When I buy Football Manager, I am happy to play it for a few years before buying a new version so I put a large amount of hours into FM23. However, Epic Games gave away FM24, and with FM25 delayed, I started playing this recently; an entire year late.
Since it's a game of football, the series often does not have a great scope for major changes, other than a few rule changes, an updated roster, new aesthetic, and tweaks to the match engine. So once you get used to any new menus, or new layout for menus - it's really business as usual. FM25 will change that when moving to a new game engine of Unity; so expect major changes then.
As usual, if you don't like the layout, or lack of licences when it comes to faces and club logos, you can download your own skins to dramatically change the look. You have to download facepacks, team logos, and kits if you want to see the official images on the appropriate screens.
In terms of new features, there’s some cool ideas. First of all, you can continue playing your FM23 saves in this game. If you want to start a new game, there are 3 different options to choose from which modify the starting database. There’s the usual Classic mode, where players transferred during the real transfer window are at the club, but they appear from the start (so a player bought in September 2023, will be there August 2023 even though they weren’t actually at the club yet). This was always an annoyance of mine, so now there is the Real World option where he won’t be there in August but will join your club in September. Then there is the Your World mode where the game starts with the squads at that time, and you can then make your own transfers.
The AI is supposed to be better at squad management, so will bring more youngsters through, and also try to purchase players that are better suited to their preferred tactical style. When you are making tactics, there’s a new Inverted Full-Back player role.
Although the graphics of the match engine still look fairly primitive for today's standards, they are better than before, improved pitch textures and there's improved animations. The players generally seem more agile and can recover loose balls more quickly. I noticed way more long range goals, more from crossing opportunities, and more deflected goals. There were some good improvements from the year before with more lobbed shots, curled balls, crosses/through balls in more central areas, and more parries from the keepers. So if you haven’t played for a few years, these combined changes will look dramatically different to you.
You have a bit more customisation options when it comes to Set pieces, organising players into roles; basically Creators, Attacking Options, Recovery Players, and by default the players are placed in suitable positions. You can save multiple routines and select the frequency your players will try them in a match so you are automatically varying the routines. There’s a new coach you can hire “set piece coach”.
When you create a tactic, you choose an overall philosophy such as “Vertical Tiki Taka”, "Fluid Counter Attack" which gives you a good description of what you are trying to achieve. You select a formation, with a few options being presented to you as appropriate to the philosophy. You can make adjustments to the individual player roles, or make tweaks to the style which is composed of three sections: “In Possession”, “In Transition” and “Out Of Possession”.
It can be a bit confusing what some of the individual options actually mean, and can be hard to visualise the changes since you need to analyse your tactic over several games to see how well it performs when your players are familiar with it, and test it out against a range of teams.
One confusing aspect is that you can have a high/low defensive line, but then there's instructions to Step Up More/Drop Off More, as well as the defenders having roles that decide if they should push up or drop: "stopper"/"cover", as well as different pressing and tackling options which will involve running towards the player with the ball. It's unclear if some of these instructions contradict, or if they change behaviour in specific scenarios.
The player roles have some standard/obvious ones like Wing Back, Centre Back, but there's some fancier named ones such as the Mezzala, Carrilero, or Raumdeuter. You are shown a short animation to illustrate how these roles should behave with and without the ball.
Over time, the tactic screen shows chemistry between players in the form of a solid line. It shows background colours from red to green to show coverage of that position - i.e. if you have a player that is set to an Attacking role, and the player behind him is on Defence; and then the space between them might show as red, because no one will occupy that area. It also is affected by the player’s suitability for that role, so playing players out of position won’t give you good influence in that area of the pitch. The tactics screen also has some bullet-point “pros and cons” of your tactic.
A couple of games ago, the percentage to show fatigue was switched out with a heart icon. It works the same as before, just a bit more abstract. It seems like a random change when the players attributes are also fixed numbers and you could also say this system should also be switched out for something a bit more subjective.
I think chemistry has always been important, but there's been a greater focus on it over the last few years, and it even has its own page; Dynamics. This can show you which squad members have formed friendship groups and who has influence. If you sell an influential player, then you are likely to cause disruption within the squad, and also annoy the fans.
When negotiating contracts, there are a lot of aspects to haggle. It's not just the wage, agent fee, contract length - but all the many bonuses; appearance, clean sheets, goals, assists, competition bonuses. You can see what range of wage, expected playing time and release clauses they will demand, before offering the contract. You can often get their demands down slightly by telling them it is too much.
