Football Manager 2024, the review: every damn Sunday

Considering two of the main notes that we will make about Football Manager 2024, more as a sign of a certain, albeit understandable, stagnation, it is worth recalling the words entrusted to us by SI studio director Miles Jacobson in our interview. “This year we have worked a lot on the transfer market”, and “in reality, in FM 23 there have been fewer injuries than in real life”.

We would never dare contradict or refute the words of a guru like Jacobson, with whom we had one of the most delightful chats of our career. But it is clear that, when playing Football Manager 2024, the impressions in practice are a little different from the theory studied to the millimeter by the East London development team.

Let’s start from the market. If we can turn a blind eye on the price tag front (there is always a way to close a deal, between installments and bonuses), we still record some distortions that are quite dissonant with the world of real football: why a not yet experienced Kayode should refuse a rich offer under the pretext of having just renewed with Fiorentina, for example? When has this ever been an obstacle in today’s football?

Football Manager 2024 x Saudi Arabia —

And it’s the same reason why so many negotiations fail in the first year of his career on FM24, as in the case of Mazzocchi from Salernitana (yes, we needed a full-back) and many other examples that we could give of the same ilk. Since it is a tool designed only for sales, intermediaries do not help much in this sense, and when they do, it is mainly for loan offers that do not bring fresh money to reinvest on the market – apparently, they are waiting for all of ours.

On the Arab market, Jacobson had suggested to us, without revealing too much about his cards, that he would have a role in the game, and that was exactly the case. The Roshn Saudi League has not been included among the selectable championships (the clubs and the main emigrants are there), but that of the Saudis is a looming and massive presence: between interests and crazy offers both in the summer and in January, it is a disturbing element remarkable.

January is typically a frenzy, with people pounding the cash and various cases breaking out in the locker room, but now with new variables such as Middle Eastern petrodollars it is even more difficult to maintain good relations with the team group. A good example is also the attitude to have with long-term patients: we had Abraham return one to two months after the closing of the lists in January and we kept him out for reasons of registration. Didn’t he take it like crazy and raise a hornet’s nest in the locker room, being supported by some of his best friends in the squad?

Same beach, same sea —

Beyond these small nuances, Football Manager 2024 turns out to be rather predictable by now, in its dynamics of doing well and those of doing badly, but also in the moments of the season in which you know that things won’t go the right way for some time. week. The collapse in January is a well-established pattern, although it remains difficult to explain.

Another element that is difficult to explain is that of injuries. Regardless of what the good Jacobson says, and despite Roma’s propensity to self-harm, it is not normal that we end up having even three injuries in the same match, and that outside of matches not a week goes by without a call from the infirmary. If on the one hand unexpected events are part of the job and push players to be creative, on the other they are continuous interruptions in the flow of the game, and when there are so many they border on a joke.

This is not to say that there isn’t something new. Generously, Sports Interactive has worked hard to include some of them in a chapter closing a circle such as FM24, starting with the new animations on the pitch: now, the players touch the ball with more parts of the foot and have greater variety in the first touch, which adds a pleasant layer of realism when watching a match. If the technicians of the English team have managed to bring such an improvement with a late-breaking iteration, based on a very dated engine, one wonders what they will be able to do next year with the transition to a completely new engine like Unity.

The sacredness of the locker room —

On corner kicks, the possibility of being able to retouch them down to the smallest details with a series of meticulous presets, and then see them fail or succeed based on your beliefs, is a treat for refined palates. Just be careful to set up a very long shortlist of hitters, given that, once the basic three are exhausted, the selection is completely random: we found ourselves with Lukaku (central striker) and N’Dicka (central defender) kicking them to the general dismay .

In speeches to the team and in meetings, the situational touches are appreciable: on the last day, you can tell your team that you are still in the running for a place in the Champions League, just as by going out with Liverpool in the quarter-finals of the Europa League the management will be sad but will recognize the superiority of the opponent.

This does not mean that even in speeches and meetings generic jokes emerge that have remained in the Football Manager code for decades (such as the one, now cringe, about showing the public that they are worth the money spent on the ticket…), and that even from these small details it emerges that the right time has come for change.

Football Manager 2024, the verdict —

There are many superfluous things that don’t add much to the flow of the game, that aren’t even useful and that players regularly ignore, and that we would like to see popped up next year or in any case relegated to a less relevant role in the unfolding of a season. If anyone can do it, it’s Miles Jacobson and Sports Interactive, so we’re confident in the immediate future of the franchise.

Football Manager 2024 is inevitably a chapter at the end of the cycle: the passion of the development team meant that this year too there were some fairly important innovations, some surprising such as the refresh of the technical sector, but the outdated technological base and the patterns have become readable to most people are an unavoidable factor. You’ll play it and have fun, but don’t necessarily expect a memorable version.