Football Manager 2025 Features We Want | The FM25 Wishlist Thread • Passion4FM.com (2024)

Since the summer is fast approaching, the very first news of Football Manager 2025 features is quickly closing in. With around three months away the long-anticipated announcement of Football Manager 2025, it’s time to take a closer look which new features we want to see added or improved for FM25.

In this instance, we have managed to get on board some of our fellow Football Manager Community members to share what new Football Manager 2025 features we want, as well as providing you Passion4FM’s FM25 wishlist of features and improvements.

As always around this time of the year, the expectations of new Football Manager 2025 features and its improvements are starting to build-up. While the avid armchair manager might be deep in their Football Manager 2024 career and enjoying it to the fullest, some of you might have become frustrated by the number of bugs, lack of development and updates of FM24, and its match engine, and the overall quality of the game, as it’s far away to meet our expectations after the announcement of FM24. When we know, the creators of the game admittingly felt the FM23 version didn’t live up to the standards and expectations the studio and the fanbase has set and anticipated – the last two versions of the game has felt like a major upgrade to the game rather than a fresh new iteration of Football Manager.

In fact, it has seemed as Sports Interactive have prioritized most of their attention onto FM25 – something that makes the expectations for Football Manager 2025 sky-rocket, and reach new heights.

When Football Manager 2024 release was confirmed, Sports Interactive advertised FM24 as;

Driven by a constantly evolving quest to deliver complete football authenticity, FM24 is the most complete edition in the series yet, filled with new additions that deepen your immersion and elevate your gameplay experience.

Advertising the game as the most complete edition in the series to date was probably an overstatement. Regardlessly, the game has been far from a flop. Actually, Football Manager 2024 has become the best-selling game in the Football Manager franchise‘s history by selling over 7 million copies in less than 100 days!

Since the release of the first edition of Football Manager 20 years ago, the Sports Interactive studio has been working at offering the dedicated community “[…] the best value for money games on the planet and provide people with a world where they can tell create football stories and live out their dreams.“

Read More | Discover the potential wonderkids of Football Manager 2025 – Download the FM24 NextGen Wonderkids Database

It’s been a long-term project to make Football Manager more accessible – not only to play but to reach more people across the globe who would embrace the love for a sports strategy game that enables you to create your own footballing realities and stories by escaping the reality and take over your favorite club and go hunting for new wonderkids and talents the world is yet to discover!

Now the question remains, how can SI top the best-selling game in the series and how would Football Manager evolve in the future with the release of FM25 and the future versions of the game! Let’s take a closer look at what we can expect from the next edition of Football Manager by sharing what we know so far about Football Manager 2025, before sharing our FM25 wishlist of new features.

What we know about Football Manager 2025

Eventhough we have to wait until late summer before news about Football Manager 2025 is arriving, Sports Interactive has been transparent with us in regards to some of the most innovative changes coming to FM25.

Since Football Manager 2024 was classed as the last of its kind, the 21th edition of Football Manager, FM25, is set to be released with a host of improvements, big and small, which might make the game into “nothing like you’ve seen before!”

By taking feature requests from the Community and implementing them as new features in Football Manager 2025, or revamp existing areas of the game to further improve the game, Sports Interactive is fully set to revolutionize the game.

Following is a quick list of what we know about Football Manager 2025 so far.

Women’s Football added in FM25

One of the first Football Manager 2025 features we can look forward to is the introduction of Women’s Football coming for Football Manager 2025, for the first time in the game’s history. We need to head back to 2021 when this was first announced but it’s now becoming the reality.

Over the last few years the studio has been working on the major project of adding Women’s Football to Football Manager and it’s been perhaps a longer process than anticipated to include women’s football in the game. Even though Sports Interactive was beaten by EA Sports FC 24 to include women’s leagues into a football management game by acquiring the licence for the National Women’s Soccer League and let you play with some of the biggest women’s football stars in EA Sports, the creators behind Football Manager 25 has spent years researching female footballers and leagues to try to perfectly reflect the female stars skills and give you the most accurate squads.

From what I understand, the creators have troubled with accurately assess the skills of Women’s footballers and compare their abilities towards the current Player Attribute levels within Football Manager – meaning we might see huge changes in how player’s skills are assessed in FM25. Perhaps gone are the days of player attributes ranging from 1-20 and instead changing focus towards statistics and performance to judge a players abilities rather than a set number.

How many Women’s leagues and what licences Sports Interactive has acquired is yet to know.

However, since Sports Interactive acquired the licences of the UEFA competitions ahead of FM24, we can hope the game also has similar licences for the UEFA Women’s Champions League.

“The hard work doesn’t stop here, though. There’s a lot more to come from us over the next few years, starting with FM25 and all that means with the move to Unity and introduction of Women’s Football. We’ve been releasing games for 33 years but what we’re doing now is setting things up for the next 30, where we expect to continue to innovate for decades to come.”

Sports Interactive on breaking the milestone of best-selling game ever in the series

Unity Graphics Engine Introduced in FM25

One of the greatest additions to Football Manager 2025 will be the introduction of the brand new Unity Graphics Engine. This will become one of the most revolutionizing changes to Football Manager for years! We’re talking at the same level the 3D Match engine was added to FM09!

According to SI, the current graphics engine running behind the match engine has not had a major revamp since 2017 and the game has suffered since then from using a ‘outdated’ technology which didn’t managed to keep up with the pace of the rapid technological advancements in the industry.

With the game now being released on more platforms than ever before, Sports Interactive has worked on improving the backend technology that has made Football Manager into what it is.

So for Football Manager 2025, the Unity Engine will be used for the first time in the game’s series! The Unity Engine will come to the classic version of Football Manager 2025, FM25 Console and FM25 Touch*.

The switch to the Unity Engine is a remarkable change I’m sure we all will notice once loading FM25 for the first time. By using one of the most powerful industry-leading game development platforms for Football Manager you will experience a brand new user interface to the game but that graphics both inside and outside matchdays is severily upgraded.

When we know the Unity Engine has been used to deliver games like Pokémon Go, Call of Duty:Mobile, the Cities Skyline series and the open-world, action role-playing game Genshin Impact – which gives you a similar look and feel as the Legend of Zelda game series – the possibilities for FM25 will be endless!

In the simpliest term, the Unity engine offers the opportunity to add more powerful user interface tools which will enhance how you navigate through the different screens and access information available to you.

We’ve been working closely with Unity over the last few years to be able to deliver a whole new UI which will dramatically improve the ways you are able to interact with the game, both inside and outside of a matchday. Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP) allows us to create more optimal graphics across a range of platforms, from mobile to high-end consoles and PC/Mac – but we’re also adding some enhancements on top.

The Future of Football Manager, Sports Interactive

In this instance, we can expect that long-gone are screens with all-in-one information with different tabs that let you get more in-depth information and instead have a more intuitive way of presenting data.

The reality might be that skins and panels are a thing of the past and that we’ll be able to move across the game as if we were walking around the club’s training ground in an open-world football club environment where you walk into the Manager Office, Dressing Room and interact with players in a more 3D experience all across the game.

Even though this is just a dream, the reality is that with the switch to the Unity Engine the current look and feel of the match engine and everything surrounding the matchdays will be improved. We can expect to see stadium environments and everything related to the stadium graphics being improved for FM25.

Perhaps the switch to the Unity Engine will offer us the chance to custom-build new stadiums and watch the new stadium being build or upgraded with a scenomatic overview of the process – just like we would expect to see upgrades of buildings and environments in other gaming genres.

For FM24, we could experience the very first jump towards the enhancements relating to match engine improvements and graphical enhancements with a greater focus on ball physics and player locomotion. This will further be improved for FM25 by continuing the effort into making the game a truer reflection of real-life football with new animations based on a new animation technology. These improvements will also be evident in the surrounding scenes of the whole Match Day experience on FM25.

On top of that, its introduction will opening up the opportunity to dramatically improve how newgen faces look and the quality of the faces generated, such as in the case of manager creation.

In the end, it will open the possibility of better-quality graphics across all supported devices of Football Manager – from the console version of the game to the fully-fledged career game and multiplayer modes.