Players like to complain if they are underpaid. When offering long contracts, I always ensure there is a yearly increase included, or an increase after a certain amount of games to try to scale their wage as they develop. This should stop them asking for a new contract only a year or 2 into their deal. You can often agree to start the new contract at the end of the year which is useful for delaying their wage increase to save you money and keep them happy for longer.
When you renew your contract with the club, you will agree with a 5 year plan with the board to show the ambition of the club. Maybe you are expecting to survive relegation this year, but want to progress to a Mid Table team in the coming years? They also may have a philosophy like they want you to adopt attacking football, or sign youth players to develop into first team regulars. I think it’s a good feature and realistically captures the culture of certain clubs, yet it makes it restrictive if you want to play the game your way. In recent versions, there is a stronger emphasis on supporters expectations, with some club’s fans having more influence than others. I don't think it has that much effect on if you get sacked or not because if you are annoying the fans due to poor performance, the board are also going to be annoyed too. It’s not like they really have different opinions is it?
You can define a Code of Conduct which auto-fines players that meet that criteria, rather than manually deciding as these events happen. So accumulating yellow cards, red cards, missing training etc can result in consistent, and automatic fines.
When you subscribe to teams/players/competitions, not only can you receive mail in your inbox about them, but there is a social media, Twitter-style feed. It’s actually a decent implementation and not too cringey, and I liked that when they were talking about a goal, there was sometimes a link to see a replay of the goal. You see a lot of transfer speculation on this page which can give you hints of realistic transfers to go for, or to prompt you to make your move to make a signing before he moves elsewhere.
When the game is loading, you are shown your calendar to easily see upcoming games for all squads (1st team, Reserve, Under 19’s), but can also see your training schedules. I really like this idea as it gives you good visibility on how to manage your squad’s fitness.
Physios give you “Potential injury risks” based on player conditioning and inform you about players returning from injury and how much you should play them. They will also tell you about potential permanent attribute decreases. Many people seem to complain about the number of injuries, but I didn't experience this. I seemed to encounter loads of niggly injuries, just 1-3 days, whereas major injuries seemed more of a rarity.
If you have influential players, it is often good to assign them alongside a few younger players in a Mentoring Group. You need to group 3 or more players and they can all learn from each other, depending on their Influence, and presumably personality type (this seemed a major influence in previous games). This can help improve attributes but also transfer “Player Traits”. Players must exist in the same squad to be in the mentoring group.
The pre-match, half-time, full-time team-talks are still simplistic using simple gesture buttons (hands on hips, point finger etc) then a suitable line to motivate your team.
The interaction with the media is presented in a more dramatic way with questions coming from different reporters, and you are told your relationship with each one. Fundamentally, I think it still comes down to the same stock responses which don’t seem to matter (well, as long as you don’t publicly criticise someone), and so you will blindly click or just delegate to your assistant manager.
The graphs presented in the Data Hub are quite interesting but then I didn't really know how to act on them. With different tactical styles available, if you see that your midfield has a "low number of passes, but high accuracy", is that a bad thing compared to "high number of passes, high accuracy" or "high number of passes, low accuracy"? - Higher numbers might sound good, but if they are just making simple, short passes; that is only good if you wanted them to play simple, controlling football. If you are completing a low amount of crosses, what is the solution? Play with more strikers? get more players to make forward runs? slow the tempo down? buy players with higher crossing ability? It might not be a problem at all if you don't intend to play wide and are creating enough chances via other means.
At the end of the season, you are given a Summary of how you did, which now includes a timeline with key events. It's a nice way of reminiscing over the season, and even previous seasons.
There’s a report titled "GOAL50: The best 50 players in the world" which shows you the top players. If you are playing as one of the big teams, it is good to see how many players you have here, and it gives you ideas of who to sign or keep tabs on.
They have really improved the simulating, loading and saving times in recent years. When the game takes a significant time investment, this is a really appreciated improvement.
I think most people will already know if they want an iteration of the FM series or not. I’ll need to invest hundreds of hours to experiment with the tactics to really understand the match engine tweaks, but from what I have seen from around 20 seasons across a few saves, it’s a definite improvement. Since I’ve played close to 100 hours now, it’s great value for money, even if people moan about the price increases in recent years. I find it’s the perfect game to play while you have YouTube videos in Picture In Picture mode too.