busngabb

Weight being removed is an interesting one. It's a pretty redundant stat that I honestly don't think I've ever used or referenced. Height, strength, jumping reach, agility, aggression cover the impact side of the weight stat anyway. No one thinks about it so deeply that you need to model how much someone weighs during the monthly cycle etc, which the development blog hints at, it's just a characteristic. Surely they aren't going to have women's physical stats (strength, acceleration, jumping reach) and emotional state impacted by such matters as well? Just keep that out of the game entirely. International management being canned is a big disappointment for me. I've been calling for a proper focus on international management for a while and to see it gone is a blow. It was an afterthought and has been for many years, which is why only 5.6% of players use it, but it's disappointing that it's gone. It coming back in 2026 is a positive, but I don't see why we can't have feature updates that filter in these developments when they happen like happens with other games. It's a general indication that they are really struggling with timescales, which was inevitable given the scope of the changes for this iteration. This just reinforces that FM25 is going to be one where we need to support SI and help build the new engine, rather than overreact to the inevitable challenges it'll face. I was massively behind the changes, they were long overdue and it's brilliant that SI have done it, we've got to take the teething problems on the chin and work through them. I'm starting to get a little worried that we've not seen the game engine at all yet, hopefully it's not like the new Star Wars game and Neil Maupay's shots won't fly under the game world, but that mega-corp franchise having so many challenges shows how difficult an undertaking SI have taken on. Fair play to them for it.

Why would anyone do this? The DOF seems to be set to sign players to on average make a smallish profit. They never sign anyone with potential and will seem to be capped at the 2 or 2.5 star level for it. Some of them work out to make decent money once developed for a couple of seasons, but I can't see how you'd be successful letting the DoF sign your players? It must make it so hard, unless you just cancel all the ones you don't like?

This hasn't annoyed me anywhere as much on FM24 as it had previous versions. You can probably search the history of my posts on here about this topic. In all the years of playing Football Manager, I think I've genuinely only won a handful of penalty shootouts. It got to the point with recent versions where I'd just slump in the chair and assume it as a defeat.

I agree it should be hard, but it should also have context. And you should have the option to tell certain players to pack it in and stop complaining, i'e 'You've played the last 7 games lad, what on earth are you moaning about?' As for the big about not offering regular starter, that's almost impossible. Once a player is world-class or elite, they aren't going to agree a contract unless the squad status reflects that. Some you can move down one rung, but if a player asks for star player you aren't getting him down to regular starter. Do you then sell all your players who won't accept 'regular starter' bar the odd one or two?

Yup, I agree. I know a lad who is a former player and who coaches in the Championship now after retiring. He's always been a big FM player and he laughs at a lot of the tactical stuff that's posted on here. A lot of it is utter nonsense, but say it confidently enough and throw a few screenshots in that appear to backup your point and people will believe it. If the game requires you to do certain things to work how you want it to, it needs to feed it back a lot better than it currently does. My own take on the tactical side of things is that 'horses for courses' should be a lot stronger. For example, start a career with a gegenpress tactic in a team with slow, lazy players and you should get hammered. Do the same with a tiki-taka setup in a team with poor passing, ball control and composure and again it should be very hard. If they fixed that, added some much needed clarity to the game design as you say (The new UI should also bring it up to date and make it a lot nicer to move around than it is now) and add some much needed realism into the transfers side of the game (Installments should only be accepted where there is no other interest in the player and the selling club wants to sell or has to, or if you overpay and players shouldn't be so willing to move.) and FM25 could be great. The big worry is the 3D match engine. Is there going to be one at all? We have seen the flow of the matches, but that seems to draw the game away from extended highlights back to the very start of the franchise.