FM25 Mobile will be the only platform that won’t benefit from the switch to the Unity Engine but may be incorporated to a future version of FM Mobile.

Transfer Saved Games From FM24 to FM25

For FM24, the ability to transfer saved games from FM23 to FM24 was first introduced. According to the information from SI about the future of Football Manager this feature will continue – letting you transfer your FM24 saved games into FM25.

These are just some of they key things we know about Football Manager 2025 so far! But FM25 can’t come fast enough!

READ MORE | Play Football Manager 2024 as if it was FM25 – Download the 2024-25 League Update Database

Official Licence of The Premier League

On the 10th of June 2024, it was announced that Football Manager would get the official Premier League licence. Gone are the days of Man UFC saga and the experience of managing in the English Premier League will be more immersive than ever before!

From the 2024/25 season, all 20 Premier League clubs will be fully licensed in future FM releases with official logos, kits, and player photos featuring across the entire FM-series.

Expect further information about the Premier League’s in-game integration with Football Manager and the partnership activities between the league and Sports Interactive coming later this year.

So far, the Football Manager 2025 release date is unknown. However, normally a new edition of the game by Sports Interactive is announced in August with a release date set to late October/early November.

Football Manager 2024 was released November 6th, 2023 with an Early Access of FM24 dropping around 2 weeks earlier – on the 19th of October.

For Football Manager 2025, we can anticipate a similar release date as in the previous years but we have to wait and see as nothing is confirmed officially yet!

According to Sports Interactive, they are aiming for the first major FM25 reveal in Q2 of 2024 – meaning we are nearing closer and closer to that date any day that passes by now!

With this background information in mind, let us shift our attention to the main topic of this article; the Football Manager 2025 features we like to see!

Our FM25 Feature Wishlist | What we want to see added in Football Manager 2025

Perhaps you are like me and feel there were areas of the game that’s either needs expanded upon, to make it even more realistic, features that you feel doesn’t work as intended or simply feel there are new features in Football Manager 2024 needed to maintain motivation to enjoy it.

Like you, I have my petpeeves with Football Manager 2024, especially in regard to making FM24 the most realistic and complete football simulation games in the market.

Below, me and a few selected fellow Football Manager Community members will share some of the things we would love to see added or improved in Football Manager 2025.

As you will probably notice, some of these things will probably require more time to incorporate and will therefore be more likely a new feature for Football Manager 2026 rather than FM25 – but who knows.

The staff at the Sports Interactive headquarter also have in my belief their roadmap for FM25 features and additions pretty made-up by now, but hopefully some of these requested features for the new game will be seen and one day become part of the Football Manager series.

Continue reading to hear more about what we want to see added of Football Manager 2025 features, as we hereby shares our FM25 feature wishlist!

Make the Game an Open-World Experience

One of the first features I want to see for Football Manager 2025 is turning the game into an open-world simulation game. However, more realistically this is probably something for the future as we might see it in the roadmap for FM26 or FM27… anyway!

Imagine having the same kind of experience we would have in GTA V or any other games where control your person. Imagine walking around the training ground and through the office walls of the club house. In some club’s you might have a tiny office with less technology, whilst at a bigger club your office will be more modern looking and you can invite your players and staff into for a chat and see them sitting in front of you.

Then, on the contrary in press conferences, team meetings or in the dressing room, you’ll be able to see your players and journalist sitting in front of you and the quality of the persons are similar to what we would expect from a video game launched in 2024 with better quality in the human faces and movements and face reactions almost true to life.

If it’s one thing the Unity Engine can deliver is the opportunity to turn Football Manager into an open-world simulation where “anything can happen”.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to see your team celebrate through the streets of your town in an open bus if you manage to win the Premier League or the nations biggest trophy? Or, walk through the doors of Carrington or de Toekomst to experience the club’s facilities or the building of a new stand on the Stadium happening in front of you?

An open world experience would also provide us with more opportunities in the daily management of the club – something I’ll speak more about below!

Revamp Training

It’s been a few years since the current training model saw a major revamp. Even though I can’t remember* when the current training sessions and how you would create training schedules in Football Manager was incorporated, I think it’s time to dramatically improve and revamp training for Football Manager 2025.

*Training has to my knowledge stayed more or less the same since FM21…with only minor changes to types of training sessions and theirs impact on attributes, condition, team cohesion and so on.

What I want to see changed in training for Football Manager 2025 is a total revamp of the training calendar and how you would decide upon training duration and intensity.

To enable these changes, there are three things that needs to be added;

A) Add Warm-Up Sessions

If we look beyond the types of training sessions available for FM25, I believe it would add a layer of realism and uniqueness to be able to select specific warm-up sessions and decide on how long they would last. For instance if we select ‘Ball Retention’ for Training Slot 1 we have no control over how long the session would last. We only knows that it’s intensity is 15% of a full match for the defensive unit or 9% of full match for the attacking unit but we don’t know if the session lasts 90 minutes or 45.

Rather than having three training slots where one is extra, it would be more realistic to break up all training slots into warm-up, main and post-workout or extra sessions, and then decide how long each session would last.

Here we could imagine that you wish to add some kind of Rondo session – high intensity possession drills for the warm-up session, which would last for 20 minutes before you plan a 45 minute long main session. Post-workout you could get your strikers to work on their finishing while defenders and midfielders work on crossing or through balls, defensive positioning and concentration for another 20 minutes – meaning the length of the first training session of the day will be 1h and 25 minutes.

The idea is that you could bring your training philosophy into the club and incorporate an unique training model by stamping your mark on the training ground with how many training sessions a day, what they focus on on warm-up sessions and main training sessions and how much emphasize you would put on set-pieces and other extra sessions post-workout.

In overall, this will enable you to plan the training from 1 to 3 sessions a day – just as we can today – but you will be able to tailor the training in a more specific manner as you can ask your players to focus on either technical aspects of play or physical condition and injury prevention for the warm-up, before focusing on a tactical training sessions for the main session – e.g Match Practice.

2) Ability to Tailor Training Units Per Sessions

When picking training sessions the description would let us know the training impact for each of the training units or who will attend the training session according to what you’ve set up in the training units tab.

When planning training, I would love the ability to decide on the numbers of players who shall attend a specific training session. For specific training sessions like Match Practice and other more specialized training sessions I would love to pick either from a 4vs4, 7vs7 game, 11vs11 or other scenarios where it’s one or two players more than the defending or attacking unit – e.g 4vs2, 3vs1, 5vs4 and so on.

This would enable you to ask your wingback to work with the defensive unit at one session working on ‘Defending Wide’ and also being part of the attacking unit for the ‘Attacking Direct’ session later on that day.

At the same time, you would be able to let your defenders work with your most technical skilled players in ball retention sessions that aims to replicate the Rondo in a smaller group to help to aid their ball control and defensive positioning when up against two or more attacking players when possible as well as they would be part of the defensive unit for any other sessions.

By letting you pick training units on a more frequent basis you would be able to improve player partnerships and establish connections between the players by integrating a new player or a youth player more easily, as you can let your players work in a smaller group of 4 to 6 players for a specific session to target specific areas of improvement.

3) Select Training Intensity per Session

Once planning training, I would also love the ability to select a training intensity on a per session basis. For instance, we can imagine that you got an important match coming up and you wish to have a light Match Practice session to mimic a warm-up session, as it only lasts for 30minutes, before having a more intensive Attacking Movement session which lasts for another 30 minutes.

Who attends these sessions might also differ considering who shall take part of the next part and who won’t.

The idea would be that training will be more unique from club to club and you will be able to prepare your squad for the next match on a different scale than now.

4) Add Ability to Set up Training Sessions for those not involved with Matches

What happends to the players that’s not part of the match squad and won’t be travelling to the game? At the moment, they will have a rest day as far as I know. For FM25, I would love the ability to set up an instruction for what should happen for anyone not taking part of the match squad.

Here we can imagine that you would have the option to choose between either;

• rest
• individual training focus
• or, ask your coaching team to set up a training session

What’s useful in my point of view, is the ability to determine and plan when players should work on their individual training focus or focus on team training.

Right now, we have no information about how many hours per week the players’ are training and when they are working on their individual focus.

