old Firm game, just in case there’s a player there that your scouts have missed. Nothing weird about that. And, if you’re really dedicated to the idea of imposing a holistic style on a club, you should manage the under-21s and under-18s, shouldn’t you? No? It’s just me, isn’t it? Oh dear.

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