Overmars

My suggestions: Give him an IF(a) role and give your central striker a DLF or F9 role. Train him to be an AMC and let him be a SS(a) in a 4-2-3-1 with a support striker ahead of him. Play him as an AF(a) with a support striker in a 2-striker formation.

I love these narrow formations, but they are a struggle in FM24. My thoughts: You need at least one excellent attacking fullback, and preferably more since they will tire out and be injury prone. They need reasonable winger-like attributes or else your attack will be weak. At least one of your strikers should be great in the air. It really helps make the deliveries from the fullbacks more effective. Similarly, your strikers should have good quickness and anticipation to latch onto risky passes. I like using 3 DMs in this formation instead of 3 MCs. That allows me to use segundo volantes, which I find provides an optimal mix of defending and attacking threat. I find an AM(s) gets lost in the shuffle. I would much rather use an attack duty on the AMC and a support duty on one of the strikers. A DLF(s) helps link up everything. Better teams will kill you down the flanks. You might want an alternate formation for those matches. Work ball into the box is going to limit what your fullbacks can do in terms of crosses. They'll probably cycle possession, which isn't ideal for creating chances. In a two-striker formation, I would rather play higher tempo and use counterattacks. Lower tempo cancels out a lot of the advantage to having two guys starting that far forward in the first place.

Remove player role stipulations from loan negotiations. It is unrealistic and unfun to have someone tell you to play a player as a mezzala, as if that's a thing in real life. Make player form less predictable -- or its impact more subtle. Players don't often cycle up and down in form in 5-8 game increments in real life like they do in FM. Match ratings need to better reflect player performance and be more forgiving when playing aginst much better teams. A player's unhappiness about their contract should not impact the rest of the team unless they are a true team leader. Salah shouldn't badger Klopp because Bajcetic wants more money. Scouts should be less lazy on their assignments. Micromanaging scouts should not dramatically improve/increase their report output. Team training time should be allocated on a percentage of weekly training time basis rather than as three daily sessions that you have to micromanage with every schedule change. Improve newgen attribute distributions. Give us more attacking wingbacks and fewer short central defenders. Match engine -- This has improved in recent years, but we still have pass completion percentages that are too high and other deviations from real life that throw off the balance of the game. Add some variety to goal and trophy celebrations.

My lingering nitpicks for this game: Players should wait at least 10 months after signing a contract before demanding a new one. Stop hounding me 6 months into a 4-year deal. Player form irritates me. If a ST/AML/AMR goes 4-5 games without scoring then their finishing attribute of 15 seems to drop to 1 until they score again. The impact of form is too severe. Loan player role stipulations need to disappear. Unfun and unrealistic. Just make the stipulations all about playing time. I am enjoying most of the rest of the game. It has improved enough that the thought of playing an older version really does not appeal to me. I'd love it if the next version of this game had more "fun" parts in it. More variety in title-winning celebrations would be a good start. I don't want to see the identical cut sequence every time I win something. I'd also like a bit more variety in job interviews and player interactions. Anything to make the game less predictable would be a win.

General things I have noticed from using a 4-3-3 on FM24: The AML/AMR spots work better in support roles. Relying on them as main goalscorers is unwise. They work better in creative roles in FM24, dribbling and playing cutbacks to scorers in the middle. At least one of the MCs should be given a CM(a) (or maybe MEZ(a)) role. These attacking central midfielders will score as many goals as the AML/AMR will, often latching onto the end of cutbacks. The DM can be a HB if the wingbacks are particularly aggressive or a DLP otherwise. High decisions and composure are vital here. The wingbacks should be WB(s) or WB(a). You can go with CWB if you are really aggressive or FB if you aspire to be dull. I have messed around with inverted wingbacks, but I would only do this if playing a winger role on the same side as the IWB. I find an AF(a) for striker works best. In principle, a DLF or F9 role should be fine, but the AML/AMR players just don't score enough to make this approach reliable enough in FM. As for team instructions, the usual gegenpress instructions work great. Even when attempting to keep a lead late in matches, I will still press high and try to score insurance goals rather than sit back and hope to kill time. Again, that's an FM thing more than a football tactical thing. You will also be able to win lots of corners, so make sure you have a good corner delivery specialist and 1-2 players with very high jumping to head home near post corners.