Training Planner – Create Training Sessions & Drills

On top of the changes I want to training for Football Manager 2025 comes the Training Planner. Just like the set-piece creator in FM24, or any other football training planner apps available on the market, I would love to get the opportunity to create training sessions and drills.

Now this feature will mostly cater all the advanced users of Football Manager but could provide a great addition to the game – especially since we have the brand new Unity Engine which adds greater opportunities to graphics and animations.

Just like the Sports Session Planner by Coaches Voices you could build sessions and plan the training with a training programme added to the game. This feature, if implemented to Football Manager, would of course be an extension to the current training sessions – meaning you could choose between pre-set training schedules, create your own schedules by picking from the current sessions, or custom-build sessions from scratch with specific focuses in terms of transitions, in possession, out of possession or ball control and passing exercises that enables to work on important matters to your tactics.

With a brand new technology and animatimations you could drag and drop within an interface that enables you to set up how players should be positioned, use arrows and paths to describe how the ball should move or where players should run and pick equipments like five a side goals, cones and wall dummies to practice certain situations.

The Training planner could also have specific templates to choose from with different coaching points depending on your football philosophy and tactics to work on creativity against a a defensive block, possession in wide areas or playing out of the back drills to encourage improvements in ball progression from the defensive third into the final third against a high pressing block or to increase understanding of each players’ necessary positioning in a more shadow play curc*mstance.

Regardless of your brand new to creating training sessions and drills, or got some interesting in building football training sessions, there’s always the option to get influenced by real-life coaches who shares their training practices on social medias, so you could always take advantage of that when transferring it over to FM.

I understand it’s quite an advanced feature that won’t be necessary for the average Football Manager gamer, but it could increase the realism of Football Manager and make us feel more like managers and coaches. I’m also aware that it’s more a likely feature to be implemented for FM26 or FM27 than FM25, but who knows how great of a leap the next version of Football Manager will be in terms of the coming graphical enhancements.

Training Engine

Along side the Training Planner and the idea to revolutionize training on Football Manager 2025, my desire would be to top the game with the ability to visit the training ground and oversee training – just like you would oversee matches.

At the moment, you will be presented with a report of this week’s training featuring an overview of the best player’s Training Performance in a score. The training rating doesn’t provide us with any feedback on why and in which training sessions they stood out.

One way to get more feedback about the training performance and see your training sessions and drills come to live via a training engine. In FM24, at friendly fixtures against your B-team or Under-21, you will be able to see your players warm-up and do some kind of drills in the pre-match build-up.

This could be the first glimpse of what to come for Football Manager 2025!

Even though I understand not everyone would like to spend time watching training sessions being played out, you could be provided with highlights from training that provides you with more feedback on why a player is performing well in training and what he did well.

Such highlights from the training engine would be useful when the players have done ‘Match Practices’ or any other sessions the players will work on their player role.

Enhance Training Performance Feedback

If, you wish to oversee training, the training engine will give you valueable insight to whether a player understands his role and duty in the different phases of play, and could be a potential starter for the next match, or if he makes mistakes in his positioning and decision-making. If so, I would love the ability to correct such behaviour.

Whether it being feedback from your assistant manager who informs you about players who have stood out or not on the training ground, and a better insight to what he did well/bad. You could be informed about player X received a training rating of 5.9 because he was more or less lazy, where unfocused and didn’t tried to play at his best. Then, it could say that he missed passes frequently, positioned himself wrongly when defending which resulted in several of goals conceded and should be working on his defensive positioning and concentration as an Individual focus plus being critized for his training performance.

New Staff Roles: Add Personal Trainers

In regard to individual training and developing players, one suggestion is to incorporate the ability to hire personal trainers who will work with individual players for a given time to improve their physic or specific weaknesses. If we look at the rise of Erling Haaland, his personal trainer John ‘The Fix’ Haddad has been a huge part of improving the players’ strength and prevent injuries outside the job done by the different fitness coaches at Man City, Borussia Dortmund and RB Salzburg to manage overall training load.

In this event, I would envision that we could hire personal trainers for a set time and at a set cost to work on player’s biomechanics. Rather than the injury susceptibility is set at a specific level in Football Manager (e.g. high, average or low), the players working with personal trainers could see their overall level of training susceptibility being lowered as they take care of injury prevention and reduce the risk of previous injuries to enrupt.

This will be handy for all those players suffering from injuries that has a tendency to come back several times. Perhaps your striker has a tendency to strain his hamstring or got a weak hip that causes problems with his stability and fitness. Perhaps there are players that wish to improve their physic outside the training facilities the club can provide and wish to hire a personal trainer at his own cost.

Revamp The Tactical Creator

For the last years I’ve felt the Tactics Creator has gone a bit in the wrong direction. One of the Football Manager 2025 features I want is to incorporate a Tactical Creator that enables you to sketch out attacking strategies in terms of how you want your players to move, position themselves and zones to attack which goes beyond the default player role movements.

The Tactics Creator app inside Football Manager does not need to be that advanced but should be able to set up strategies for:

• a maximum of two different strategies to playing out from the back – e.g how you want your players to react to playing against teams using a high pressing system and the default plan
• a maximum of three attacking plans featuring the movements and ball progression of your attacking players to enable your CM to get into a goalscoring opportunity, free up the striker or what needs to happen if the winger cuts inside

Overall, this would enable you determine third man runs, overloads and ball progression when you build out from the back or when you are entering the final third.

One of the benefits of sketching out plans for when you are in possession or in the attacking transition phase is to make use of rehearsed movements. The players know where they needs to be and how you wish to attack.

In honesty, the idea behind a reavmped Tactics Creator App is that the strategies you create will be linked to the training engine – meaning whatever you create in the Tactics Creator will be seen on the training ground when working on final third entries or building out from the back.

At the same time, when the player’s are working on Attacking Movements on the training ground, they understands when or where a player should get forward and into the penalty box, make a dummy run towards the flank or what they shall do if they receive the ball in the middle of the pitch. Hopefully it can get rid of ludacris mistakes and rushed decisions where the player pass the ball outside the touchline or back to the goalkeeper when it’s a clear opportunity to progress the ball into the penalty area by looking for a through ball or that I player moves into a covering position which may free up a player further forward.

Kick Off Routines

To follow up the idea on expanding the features of the Set-Piece Creator is to enable the ability to set up certain kick off routines within the Revamped Tactics Creator. Over the last few years, more and more teams has seen the advantages of using kick-offs as a dead ball situation and tried to come up with attacking strategies and plans on how to create chances directly from the kick off.

With the ability to plan and create effective kick off routines, just like you would prepare for wide free kicks, you can catch the opposition off guard by asking certain players to sprint forward and attack the final third zone.

This means that you should be able to determine how you want your players to line up at kick off and their duties – who should sprint forward, where you want the ball to go – whether you wish to be patience in the build up and use short passes or try to launch it long as soon as the DM receives the ball.

Enhance the Set-Piece Creator

The set-piece creator was a highly welcomed addition when it was introduced to FM24. With more opportunities and an interface that enabled us to create more true to life corner and free-kick routines, it enabled us to immerse ourself into deadball situations and more attacking strategies.

Even though the set-piece creator is fantastic and gives us more opportunities to set up more realistic deadball situations, I want to see further improvements to this area.

I understand from a game developer concern is that positioning of players has to be in a specific area. However, I would love the ability to instruct multiple players to take up position in a specific area of the field, for instance start their position on the edge of the penalty box (far centre) and attack the ball from deep. In these situations you could be able to instruct one player to make a diagonal curved run from his location towards the far post towards the near post, while the second player holds position and the third player attacks the middle of the penalty box.

These runs would cause far more chaos and would enable us to create more realistic corner routines, just like we have seen Arsenal or Brentford has been so good at.

At the same time, the question arises what should happen if you ask one player to come closer. At the moment, there are no opportunity to set instructions for this player in terms of what he should do when he receives the ball.

Having the opportunity to instruct him to make an outswinging cross as soon as he receives it, pass it towards the more creative player that stands at the edge of the penalty box, or run with the ball towards the near post would bring another layer to short corners.

Being able to create arrows and pass maps for set-pieces could be one way to go in the quest to mimic real-life deadball situations on Football Manager 2025.