It does need to be part of the game, but it seems ridiculously basic at the moment. Players will kick off within the first few games of a season, then you promise them gametime, they'll play 7 in a row and be dying in terms of their conditioning and then demand a transfer because you broke a promise in not playing them. (Despite them playing 7 in a row after it). It's got to the point now where I start players with poor condition and sub them in the first half. They don't seem to mind this at all. There needs to be more depth built into the game over this. Who the opposition is and in which competition it is and their condition and age should all have an impact. It's fine Salah kicking off if he's repeatedly rested for Premier League games and you end up drawing them and costing the team a run at the title, it's another thing entirely for an elite player to be having a tantrum because him not playing away to Stevenage in the Carabao Cup on a Tuesday night in January when there is a top of the table derby match on the Saturday meant he'd 'only' played 80% of the last 10 games.. I highly doubt you've never had any player complain about gametime like you make out. It's rife in the game. Conditioning seems to be a far bigger factor in recent years and players will decline in match fitness due to match load far quicker. It's now realistically challenging to keep players fit enough to perform well over extended runs of games. You pretty much have to rotate these days. The game should be more like: Star players - Expect to play in pretty much all the big games, derby games and finals and would expect NOT to have to play in the lower ranked cups, certainly against minnows or around big games. Wouldn't complain if rested for games against lesser ranked opposition in the league, unless perhaps if the game was unexpectedly drawn/lost and it threatened a targeted outcome. Important players - Wants most of the big games, derby games and finals. Wouldn't mind being left out of the lower ranked cups or when not at peak condition etc. Regular starters - Would only complain if missed a run of big games, derby games or finals. Squad players - Wouldn't complain about missing big games, derbies or finals. Would be more likely to complain if not selected for lower ranked cups, especially against minnows etc. There would still need to be some % based overarching happiness index, but it needs to be far more context sensitive and should take far longer to kick into play. They could even build personality and depth into that, for example the selfish, mercenary types like Ronaldo might kick off about missing minor home games if they are close to the top of the top-scorers list and want to stat-pad. Also, converse things should happen, you should have players moaning about having to play too many games or doing too much travelling. 'Expects to be rotated for the upcoming Rushton & Diamonds game due to playing 8 games in 3 weeks' and the like.

FM24 seems more like a spoilt brat simulator than a sports game these days. Whilst I get that there has to be an element of that in the game because Premier League footballers are largely overly pampered babies who have no idea what real life is like. BUT, the game this year seems to be a battle between two key factors, namely players needing a rest and players kicking off about their gametime. The game seems to programmed to make players kick off if they don't play x number of games, based on their squad status. So a star player will kick off if he isn't selected for a couple of games, then once you promise them the gametime, they then collapse into a raging fit if you say 'only' play them 80% or 90% of the following games. In real life, no 'Star player' is going to have a meltdown because they were left out of a Carabao Cup game at Fleetwood, then left out of a Premier League game away to Bristol City. In real life your stars players would love that, they'd be on Instagram enjoying a posh hotel or on the beach somewhere. It's ridiculous in the game that you can't say to a player 'we're not going to play you against Plymouth or Bristol City, so that we keep you fit for the big games coming up' or 'I'm not playing you so I can give this kid a game because he's very high potential and we're playing The Dog and Dart in the FA Cup'. You can tell a player he's being rested, but do that more than a couple of times and they kick off about that as well. I've got about 8 players in my squad who are in dire need of an extended rest according to the medical team and who's condition/health bar plummets to almost zero by half time, who are also crying about not getting enough gametime. It's ridiculous. Even if you tell them they are rested, they then demand a transfer if you then leave them out of any of the next 8 or so games. It should be that players kick off if they are on the higher squad statuses and are repeatedly left out of the big games. They shouldn't ever kick off if their condition is poor, unless it's a critical game or a derby etc. The game should also take longer for the strops to happen, again based on their squad status but over a whole season, and taking their length of time at the club into account and the opposition. For example I signed Hincapie on a free. Season starts in late August, by November he'd demanded a transfer because he wasn't getting enough game time, then I left him out once after promising him it. He's not even in the top 3 centrebacks at the club and wasn't given star player status. He played 10 games in that time. A new player at a club irrespective of his status would not be kicking off if they played 10 games in the first three months at a new club in a new country.

From what I've seen of it, recruitment focuses either work as expected, or don't work at all. I suspect there is a reason for that, such as the scouts or head scout are all engaged doing other things and never get to it, despite it being the highest priority. Or because the players it would find are not shown because the 'include players from other recruitment focuses' bit isn't ticked or isn't working. I always tick that now.

Why are they gamey restrictions? Managers don't have anywhere near the level of autonomy in real life. Poch isn't signing anyone for example, I doubt he even knows they're happening until Chelsea tell him. Of course we want the game to be fun so it can't go that far, but there should be a more realistic representation of how clubs approach transfers. Most clubs will have instructions from the manager as to what he feels is needed and what the priorities should be (Like FM already has with the squad planner and recruitment focuses). They might even be allowed to suggest targets, with suggestions alsocoming from owners, scouts, Directors of Football if they exist as well. But they aren't deciding themselves, submitting offers, then negotiating contracts. They're just either getting the targets they've wanted, or not. There will also be constant disagreements over targets, suggestions of better value or more available alternatives and push back over how much is spent etc. It should be more like this in the game. FM's squad building is just too open. You can change your entire squad for better players within two or three seasons easily and just overpower everything else the game has to offer. How many other games are there where you can basically do what you want and make it as easy as possible? Having a learning curve and difficulty level is a firmly established concept in gaming, it always has been.