You could keep the attacking trio the same and swap out an MC for another CD in matches against high reputation teams. I have also had some success with a 4-3DM-1-2 formation, but that requires 3 DMs and isn't always viable when you have pure MCs in the team. Have you tried a narrow 4-3-2-1? I gave that a shot in FM24 but never found the right combination. Maybe your two creative AMCs would pair well together in that formation.

Please remove this from the match engine: Corner taker takes the corner. Defense heads it clear. Offensive player passes immediately back to the corner taker. Corner taker is whistled for offside. At the very least, please remove it from the "key highlights."

Wage negotiations can be completely illogical: A 22-year old free agent fullback asked me for 2.5k per week + bonuses to equal 3.4k total per week. I countered with an offer of 2.0k per week and 3.2k total. His agent countered with 4.8k per week and 6.5k total. I wanted to see if this was some sort of bug, so I reloaded and tried it again: Once again, the fullback wanted 2.5k wages and 3.4k total per week. I countered with 2.6k wages and 3.5k total per week -- objectively more than what they asked for. His agent countered with 4.8k per week and 6.5k total and the message: "Your opening offer is too far apart from my client's demands."

Please get rid of the player role stipulation in all loan negotiations. It is incredibly unrealistic and super-frustrating for gameplay -- the worst combination for a feature in a simulation game.

I think you mean Match Rules. Select your Nation in Advanced Rules editing, and expand the options for that Nation to see "Match Rules" as a subheading. Then you will need to select which Match Rules to edit, since you can have multiple versions of the rules within each nation. Finally, select the "Squad Selection Rules" subheading and add/edit particular rules. To activate these rules within a particular competition, you refer to them in the "Match Rules" subheading of each competition b the index value of the set of Match Rules that you created. You can have every comptition refer to the same index value or have different indices created for each competition.

Continental reputation players are more widely known and are generally better. National reputation includes a lot more players.

I have this same issue when editing Ireland's advanced rules. The season update day never happens despite all of the competitions completing as expected. I know the default Irish season update day is in the winter, but I moved the start dates of the league and the Editor seems to hate it. After a lot of experimenting, I am ready to give up. Sorry I couldn't help you. If you find a solution to trigger the update day then please share it.

I hope this is still a work in progress because it sounds great. In my opinion, stopping at Level 4 would still be a major win. A 4-tier Irish pyramid provides a nice game world.

I think you will find a lot of people disagree with that. I am one of them. I remember having fun with FM15 which had a similarly high-scoring match engine, but ultimately I was disappointed with how immersion-breaking it can be when you rarely see 1-0 or 0-0 scorelines.

It's not all about the player count. It's at least as important to consider how many active leagues you want and how detailed the simulation you will choose for those leagues. The more leagues you sim on full detail, the slower your game will run, but full detail is really nice to keep your most important leagues feeling as realistic as possible. And yes, playable/view only below is exactly as you described it. Generally speaking, view only leagues aren't going to slow you game down much at all, so when I add a playable league I will also add the leagues below it as view only. It's the number of playable leagues, the amount on full sim detail, and the player count that really affect speed. For a European save based in England, I would usually go with the following playable leagues: ENG - top 6 levels (full sim at least the top 2 levels) GER - top 2 levels (full sim the top level) ESP - top 2 levels (full sim the top level) ITA - top 2 levels (full sim the top level) FRA - top 2 levels (full sim the top level) NED - top level POR - top level AUT - top level SUI - top level BEL - top level GRE - top level TUR - top level CZE - top level CRO - top level DEN - top level NOR - top level You might also consider loading the top league as playable in Serbia, Sweden, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Slovakia, Hungary etc., if your system is fast. Some might want to load Brazil and Argentina's top leagues as playable, though I find there are still plenty of South American wonderkids available for scouting without loading those leagues. One extra thing I do, though, is to add players from every continent who possess a continental reputation.