Match Day Improvements

When it comes to match days and what you do as manager on the touchline, the animations and instructions could be expanded upon in my view.

One thing I’d love is to instruct your players to warm-up and see them running, stretching or doing drills outside of the pitch – whether it being behind the goal, down the touchline or near the corner flag.

By asking your players to warm-up it provides a signal to both the players on the pitch that they have to perform better otherwise they will be substituted and that the players on the bench could enter the pitch in near future – making them mentally prepared and reduce the risk of seeing ‘players unable to meet the pace of the game’ within their body language.

On top of that, and in regard to Odin White Man Gaming’s idea I would love to get an additional Camera View – The Touchline Camera or the Manager View which enables you to see the action up close and more personal. This means that the quality of the newgen faces and other animations around the pitch must be improved as you’ll be able to see bottle stands, Camera’s, as well as the chalked box for where the manager can stay.

Ability to Instruct Players to Get Physio Treatment at Half Time

Apart from half time team talks and trying to motivate the players to step up their performances for the second half, the half time experience could be expanded upon a little more. Apart from being able to walk around the dressing room and see your players as you make the half time team talks, it would be wonderful to instruct tired players or players who have taken a little knock to get treatment by the physio to improve their fitness for the second half.

Make the Touchline Tablet More User Friendly – Swap Player’s Positions

Have you ever wanted to do a quick change to your squad selection within the match? Perhaps you have noticed that your central midfielder or wingback doesnt perform as good as you had desired, or that your newly subbed in player, is playing in a weak position and you want to make some quick changes to your formation?

If so, you would need to click the Tactics button on the Touchline Tablet to make a change to the position (and/or role).

Wouldn’t it be great if you were allowed to swap players on the pitch directly within the Touchline Tablet?

I would certainly embrace that feature as I’m having a very versatile squad where the central defender could play as a defensive midfielder, wingbacks who can play on both flanks, or as both fullbacks and wingers.

Rather than having to visit the Tactics Screen to make the changes, having a more flexible Touchline Tablet where you drag and drop players would be wonderful and save me some time!

Build Youth Academies

Everyone loves to create a golden generation and use their youth facilities to get that next generation of wonderkids and talents coming through the club’s Academy. Outside just improving the club’s youth facilities and hiring a head of youth development and youth coaches that fits your playing style and have a positive personality, you will have no real influence over the grounding principles and structure of the youth academy and it’s philosophy.

In FM25, I would like the ability to be part of the process of establishing the club’s youth academy for those minor clubs. As you build the club from the lower leagues and improves your club reputation it would be wonderful to have an influence over the DNA of the Youth Academy.

Apart from being able to decide on the location of the Youth Academy – whether you got the resources and funds to open up a Youth Academy in another country or you need to prioritize your local region, it would be wonderful to give us the choice to determine what type of Junior Coaches we want to hire and what areas of the game, the youth development of the Juniors should primarily focus on.

At a club playing a more direct counter-attacking football, you might wish coaches who prefers a 5-3-2 formation and is better at coaching defending and tactical than mental and technique.

In terms of training focus at the youth academy, you could be presented with a list of attributes to develop and have the option to prioritize a maximum of 3 attributes. Then, you have to make the difficult choice of trying to develop youth players with better ball control than tactical understanding or prioritize physic over technique.

Now I know that real football academies won’t be targeting only three attributes but it might help to emphasize certain attributes within the Youth Academy on Football Manager 2025 to develop players more aligned to your football philosophy and type of playing style the club plays.

Also, regarding this matter, I’m not talking about removing the national differences in types of players being generated but being able to create a youth academy that aligns to the club’s tactics so we increase the chance of developing players in a similar mould – just like Barcelona’s La Masia or Ajax’s De Toekomst are so brilliant at.

Apart from being able to target specific skills in terms of football coaching and types of training sessions the Academy players are attending, FM25 could feature a Academy budget – just like we have the ability to prioritize money on scouting budgets and transfer budgets.

Here I’m thinking of a similar slider that enables you to decide how much importance you’d like to give to the development of players from the academy.

How much money you allocate to the Academy will determine both the quality of the Junior Coaches, the pool of players that will be invited to the Academy and the quality of the equipment.

For a State of the Art Academy you will be able to let your players use the latest technology to improve their vision, decision-making and ball control by using VR and other advanced training equipment, as well as the number of training courts and other facilities that helps the players to improve as footballers.

The more money that goes to the Academy, the more players could be enrolled depending on what you prefer. Perhaps, you’d like to keep the number of players to a maximum of 100 players for a more focused development, or prioritize the money on an higher number of youngsters from the age of 13 to 15 to increase the chance of getting that golden generation.

Like today, these players’ will be hidden until they reach the age when the youth intake happens. However, you might get Inbox messages that informs you of shining products within the Academy so you can plan for his arrival – one or two year down the line.

The User Interface when building new Youth Academies could be:

• Step 1: Determine the size and location of the Academy
  • Local Academy – Cost: €10K
  • Regional Academy – Cost €100K
  • National Academy – Cost €500K
  • International Academy – Cost €1M
  • Worldwide Academy – Cost €10M
• Step 2: Determine Academy’s Training Philosophy
  • Prioritize Player’s Physic e.g quickness or strength
  • Prioritize Player’s Technique e.g Ball Control
  • Prioritize Player’s Tactical Abilities
  • Prioritize a Training Philosophy accoding to a certain Club DNA – specific attributes
• Step 3: Minimum Requirements & Quality of Junior Coaches
  • Determine the minimum coaching qualifications for Junior Coaches working at the Academy
  • Determine the preferred coaching style and preferred formation for Junior Coaches
• Step 4: Enable us to prioritize and weight certain attributes relating to the type of Academy you are creating so the training sessions at the Academy aligns with the club’s playing style e.g Barcelona vs Ajax vs Liverpool or West Ham.
• Step 5: Choose the location of the Academy. Where you are able to build a new Youth Academy depends on the club’s Youth Recruitment, Reputation and Affiliated Clubs.

Revamp Player’s Profiles: Player Role Pizza Charts & Graphs

By using custom-made skins like the Mustermann Iconic skin for FM24, we have seen how innovative the Football Manager interface can become. Personally, one of the most imoprtant things when playing Football Manager is that the user interface provides you with the most necessary information, so you can make more informed decisions.

In terms of the player profile screen, I’d love to see some changes to its layout and opportunities – making it look more modern whilst incorporating important features that enables you to judge the player’s abilities; whether it being strengths or weaknesses.

Now, I don’t know if it’s time to go fully Attributessless and remove the classic levels of player’s skills from 1 to 20 but I do feel down the line that player’s skills could be determined in a different way.

Besides key information about the player, you could have a section where the player’s performance would get more emphasis.

In reality, it’s not like real managers and coaches has a list of player attributes ranging from 1 to 20 in front of them, star ratings or whatsoever.

Whether it’s time to incorporate last seasons statistics as a basic level of determine a players skills it’s something that must be up for discussion. However, one thing I like to see in terms of changing to the player profiles is that player data and statistics is better incorporated – giving you the ability to see how good he is in passing, shooting or tackling.

Adding an area within the player profile that incorporates key statistics for the position – similar to the Mustermann skin would be fantastic but on top of that I would love to see a player’s heat map featuring in his player profile – like how it is on the SofaScore website.

More Data-Driven Profiles

Another improvement for FM25 is to remove the star ratings for his player role abilities and instead have percentage score of how likely the player will be good at playing in a role – according to his tendencies, expectations and key stats for that role.

Let us assume that you have a right winger in your team. His statistics reveals that he is great at dribbling with the ball and finds the target from shooting from outside the penalty area more often than crossing from the byline. Through his previous performances he has a great chance of being good in the Inside Forward role and weaker at playing as a winger.

By incorporating a pizza chart for player roles rather than a star rating system would make things more realistic. My vision is to add a similar pizza chart, Football Manager partner SciSports uses in their recruitment solution.

It will integrate how coaches and scouts has to judge players skills based on their statistical performance and tendencies without knowing if the player will be best used in the Roaming playmaker role or the ball-winning playmaker role. Right now, the star rating may be three stars for more than two roles without considering their statistical output and tendencies within a team.