I'd prefer some kind of restriction on it. I always succumb to signing players I know are wonderkids in every position. So after two or three years I've got an entirely new 11 and I'm winning the league every year and have a stockpile of amazing talent waiting to replace them. It should really be a case of 'Everton's transfer budget is £20m this season. You must sign a striker as we only have one. There are two loan spaces in the squad available and you must raise £10m in player sales". That is how an Everton transfer window is. Not 'Your budget is £30m, you can sell players to get more and we don't care who you sign or whether you pay upfront or add to the £984m of transfer debt we already have.' You shouldn't be able to sign anyone you haven't thoroughly scouted, at least until you are very established and respected by the board either. I could stop myself signing those players and sign average ones instead and finish 9th, but that's like when you let your kids beat you at sport. It kind of feels wrong. At clubs with an interfeering owner like Chelsea, it should be 'Hi Mr Manager, here's Billy, our £128m signing from RB Leipzig. You don't want him? That's fine, we don't care, just make sure he plays every week. Good lad.'.

Just by making it harder by default? So making a tactical mistake has more impact, so weaknesses in your tactics or players are more likely to cause you problems. I've no idea how the calculations behind FM work, but presumably there is some sort of calculation going on to see if things happen, just tweek them to make them favour the AI more. If they are set currently to be completely fair and based on the tactics and players and not favour the human player, then make the AI do more to try to beat you. I always start FM with my own tactics, fail to win anything but do well compared to real life and get frustrated. I moan about it on the tactics forums and people point out the glarring errors, I change those and instantly win titles. If there were such glarring, obvious errors, why was I doing well in the first place? I'm absolutely terrible at the tactics side of the game. I understand football, played it at a pretty good level. But I look at the FM match engine and I'm really struggling to pull any real information from it. Most of the goals I concede are balls from a marked central midfielder up to a marked forward who turns and leathers it into the goal. Or tap ins from second balls on set pieces and I have no idea what that means in the game. But I've started two careers on FM24 (Both as Everton), made my own tactics loosely based around how I'd like them to play and I was top after 23 games in one, but restarted after the update because Jarred Branthwaite had scored 20 and I figured set pieces might be permanently broken. I've started a new career and I'm second after 15 games, with only the loan signings of Ilaix Moriba, Fabien Rieder and Hamad Traore (None of whom play regularly). If someone as bad at the tactics side of the game as me can do that, I hate to think how easy those who really know what they're doing with the tactics are finding it.

Sounds a lot, but really isn't. The Classic would just be the core game with sections removed and their impact removed. The Hardcore mode is just the core game but with more realistic restrictions on squad building and ramped up sliders/impacts of doing things right/wrong tactically etc.

I've always wondered that. It's presumably some kind of calculation to work out which club is best or worst overall for that category. But it probably shouldn't be visible as it doesn't give you the score for your own club, so you can't compare it to anything.

That's fine if you're the kind of person who loved to play dress up and role play in your youth. FM shouldn't be a role playing game where you make up things in your head though. If a player is available to sign, you shouldn't have to worry about whether it's realistic or not. These kind of things should be linked to the reputation of the manager, the club, the competition etc. Transfer policy should be far more rigid, at least when a manager is new to a club, once they've been successful, perhaps they get more leeway. The number of signings, the cost, the amount of future fees and the positions should all be restricted. The game already provides this with the recruitment meetings. It should set you targets for players in and out and make you stick to them.

Commercially no. Covid no doubt helped significantly as people stayed at home and got bored and refound FM and Gamepass opened it up to a lot of new players too. But in terms of the development of the game and it's improvement arc, it had definitely stopped improving. You could compare a 7 or 8 year old version of the game to the current one and you would be hard pressed to find any material differences. If anything it got worse graphically every year until this year as well. This is what makes FM25's new engine and UI so brave and ambitious. They didn't have to do it, they could have cashed in for a few more years. But they've pushed to improve and I'm all for that.