I manage in Europe and load nations where I want the biggest clubs to have complete/active squads in continental competitions. Since Russia got banned from continental competitions, I haven't bothered to load them and don't miss them.

I like the player interactions in the sense that they offer some necessary checks and balances in the game. For example, if you sell a popular teammate then you should hear about it from your best players. I don't want to feel as if I am managing faceless robots. That said, the interactions need to be more logical. No one should be getting upset about selling a backup who has no clout within the team. The press conferences -- I leave those for my assistant because they are genuinely tedious.

You chose Celtic, who have won 11 of the last 12 league titles and finished +80 in goal differential last year. If you didn't find it easy then FM wouldn't be simulating very well.

Lots of options. If you prefer a 4-3-3 formation then I would use: DM = Stay at home DM = AM(d) or HB(d) or DM(d) or BWM(d) CM = Playmaker = AP(s) or RPM(s) CM = Runner = CM(a) or BBM(s) -- You could use a second playmaker here if you really wanted to. For a 4-2-3-1, I would use either: DM = Holding midfielder = A(D) or DM(d) or BWM(d) DM = Playmaker = DLP(s) or RPM(s) or REG(s) AM = Aggressive secondary scoring option = SS(a) or AM(a) Or: DM = Holding midfielder = A(D) or DM(d) or BWM(d) DM = Runner = SV(a) AM = Playmaker = AP(s) Ultimately, your midfielders are only going to deliver a lot of good through balls if they have the appropriate traits and attributes. Even then, they require a lot of good off the ball movement from the front three and a cooperative opponent who isn't just sitting back conservatively.

It would be nice if we could prioritize or sort our preferences of delivery in order -- just like the way the player role selection is done for set pieces. That way we might see something like 60% near post, 30% far post, 10% central.

Yes, most clubs, but especially newly promoted clubs, are far too inactive in the transfer market. The big immersion breaker for me is when the game shows me a graph of the number of transfers by club for a given transfer window and most of the transfers were made by me. Established clubs can hang on to their quality for a few seasons before their best players deteriorate, but newly promoted clubs get relegated right after getting promoted. There are no Lutons or Bournemouths in the game.

I'd go as far as to say the vast majority of FM players really enjoy managing transfers. It's more fun to pick and choose who you want to buy/sell than it is to click "Encourage" or "Congratulations on scoring a goal." I bet almost every FM player is much more active with transfers than the AI is. That's the big difference. Humans make net positive deals constantly throughout a season, sometimes moving dozens of players in and out of the club. If AI teams did the same then they would be much better, the human managers would find it much tougher, and the game would feel completely ridiculous because the football world doesn't have anywhere near that much transfer activity in real life. If someone wants to add a bit of challenge to their save without going too extreme then I would suggest limiting the number of transfers per season.

A 4-4-1-1 looks very different from a 4-2DM-3-1 in FM, but in real life it would be hard to differentiate between the two. Frankly, I think the 4-2DM-3-1 in game is the better representation of what real clubs actually use. That said, if the formation is truly "the shape of the team when defending" then we should be seeing flatter formations (flat back 5s, two flat rows of 4, flat front 3s, etc.). In general, a back 3/5 is not used enough in FM.

I wish FM would handle promotion finances better. I just got promoted to the French 2nd tier. We have 2.5 million in the bank: Team wage budgets range from 2.9M to 13.1M. They've given me a wage budget of 0.7M. Every manager earns 4,000 or more per week. They are offering me 725 per week. All of my starting players are asking for new contracts, with the minimum they are asking for being 2.5k per week. My 15k per week budget means I can't keep any of them. My board sold one of my brightest prospects because the offer was too good to turn down. We got 400 pounds for him and a promise for a friendly.

It's much easier to score in FM with an AF (or two) in the team. The game presents so many opportunities to strikers playing for through balls. You just don't get those same opportunities for AML/AMR players looking to do the same. Also, even if your support striker does his job, he'll drop into "poor form" if he doesn't score for a few games in a row, and that will tank his performance for the next few matches. If you want the game to feel easier, try a 2-striker tactic or at least an AF in a solo striker tactic.