Along with a pizza chart of his best roles, you could have key information about which position he is mostly used at and which role he tends to behave like – e.g playing in the DM position but behaves more like a segundo volante to better distinguish his best player role according to statistical data & previous performance at his current club. It doesn’t mean that he could play well in another role, but that his current performance makes him more suitable to play as a Segundo Volante than an advanced playmaker or Carrilero.

This suggestion of mine, aligns well with MustermannFM’s FM25 feature request, which you can read more about below!

More Graphs!

On top of that, I would like to some small changes to how we are able to assess potential and the future economical opportunities that opens up in terms of potential transfer value growth by adding prediction graphs which compares your player to the best footballers in his position, or according to a specific player or club you can choose from to provide the relative graphs in regard to a player’s potential and development.

Introduce Estimated Development Graph

First up, is introducing the estimated development graph. This graph compares the players at your club to the best footballers in the respective position, or to players from a specific club of your choice, and tries to predict his future development and how much he can progress in the next years under the right circ*mstances. The estimated development graph will take into account injury history and other data about the player and tries to predict whether he can reach Premier League football in the future, or how his skills relate to the players within the top 5 leagues.

At SciSports, a partner of Football Manager, they have used a number between 1 and 200 to determine a player’s potential – similar to how the potential rating is in Football Manager. Rather than using a star rating, they try to estimate a player’s development according to their current skills and his potential to improve both in relating to his age and his potential to become a key player for a specific club – as seen in this illustruction for Player Recruitment at SciSports.

Introduce Estimated Transfer Value Graph

The player profiles of SciSports also includes an estimated transfer value graph. It contains the historical transfer value growth for the player as well a stipulated line that tries to predict his future transfer value. Having this tool enables you to see how his transfer value has grown, declined or stalled in the last few years and make a decision from an economical perspective whether he could become a player that you can sign and sell for profit a few years down the line.

Revamp Player Personalities

In the quest to find players who can develop and may better reach their maximum potential, the search for professional players might be favoured. Without thinking more about it, we simply look for Model Citizens, Model Professional players or any other players with high Determination, ability to handle pressure and high ambitions.

Rather than summarizing a number of different personality traits into one description, I would love it if players on FM25 had more personality!

They could easily expand on the areas that affect a players’ personality with more background information. One step on the way would be to provide a more accurate description of all your team’s current players’ attributes relating to personality.

In a similar way as seeing each players injury susceptibility and positional abilities, it would be great to see whether a player has high or low temperament, high, low or average sportsmanship.

At the same time, we could incorporate several other personality traits to make the player’s more complex in terms of their behaviour.

Let us see charismatic players, players with higher or lower compassion, footballers who might be some drama-queens, or fun-loving guys who is playing football just to have a good time. Or, let us see players who are introvert and shy, cleverful players with a creative side that enjoys a challenge.

Regardless of the personality traits featuring in Football Manager, it would be wonderful to have a more in-depth insight to the players you have extensive knowledge of and known for at least a year.

Finding out that a player suddenly has become more controversial after entering a mentoring groups is something that could be avoided if we knew more about their character.

Adding a more true-to-life charactheristics of the players would also be beneficial in terms of recruitment and managing squad dynamics. In fact, in all scenarios where you has to meet the player and chat with him about unhappiness or recent performances will be ‘easier’ as you can approach the situation from a different angle or consider how you use gesstures and words to reach the player’s understanding.

When talking about player characteristics and personalities, one area of the game that I miss is enabling a player’s social life and build more drama to the saves… who doesn’t forget the time your most important player missed out of training due to personal reasons or simple came late to training. It’s not often we get these inbox messages anymore.

Relating to a player’s social life, it would be interesting to see how life changes like getting a newborn kid, a bad break up with a fiancee or other life-changing moments can affect morale, happiness, determination and eventually the player’s form.

Now, I’m not saying Football Manager should go completely nuts with frequent Inbox messages of player issues, but providing more information and feedback about form drops and give you more reasons to take your player under the wings by calling him into meetings or try to encourage and motivate him should be desireable.

Dynamic Attributes

Another area to improve realism of player’s personality and motivation would be to make Determination a more dynamic attribute. Like everyone else, footballers inner drive to succeed and motivation to improve will always go up and down throughout their life.

Let us take the example of Eden Hazard…

After moving to Real Madrid and reaching one of his biggest personal goals, the next two years saw him trouble with a never-ending injury crisis. Even though injuries plagued him, I’m sure his Determination and confidence took a major hit and declined to a level that made the player never reach the same heights again.

For FM25, it would be wonderful if certain attributes such as Bravery and Determination went up and down throughout a player’s career – both depending on his injury history but also depending on age, past achievements and play time.

For instance, when Erling Haaland had helped Man City to win the treble, and becoming the leagues top goalscorer as well as reaching a number of other milestone at the age of only 22, it seemed to me that his inner drive to score goals reduced slightly in spells throughout the 23/24 season.

Now, we might question his form and self-confidence as he were out injured for around two months but I’m 100% certain from a personal perspective that my inner drive and motivation goes up and down depending on the life situation and what happends to me.

I’m sure if I would be benched for a month, my Determination to succeed and get play time would increase despite my self-esteem would take a hit.

Enhance Scouting & Recruitment

Ahead of Football Manager 2023 scouting was revamped and one of the changes was that scouts would only include or recommend transfer targets of players that are interested in joining your club. This has been a source of frustration for FM24 as the number of players found and being recommended when setting up recruitment focuses is reduced to a very low rate, even though Sports Interactive has been happy with how it works.

One of the ideas behind the changes to scouting has been to make it harder to scout for wonderkids and sign these gems as they have restricted the players found to players above the age of 18, or who are interested in transfer.

However, my belief is that the recruitment focuses needs to be tweaked and behave a bit more realistic. When you are scouting for players by sending out your scouts at assignments they should report back on players they find regardless of how interested these players are at joining your club, or their age. In my point of view, it’s not their job to filter the potential transfer targets before recommendations pop up in the Scouting Centre.

… and why should Sports Interactive try to force upon us a specific way of playing the game and for those who wants to, not being able to spot the next big thing in Football Manager?!

If it was up to Football Manager, Man City would never know about Cavan Sullivan until he turns 18, or Chelsea wouldn’t have heard of Estevão Willian at the age of 15-16, as they would never be able to entice the player to move to them as they would never get a scout report of the player that early!

One of the changes I like to see in terms of scouting is to remove the current “rules” working in the background of scouting and let scouts work freely to find players according to the minimum requirements you set for your recruitment focus.

Instead, I would advice them to incorporate a scouting parameter that enables you to scout for players based on their interest, even though it’s a feature that should not be needed when you are asking your scout to find players within a country or region.

A suggestion could be that you choose between an Interest level from None to Extremely Interested, just like how you can operate in the ‘Players In Range’ section.

At the same time, it would be wonderful to have different types of recruitment focuses that enables you to tell your scout whether you’re desire is to prioritize on potential immediate first team starters or players for the future – meaning you can ask your scouts to find players for your under-21 team, U18 team or U16 team that has the potential to become at least useful players for the first team.

With my changes, the overall number of scout reports would be likely to increase but that doesn’t mean it will increase the likeliness of signing that 5-star wonderkid that has emerged in South America. Like any other teams’ director of football, or those in charge of recruitment, agents or intermediates, you will need to try other measures to get the player to become interested in your club or make him unsettled to increase the likeliness of a future move.

Improve how scouts operate

How the scouts operate must be improved too!

One of the main sources for a scout to learn more about players and increase the pool of players found is by watching matches – whether he attend the matches himself or uses data programs to re-watch matches on his laptop, TV or other devices.

For FM25, I would loved the ability to see scouts who are travelling a nation to attend matches without my having to ask the scout to attend it. At the moment, it seems the scout doesn’t consider the quality of the teams who are playing and could attend a division 3 match in Brazil rather than travelling to another big city to watch a match between Brasileiro Serie A teams, or an under-19 match if he’s restricted to scouting for solely players under the age of 21.

If you’re managing a top club like Olympique Lyon, your world class scouts should understand that it won’t be beneficial to watch a game in the lower divisions but use his reputation and experience to prioritize scouting specific regions and divisions that could find players that meets your criterias.

