Every year, there's one game I cannot pull myself away from, and that's Football Manager. Simply put, no other sports video game is able to create unique and emerging stories in the same way that Football Manager can, thanks to its dedication and commitment to realism.
This year's entry, Football Manager 2024, represents an end of an era for Sports Interactive. Earlier this year, SI announced that FM25 will be made using Unity, as the existing engine for the game is no longer technically sufficient to support further development. Thus, this is the last time we'll see Football Manager in its current form, with FM24 promising to be the most complete Football Manager experience ever.
Starting off, one of the best features added this year is the ability to import your FM23 saves to Football Manager 2024. Even more excitingly, the feature is fully compatible with importing modded databases from FM23, meaning I was able to port across my North Macedonian Akademija Pandev save without any issues. The process of importing an FM23 save is really clean and easy to follow in-game, and is one of the most exciting additions to Football Manager in recent memory.
As someone who likes to play “nation-building” saves, selecting a small team in a random country and work to lead them to international glory, the improvements made to AI transfer business and squad-building made a huge difference to my save, with AI clubs making much more intelligent and logical decisions. Most importantly, the tweaks to player values mean that your players are valued more accurately by the game’s AI, which makes your transfer business feel much more meaningful and realistic compared to previous entries.
Moreover, the addition of intermediaries to help offload players has helped to further bring to life Football Manager 2024’s transfer dealings. The feature undeniably makes the game easier, allowing you to drop players from your wage bill without too much difficulty. Still, it further adds to the depth of the game’s systems, helping the transfer market to feel much more active and alive, and thus more representative of real life, which is always a win for the most realistic sports simulator on the market.
Another outstanding quality of life improvement that's present in Football Manager 2024 is the new Set Piece Creator. Like many, I rejoiced when Sports Interactive announced a huge overhaul was coming to set pieces, from how you create your corner tactics to hiring specific set piece coaches to help train your routines. Being able to rank your players for different roles within a set piece routine is also a dream come true, as previously players had to change their set piece tactics whenever they made a change to their lineup or a substitution.
Having played around with some different tactics, there's a huge amount of depth and customisability with the new Set Piece Creator. It's great to see Sports Interactive listening to fan feedback on the game, as this feature is certainly pitched towards the game's existing playerbase. If you're new to Football Manager however, you'll likely be overwhelmed when faced with the Set Piece Creator. Thankfully, players who aren't interested in the feature will be able to delegate the job of creating set piece routines to their staff.
However, for myself, some of Football Manager 2024’s new features didn’t quite hit the mark. Player targets were a feature I was keen to get a look at; player dynamics and promises are notoriously one of the most frustrating mechanics in previous titles. It’s easy to get tied in promises you didn’t intend on making thanks to some dubious and nonspecific dialogue options when speaking with a player.
Unfortunately, this results in targets becoming more of an annoyance than anything else, as there's seemingly no gameplay reason as to why you would set targets for players. Perhaps you could argue that the inclusion of targets simply helps add to the depth of the simulation, but there's no benefit to engaging with the mechanic, and most players will end up avoiding setting targets as there is no perceivable benefit.
Moreover, whilst undeniable improvements have been made with FM24's match engine, it’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore the fact that the game still doesn’t look as good as a game that’s consistently in Steam’s top 20 most-played should. Player movements do look more realistic, and the ball does move through the air and bounce much more naturally, however the complete visual package on show has become increasingly dated.
There’s long been a debate amongst the Football Manager community regarding the game’s quality of graphics, and whether they can justify being as poor as they are. As mentioned before, we do know that Football Manager 2025 will be made on Unity rather than Sports Interactive’s own engine, and consequently we can expect a major graphical upgrade next year. In the meantime, FM24's graphics leave a lot to be desired.
Speaking of areas of the game that maybe should have been given a little more focus is the game’s interview and interaction systems. I find interviews to be one of the most boring aspects of the gameplay in the Football Manager series, with the dialogue decisions you make becoming incredibly repetitive and formulaic. This sadly remains the case in Football Manager 2024.
You can delegate the task of speaking to the press to your assistant manager or any other member of staff. Yet before you know it, he’ll be offering out your star player to your biggest rivals in every weekly conference. This causes further disruption and frustration with the player dynamics, as this scenario is entirely out of the player's control. Therefore, you're forced by the game to engage with its press conference mechanics, which consist of picking the same dialogue options every time you talk to the media, because you've done it so many times you know which ones give the biggest morale boost to your team.
As I've put thousands of hours across numerous entries across the last six years, interactions in general have undoubtedly become one of my biggest frustrations with the series as a whole. SI have said that they've improved the interaction logic in Football Manager 2024, but interactions still feel either incredibly predictable, with its copy-paste press conferences, or incredibly random, with the board accepting and rejecting requests seemingly on a whim.
Sports Interactive have said that this game is a love letter to the series as it prepares to ascend from its proprietary engine. It's hard to argue with that assertion: Football Manager 2024 is undoubtedly the most comprehensive, dynamic, and engaging sport simulators ever released, and I know I'll be putting many more hours into this year's entry.
However, given that the last two or three Football Manager games were somewhat light on new features (thanks in part to a certain pandemic), I was personally hoping from a little more from Football Manager 2024. It's become increasingly hard to justify how bare-bones international management is, or how dull the game's interaction systems become over time. I think there'll be just enough features to satisfy fans this time around, but expectations will be high for FM25.
Reviewed on PC. A code was provided by the publisher.
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