Football Manager 2024 is the best way to get obsessed with “the beautiful game” all over again

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SHOULD I PLAY FOOTBALL MANAGER 2024?

Chances are you already know the answer to this question, and it’s yes, because you’re one of the people who plays it every year. If you’re not, though, Football Manager 2024 is a terrific place to jump in. While many of the changes over last year’s edition are small and iterative, together they make this the slickest, easiest to play, and most fully featured soccer management sim ever made.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played six hours of Football Manager 2024, which is a mere blip in the face of the upcoming season I plan on running as the boss dawg of the Philadelphia Union. This was enough time to get acquainted with the club, take the usual induction courses for the scouting team, training, and tactics systems, go on a massive staff hiring spree to fill out my medical and coaching teams, and actually kick the ball around in the new match engine in a couple friendly matches and scrimmages against our second team.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT FOOTBALL MANAGER 2024?

• An eyeball-rupturing amount of data. As usual, this year’s edition of Football Manager is powered by developer Sports Interactive’s industry-leading dataset on hundreds of thousands of players, clubs, leagues, youth organizations, and more. It’s so detailed that it’s become part of the business of soccer—sorry, football—around the world. Scouts and oddsmakers use it to make predictions about trades and matchups; it’s just that comprehensive. I always find all of that information a bit daunting when I jump in, and this year was no different. Once I let go of the idea I had to take it all in, though, I just let the ocean of numbers blend together into an incredibly believable role-playing experience.

• The new set piece system. Football Manager 24 has an all-new system for handling my team’s approach to set piece formations. I decided whether to focus on the far post, near post, or center of the goal, and then my new dedicated set piece coach handled it from there by designing a training routine to get everyone up to speed. For someone like me who still struggles with many of the finer points of the game, I loved the ability to hand the nitty-gritty details off to another coach and stick with my high-level strategy (i.e., mostly reading email, like any good manager).

• The match engine looks so good now. Okay, you’re not going to see FC24 level graphics on game day here, but this is easily the best Football Manager’s match engine has ever looked and performed. Player animations are natural, there are some lovely new net animation effects, and interactions between players—while still pretty wooden at times—have improved tremendously.

• Easy to play throughout the day. This has been true of Football Manager for a while, but it’s definitely a bonus worth highlighting. In the past, when I’ve gotten a season going, I liked to just have Football Manager running in a window on my desktop. So much of the game comes down to reading emails and responding to them with decisions that it’s a breeze to dip in and out of over the course of the day. I like that I can always be doing other stuff while I’m playing.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT FOOTBALL MANAGER 2024?

• It’s still a beast to get into. Football Manager 2024 is without a doubt the slickest and most polished version of the game to date, but that doesn’t mean it’s reached true user-friendliness, particularly if you’re coming at it without much prior knowledge of the business of professional soccer. Even if you are, Football Manager gives you so many ways to interact with your team and the league that it’s overwhelming at first, and the inductions don’t do a terrific job of pacing the flow of new information: It’s either off or on fire hose mode, nothing in between.

Even as someone who’s not totally new to the series, it took me a while to re-familiarize myself with the game this time after taking the last couple years off. I had to dig for a while to remember how to set up specialized training programs for individual players, for example, and where all my transfer budget information lived. With this much information at your fingertips at all times, it’s inevitable that the interface is going to have a bit of a learning curve, and I think Sports Interactive has done good work continuously improving it year over year—but that steep learning curve is still there.

💬 Will you be spending this winter poring over xG and transfer budgets in Football Manager 2024, or do you prefer the glossy action of FC24? Let me know in the comments!