Enhance Scout Reports with more useful data

By having the scouts to operate smarter, they will also gather more highlights of players which should begiven a greater focus when scouting for potential first team starters.

The scout reports would be improved too as the scouts will be able to give you feed back on how the player tends to operate and provide you with highlights of pros and cons that backs up the information within the scout report so you can get a better picture of why the scout only recommends the player as B- or D+.

For the players who are analyzed by the recruitment analysts, the players’ overall heat map from playable divisions should be integrated in the scout report – prodiving you with more information of his role or behaviour.

Include Regional Scouting

Consider you have just taken over a new club and wish to incorporate a specific recruitment philosophy where you only sign home grown players, or wish to prioritize certain parts of the world known for their abilities to develop players.

As the most populated state in Germany, Nordrhein-Westfalen should be a gold mine for tracking talents. Located towards the borders of the Netherlands and Belgium, this region includes some of the biggest clubs in Germany.

Rather than asking your scouts to travel to Germany to find players under the age of 25, what if you had the opportunity to restrict scouting to certain regions? That way you could prioritize your efforts at certain parts of a nation known for their number of major clubs.

By prioritizing certain regions, my hope would be that your scouts will work more efficiently and gain better coverage of the most important parts of a nations, as you could send out scouts to different parts of a country. Incorporating such a massive change to Football Manager requires SI to enhance the depth of the World Knowledge map and provide us with more details regarding cities, districts and states.

With a more realistic world map we could also hope the game informs us of the different regions population and provide us certain recommendations of areas to gain knowledge of, based on the Chief Scouts World knowledge and expertise

Including regional scouting would be a desireable feature for Football Manager 2025 as you could literally expand on the areas of the world you can ask your scouts to travel to, and make scouting more unique from club to club as you could build knowledge of certain parts of a nation.

FM25 Feature Request From the FM Community

As previously mentioned we said we would include FM25 feature request by some Football Manager YouTubers and bloggers in order to let you get an insight to what others within the FM Community likes to see improved or added for Football Manager 2025. We are hereby proud to present some of the guys who wanted to be involved and hopefully you’ll find some new acquintances or see what your favorite FM Creators want for FM25.

More In-Depth Statistics & Customisation of Data by MustermannFM

Customisation

It’s a regular Monday morning. November 2025. As I arrive at the training ground I am greeted, rather excitedly by Alex Sosa. Not the Bolivian drug lord from Scarface, but instead the Guatemalan Head Performance Analyst at Real Zaragoza. Doughy-faced, with gentle eyes gleaming, he hurriedly tells me that the passing stats of our defenders are potentially interesting, as he shoves a print-out of a scattergraph in my face.

They are indeed interesting.We have a quintuplet of centre-backs all featuring in the upper right quadrant. They complete a large volume of passes with great accuracy.Our wingbacks, on the other hand, are nestled much closer to the average.It may be interesting, but it is not surprising.We play a possession system that builds up from the back, and so I would expect to find our centre-backs excelling in this manner, although it is good to have this validated by the numbers.

“Thank you”, I say in my head to a fictionalised version of a real human being. “Would you be able to provide a similar breakdown showing progressive passes?”

I am met with bewilderment.And silence.Perhaps I should’ve been more effusive in my praise for the graph I had just received.Clearly time and effort went into it, and to meet it with a request for a different report might have come across as dismissive of the work they had done.

Still that didn’t change the fact that Alex Sosa, nor any of the performance analysts within the game are able to provide me with the report I want.The information is recorded, yet I cannot access it in a way that would be meaningful.

Now, let’s be clear: FM has come a long way over the last few years. xG was introduced in FM21, and the Data Hub followed in FM22.It’s a brilliant addition that allows us to drill down into some of the finer details and identify potential areas for improvement or, like above, seek validation.They have continued to expand on it year-on-year, with an ever increasing arsenal of metrics, such as OPPDA, Final Third Passes, and Field Tilt.The next step, for me, is to allow us to customise those graphs ourselves.

There is likely zero correlation between distance covered per 90 and saves parried, but if a manager asked to see that data, an analyst would be capable of providing it. This isn’t confined to scattergraphs, either.

Imagine being able to configure your own polygons!

This is something particularly dear to me. Having created Pizza Charts for the Mustermann Iconic skin, I am essentially asking to be put out of a job. Imagine being able to select which metrics are important to you, and then having the game automatically compare them against their peers.Either within the division they are in, or possibly against a wider range.

More, More, More

Of course, that is just one feature I’d like to see added for FM25.For me, it would be worthy of being a headline feature, but that’s because I’m a nerd, and I appreciate it might not have the same level of appeal to the masses as others within this article. ¨There are some more modest changes I would love to see, too.

Firstly, I hope to see them continue to add more metrics:

• xG Chain and xG Buildup would be a fantastic way for us to assess how our players are contributing to chance creation beyond xG and xA
• Carries would allow us to see which players are effective at breaking the lines even when they don’t necessarily “dribble” the ball past a player
• Dribble Success Rate would bring more context to how effective a player is when taking their man on
• Separate metrics for attacking and defensive headers to allow us to identify the effectiveness of players at aerial duels in different situations
• Combined metrics such as Shot Creating Actions (shots and expected assists) and Combined Defensive Actions (blocks, clearances, interceptions and tackles)

The spirit of xG Build up is based on knowing which players are part of passing chains that end in a shot but without taking into account the last two links – shot and last pass -, thus measuring midfielders, centre-backs or full-backs who have an important influence on their team’s possessions. In this way, we can see the role of those players who accumulate and construct many plays that end up being relevant.

‘xG Build up’: trust the process

Contextualised Information

This is all good and well, but I recognise that there may be some of you reading this who don’t touch the data hub and all this jargon is very off-putting.I expect it will have been mentioned elsewhere in this article, but a glossary would be a welcome addition.One of the key elements of data visualisation is it is there to help make reading statistics easier.This is all moot, if there is nothing to explain what those terms mean in the first place.

This can go further still, with drill down graphs. Imagine you are looking at the above polygon.The analyst has identified that we score a high number of goals per 90, yet take fewer shots per 90.What they haven’t done, however, is given us an indication why.My next step would be to look at the player graphs for “Shooting Forwards” and “Assisting – Midfielders”.

In doing so I can see that our strikers are performing well.Exceeding expectations, in fact.Exceeding expectations because they are feeding off scraps…

…We have an issue with chance creation and this becomes clear when looking at the “Assisting – Midfielders” scattergraph.Now, wouldn’t it be great if the game led you there itself? Rather than relying on us, as players, to know where to look.

History

There is one remaining improvement I’d like to see for FM25: Retention of historical statistics.I know this is a bugbear for many.Once a season ends, you are unable to access statistics from the previous campaign.If you want to search for a player, or do any analysis, you need to create a save point before the roll over and analyse it in a third party tool (like Excel).This is, in the nicest way possible, annoying.

Now let me temper this with an exceptionally boring bit about databases.For historical data to be accessible, it needs to be stored.Let’s say you have 20 leagues loaded with, on average, 20 teams in each league.Each team, when factoring in cup competitions, might play on average 45 games.That’s 18,000 games per season.On a large database, that might be around 80,000 players.And there might be around 60 metrics for each game, plus another 40 calculated metrics on top of that.It’s a lot of information.A lot of information, of which a player will only ever want to access a very small amount of it.

Storing that information will increase save game sizes, which are already pretty sizable, and put greater demands on hardware.We know hardware requirements are likely to increase for FM25, but I imagine there will be many discussions about performance optimisation and how this impacts what features are feasible.

Of course, that’s not our problem.It’s SI’s.We should be able to access advanced metrics from previous seasons.How that is done, is for them to work out!

If you enjoy statistics and data as much as Mustermann FM, head over to his YouTube channel and enjoy his wonderful series, the Moneyball Clinic. In his latest video he aims to rebuild Fluminense and continue the work of Fernando Diniz to apply the brand of Relationism football. If you don’t know what that is, tune in to MustermannFM!

Revamp Tactical Match Preparations by FranklyFM84

by FranklyFM84

For the last few years, Sports Interactive has tended to ‘dumb-down’ the game and make things even more user-friendly and easier to grasp for those new comers to Football Manager. One of the areas that has seen a major change is match preparations and how you would go about preparing for the next match.

The next match preparation screen was brand new for FM24 and while we had the opportunity to select which tactics to prepare for the next encounter for FM21, how we would prepare for the next match was changed for FM24. Gone were the days where you picked a Match Preparations Training session. Deciding whether you would pick Defensive Shape, Attacking Movement and Team Cohesion was removed for a more all-in-one solution where you choose to focus at a specific tactical preparation for the next match.

In the lead up to the next match, you should be presented with more feedback and information about the next opponent, so you can make better judgements of which tactical preparation focus to select.

Beneath the options to determine the match preparations you could be presented with statistics and data that relates to the analytics your Performance Analyst have conducted.

At the one hand, you could choose to base your decisions on general feedback from your Assistant Manager or Analyst like today. For instance, when your assistant tell you to focus on possession or to defend corners at set-pieces.

However, I want tactical preparations to become more realistic than that!

The current screens are just too generic; “defend set pieces” and “focus possession play”. Those can be made into real life scenarios instead of just being generalised.

What would happen in real life is that a coach or scout would analyze the next opposition to look for real weaknesses. If someone has watched their last few games, you can get feedback like: Some examples could be;

“They are strong at: Through balls through centre, Defending zonal in centre of goal, Playing out from the back”.

Or, on the contrary, they are weak at: “Wing Back defensively, Aerial height from corners or Defending with high line”.

• Martinez is a small center back at Man United and it would be beneficial to target him aerially by hitting floated crosses from deep towards his position.
• The opposing goalkeeper isn’t strong at corners as he might lack Aerial Reach and Command of Area and it would be beneficial to change the type of corner routine you should use to one which overloads the box with inswinging corners.
• Brentford like to play with an overload, and we could counter them by targetting runs and movements of the ball into the channels to try to take advantage of the spaces that are created behind their high block.

Then, things could get even more specialized with feedback more relating to player’s strength and weaknesses.

Like for example when Liverpool played against Arsenal and lost 3-1, it was obvious that the opposition were targeting Trent Alexander-Arnold because of his tendency to come inside and leave his position unoccupied. The two games late in the season against Manchester United were other perfect examples where the opposition effectively exploited Liverpool’s right back position due to their likeliness to vacate their ordinary position as DR and move into midfield area – meaning it would be acres of space to counter-attack in.

So, the feedback screen should be to say that they have a weakness at right back and we can target that in sessions by playing balls over the top or through balls specifically into that area of the pitch.

Also using Liverpool as an example again, it was known that Liverpool were using Trent to switch the play. They would play out from defence and play to Trent who would switch the play with a diagonal ball like he did for England the other night.

In the tactical preparations we could be recommended to practice playing against a player like Trent and we can negate that by marking him tighter or having a player in the area of the pitch that could reduce Trent’s influence on the game.

With these kind of feedbacks and suggestions on how to counter the next opposition, you can decide between whether to keep your current tactics or make the necessary changes to combat them.

My desire is that it could be the first step on the way to reduce the impact of plug-and-play tactics as the hope would be that both you and the AI manager will try to make more frequent changes to your system to react or counter opposition strengths or weaknesses.

If they are telling you to man mark a central midfielder you might be inclined to play an extra man in midfield so you’re not unbalanced by the one doing just that job – meaning you would go from a 3-4-3 to a 4-2-3-1 or a 4-3-3 system. If you get feedback about a weakness down the flanks but normally play a very narrow system you might need to play with wingers for just that game and then revert back to your narrow tactic on the next occassion.

My hope is that two games will never be the same and that you need to plan for tactical versatility when recruiting players.

As a result, we would have to be doing a proper job of managing the team according to what is actually evidenced on the pitch, meaning you would also need to focus your training week around their strengths and weaknesses according to these findings rather than using the same training schedule week in and week out.

In order for this to be a valueable improvement to Football Manager, it is necessary that the match engine for FM25 gets an huge overhaul and that both the AI manager is better at reacting to the Human Manager’s tactics as well as you can play different tactical systems and micro-managing the team tactics.

Discover more of FranklyFM84 and help him reach 5K subs on YouTube before Football Manager 2025 release!

More Control of The Marketing Aspects: Negotiate Sponsorships & Set Ticket Prices by FMNatics

I would love to have more control over the marketing aspects of Football Manager. Imagine being able to negotiate and select sponsors for the club! Facing the dilemma of short-term versus long-term commitments with sponsors would add an interesting layer of strategy.

The ability to sell one or multiple spots on the jersey, secure sponsorship for advertising around the field, and more would bring a new level of realism to the game.

Additionally, having the power to set ticket prices for the season or specific games would be fantastic. This feature could influence game attendance and affect our relationship with the supporters, adding another dimension to our managerial responsibilities.

Head over to FMNatics’ YouTube channel for more Football Manager content as this new FM Creator is raring to go for Football Manager 2025 release!

Changes to International Managementfor FM25 by CameronFM

Over the years we have seen changes to FIFA’s international tournaments; the Copa America continues to have invitee nations and change their group format each year, the introduction of the Finalissima, and the World Cup expanding. Whether you love or loathe it, these changes keep international football exciting. But whilst FIFA and the governing bodies look at their tournaments and modernism them, we have a feeling of an ageing feature within Football Manager.

I found that International Management was introduced back on Football Manager 2005 with limited features. At the time, the developers were working on the system for 2006, but it did open the basics of managing a nation should the computer approach you – international friendlies, a national pool feature (at the time it was just merely a mixture of the current national squad + shortlisted players) and the introduction of the Olympics.

FM06 expanded the number of national jobs, ranging from the senior squad down to the U19 squads and a player’s ability to reject a call-up, which was a step in the right direction for this side of the game. Still, it was left feeling neglected for numerous years. The next international management changes arrived in FM13, a whole 7 years from it being introduced in full, and even then, players were left wanting a bit more.

Managers would finally have the chance to converse with players concerning their international careers, ranging from why they were dropped, what the future holds for them or even convincing them to play for your nation. Media outlets were continuously on your back, much like the real world, concerning tournament performances and squad selections – these interactions aided with the realistic feeling. Team meetings were a new feature for the year, and it allowed the manager to motivate the players to perform to a higher standard or even risk losing the changing room.

But that was all we received in FM13. It was about the only changes we have received, and we are now 11 instalments into the future. Okay, the finer details within international management have changed alongside updates to the game, but we are still at a point where it is significantly lacking. What do we need to improve the reputation of this element of the game?

Staffing and Training

To me, it is a bit alien that the staffing section for international teams is significantly different to that of club management. Granted that most international managers will take their selection of backroom staff to the worldwide stage, the inability to advertise for specific roles is underwhelming.

Furthermore, the inability to organise training for the called-up players is strange. Albeit, squads won’t be together long enough to make comprehensive training programmes, a tournament’s build-up nowadays has very specific training programmes for all or some players. Being able to plan training sessions for the squad would also help build cohesion between players who don’t play alongside each other – a massive benefit going into the finals.

We do not need all the bells and whistles from a club training programme to be introduced, but the ability to dedicate days working on set-pieces, attack v defence and general match preparations would and should be a feature within international management.

Improved Realism in International Management

Club & Country saves happen all the time, mostly in the shape of building a nation. I completed 13 domestic seasons as manager of AC Virtus and managed the San Marino national team at the same time. My biggest irk. Matches on the same day or the day before / after.

As a manager of both, I had to be in Hungary whilst managing in San Marino, and it just doesn’t sit with me right. To me, there should be an option within the club that the assistant will take charge of the game. After all, you will lose players due to travelling for international games, so why should the club not lose their coach for the same reason? It would be great to see this sort of thing discussed during job interviews also – I am aware that there is a dialogue option surrounding managing both jobs, but it never goes any further than that. Promises and compromises could be discussed as part of a secondary interview or even at the time, depending on the candidates going for the job.

National Eligibility

This is a near-impossible task for the team at SI, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone! But with more common instances of players declaring themselves for a country through their biological mother/father or grandmother/father, it would be great to see this introduced into the game.

Now without spending time going through the family trees of current players, it would be great if it was coded similarly to having a son (or daughter with the woman’s game being brought in soon) in the game. It would be a great feature to have for the future regens of your save, and it brings more excitement to fighting over a future superstar.

It would be good to get reports from your national team staff on potential players that are eligible to switch to your chosen international team – after all, it is a common practice in the modern game now.

Introduction of Squad Dynamics

Over the years we have seen reports and pictures of every national team and the groups that are in place. You can famously remember the English “Golden Generation” never amounting to much due to the sheer domestic rivalry between players within the camp and it never bode well for results on the pitch. Fast forward now, and you can see the groups of best friends enjoying their training and this is paying dividends.

For me, I think it would be interesting to try and manage the squad dynamics by factoring in the club rivalry along with the personalities of each player. International management has been lacking in this department, and I think it would be great to put pressure on us as managers.

I’m hopeful that going into FM25 we will see a fresh look surrounding international management. For a game like this to go so long without properly addressing the underwhelming presence it brings, it is a real shame as excitement builds ahead of this summer’s major tournaments. We are anticipating FM25 updates over the coming weeks and I for one will be keeping a close eye on anything relating to international management!

Expect more great Football Manager content from CameronFM towards the release of FM25. In the meantime, read his current series where he tries to restore the glory of Rosenborg on FM24 at FMBootRoom. In this series, you will get a wonderful insight into how he tries to reshape the Norwegian club with a distinct club culture and football philosophy, much like in the ’90s.

Improve Press Conferences & Player Interactions for FM25 by Spencomms

Hello people, I’m Spencer Hopwood and my number one feature request for FM25 are improved press conferences and player chats.

I know this is a feature that currently doesn’t get used much by most people who play FM. However, I’m a glutton for punishment, so I do all my own press conferences and player chats as I like to play as realistically as possible, and multiple conferences and chats are a big part of the modern game.

As a content creator, these are unbelievably frustrating because, within a season, they can get very repetitive. With the technology available these days, they could be a really good way to advance stories in the game. Without knowing too much about how games are made, it surely can’t be that difficult to add enough questions to keep press conferences interesting.

I know that these can be repetitive in real life, and we all play hundreds of hours every year. However, with the rise of AI, questions must be able to be constantly generated to provide context for whatever is currently happening in your save. I’d like to be questioned more on my tactics and how certain players are doing at an analytical level rather than being a Sunday league manager who upsets the press because I have to tell them two or three times in one conference that I don’t have a relationship with Pep Guardiola.

One example of how player chats could be and need to be improved comes from my current save with my created club Penguin FC. After signing a whole squad in the first summer, I found it difficult to sign a decent second keeper. This led to one of our wingers, Stan Flaherty, moaning and, in fact, he put in a transfer request at 8:30 am on the 28th of July. Approximately four hours later, we signed a second goalkeeper. You would think that would solve the problem, but because I couldn’t bring this up in a chat with Stan, I had to offer him out and wait until the end of the summer window for him to relent and realize that we had solved his problem, so he had no reason to be unhappy. If I could have had the option to speak to Stan when the new keeper signed, that could have been solved very quickly before my squad potentially got very upset over an issue that had already been solved.

By improving press conferences and player interactions, and first and foremost player chats, FM25 would take a greater step towards creating a more vibrant club atmosphere where drama and unhappiness can be better resolved.

If you like to read about how others play Football Manager and talk you through their save updates, head over to Spencercomms Football Manager blog to read about his coming FM25 save updates, as well as much more to come!

Passion4FM wishes on this matter:

Relating to matter of improving press conferences, player chats and interactions I want to add a few points to the wishes from Spencercomms.

• Enable AI conversations and mimic a more realistic conversation where you are more free to talk about any topics of concern – rather than having to be restricted to the player chat topics we currently got.
• Enable us to have team meetings regarding the poor financial situation at the club and ask your players to take a wage cut of X % if needed
• Enable us to have player chat’s and conversation in contract negotiations and give us the opportunity to tell your player that you can’t offer more than e.g. €5K per week in wages due to the current financial situation.

  This was a source of frustration for me in my latest save where I had two of my key players wanting to renew their contracts as they were on an outgoing contract in December. However, due to the club’s finances my opening bid was 0.5K away from what one of them wanted and it ended with the player settled on leaving the club at the end of the contract and I had no chance to change his mind, even though I knew I would be possible to meet his demands in the summer when players would leave and it would free up funds.

• At contract negotiations, it would also be amazing if you had a more true to life experience with a brand new camera and 3D motion capture. Just imagine the experience of feeling you are actually in a meeting with the player and his agent as you would see the player and agent in front of you.
  • With AI conversation, you can try to negotiate and explain why you offer the contract terms as you do and use tones in your voice, gestures and promises to try to land a deal.
    

Rather than press conferences and player chats to be repetitive affair, taking advantage of recent technological enhancements could bring more dynasism to this area of the game. Just consider if player personalities was taken into account when negotiating contracts. Perhaps one is nervous in these meetings and would probably accept whatever you offer while another can express that he’s destined to get the best deal possible and won’t walk out of your office until you have met his demands. Then, you could try to negotiate further and see if he would give upon other things by talking and making a conversation rather than clicking + or – on the contract terms button and see if he will accept or deny your offer.

FM Match Engine: Introducing Action Cams by OdinWhiteHairGaming

For the past 2 decades us FM players have seen minor tweaks come to the match engine year on year. No word has been circulated from SI on the launch of FM24, that we will have a total revamp of the match engine for FM25, and this is one major thing we all want to see improved.

Match engines in games like FIFA have shown what technology is capable of and is a prime example of what FM fans expect now. Although we don’t expect to be watching fully rendered live games like a real-life match, the way the graphics engines are now in game, I think it’s fair to say, we expect a substantial improvement.

Picture this, a fully realistic camera angle from the players POV, take Kevin De Bruyne for example when he bends one into the top corner and runs off in celebration. Or, you get to see up close and personal a dangerous tackle that gets your player sent off or injured and now you know whether it’s worth appealing against for a player’s ban. This can be expanded to VAR decisions and off side calls too.

With Action Cams that is added to certain match highlights sequences that comes on top of the classic 2D option and the other Match Camera’s we will have better options to fully enjoy the match experience.

That’s what us fans want, DETAIL or at least the option to have extra detail. That is immersion!

However, I have every faith in SI for keeping a game series running this long, The technology is there, I know they can bring what us FM fans want.

For more Football Manager 2024 / 2025 content – check out my YouTube channel where I enjoy doing Rebuilds, experiements and you’ll be able to watch Let’s Play series for Football Manager 2025!

Improve Media’s Influence on Transfer Rumours & Player’s State of Mind by Wroot1

by Wroot1

On the flip side, if a player is having a bad time in games and the press catches on and then comes out in the media, his head can drop and then with your man management skill try and bring his head up.

What could be interesting is with new gens, the game could come up with fictional story based around the new gens and the media story could then be like newspapers.

Discover more Football Manager content from Wroot1 by visiting his personal FM blog where you will be able to follow his journey fom the lower leagues into hunting for promotion to the top division.

Other Feature Requests

Finally, I wish to just share a quick list of other feature requests for Football Manager 2025. This wishlist of mine aims to make Football Manager more immersive and realistic:

• Expand on the playable nations in Africa by introducing Morocco, Egypt and Saudi-Arabia as playable leagues, if not more African nations!
• Add Venezuela and Ecuador as playable nations in South America
• increase youth competitions and tournaments and enable clubs to create new youth tournaments of their under-17 team if they are not playing matches.
• improve the AI selection of Under-17 and Under-19 National Teams & make an option in the editor to select which national team they are called up to based on RL events.
• add real agents to Football Manager 2025 including their strengths and weaknesses relating to doing businesses and negotiating contracts.
• improve the in-game tutorials and update information pop ups to reflect all the latest changes in terms of statistics and data introduced, player role behaviour and other tool tips relating to tactics and training.
• make the FM25 Editor more streamlined and easier to work with. A step by step guidance – just like the Inductions within Football Manager might help more people to create new playable divisions and activate nations or tournaments.