Despite storming the field when the team won but wasn’t promoted in 2003, then having season tickets right behind the dugout in the new stadium the year following and beyond, I was never a big fan of whatever you call “the beautiful game.” At least that’s what a boring EA employee called it. In more recent years I’ve enjoyed the sport of it watching the women’s game, as they aren’t paid enough to roll on the floor shouting about the wind breaking their nails. That said, I do love a good 5-a-side street game, jumpers for goal posts, off-the-wall, FIFA Street 2 style game.

Sports Interactive’s Football Manager series is anything but that. Aside from the delayed upcoming 2025 release, the women’s game has been nonexistent, national teams were a proposed expanded feature of 2025 as well – oh, and you don’t actually go about kicking a ball, you just shout at the overpaid drama queens who do. Being as menu-heavy as EVE Online and as intimidating as Dark Souls, my first experience with the PC-focused title was in the late 2000s, which was confusing and a little bit scary, but I wanted to try it again. I’ll reserve my comments about your parents’ bed.

I never bothered, because as I say, Football Manager is a very intimidating style of game, with tutorials as dull and characterless as an Edson Arantes do Nascimento speech at E3. Nonetheless, I pushed through the slow, “read this flavorless paste of a tutorial” mode and made my way through the first few games commanding my home team. Then I peeked my head up a day and a half later realizing I’d finally understood it with my very basic knowledge; cheering on every goal, swearing at every miss and goal in my net, and generally doing what I saw from a young age standing behind John Hughes.

As I have already said here and noted elsewhere, Football (“Soccer” for Americans and idiots from Oxford) was never my bag of balls or Ted Lasso’s least favorite drink. There is a whole list of reasons, one of which includes sectarian violence, but generally speaking, my idea of the game was being frozen to death, the smell of Bovril (don’t look it up), and chants that include lots of swearing. Enjoyment of the game made like another Bill Lawrence character named Ted’s “boing fwip,” I was never going to get it just by being surrounded by it.

Football Manager 2024, despite being intimidating initially, sort of dissuades a lot of that lack of care by putting you in the hot seat of just about any team you want. With more than 477 thousand players available from the very start of your tenure, you can play quite a few leagues and teams up and down the pyramids. Or if you have that disgusting optimism Americans have, put 29 teams in a league and have no consequences for the actions of the team on the pitch. No wonder the women’s game is actually worth more.

You can quite literally go from unemployment to managing Ajax at 26, or you can reach the dizzying heights of managing Scunthorpe United FC. Until Football Manager simulates the mascot fistfights pre-game and at halftime, I know which team I’m signing for. Unlike Grand Theft Auto, it is a sandbox with a bit more stakes to your future prospects. If you’re insane enough, you can play 500 seasons into the future managing one team or five hundred teams, some of which will be easier to stay with than others.

As I’ve previously said of Football Manager titles in the past, a lot of the game involves looking at spreadsheets. However, being a sandbox you also have options to make the experience as deep and complicated as you like, or you can make like Coach Lasso and hire your own Beard, Nate, Kent, Leslie, and basically everyone that keeps the manager from shouting profanities at the person selling T-shirts out of a port-a-cabin outside the main stands. This can mean being hands-on and managing the under-18s, under-21s, and reserves alongside the actual job you are supposed to be doing.

One of my saves had me play as a journeyman, unemployed from the start, applying up and down the leagues in a save that includes the full database (yes, all 470k+), and despite offering my services at non-league team Gateshead. One application was accepted in the Netherlands. Rebuilding a staff-less and struggling Ajax – which admittedly I should have researched a bit more given I’ve seen how stupid and horrible it is to have religion and football intertwined. Nonetheless, the point I’m trying to make is that you can take full control if you want to, or have to after a mass exodus.

Conversely, you could pick a much smaller team in Scotland with hardly two shiny pennies to rub together, fully staffed, and just get on with the job. If you can, I’d suggest starting at a smaller team with a smaller budget than say, Man City, Arsenal, Man U, Ajax, Inter Milan, Bayern Munich, and basically, any of the big teams everyone’s heard of with all the money. Starting with them sounds easy, but they expect big things, so if you screw it up there are consequences. Unless you go to the MLS, but then everyone laughs at you for going to the US to manage a football team.

Managing in the MLS is like going to a retirement home while wanting to work in a nursery. If you’re looking to manage, you go to Europe, Asia, and South America, anything else is just you following blood-soaked oil money or asking everyone to look at you funny for a while. If you ask me, you get more respect for managing Yeovil Town FC than you do Portland Timber, mostly because at one of those you hear chants of abuse, and the other you’d hear something like “roll tide!”, whatever that means.

No, Football Manager doesn’t have fans chanting abuse at you. That’s probably for the best, given the chants I’ve heard about Adam Johnson, goalkeepers, refs, the away attendance, basically anyone in the ground, and anyone who has played for the opposing side’s team ever. Nonetheless, games are a bit quiet and lifeless, even when you don’t play in the MLS, and quite frankly I think that just makes Football Manager the type of game on top of which you’d listen to your own music to or a podcast about 18th-century serial killers who worked for circuses.

Football Manager 2024 is just a work simulator that just so happens to involve a sport that is difficult to have respect for when you don’t like it. Lee Evans was right about how they should be paid. Nonetheless, between reading countless emails, setting up tactics, and sometimes (though not always) dragging a cup win out of less-than-fantastic teams, the gameplay is fun and I’ve come to respect and understand the sport a bit more. Though that could also be from watching all of Welcome to Wrexham and Ted Lasso, too.

Far from the most exciting game you’ll ever play, Football Manager (particularly 2024) is both exactly what you think it is and nothing like that at all. Yes, there are hundreds of screens with names and numbers you’ve no idea how to comprehend if you even remotely enjoy things like the company of other humans. Yet, despite being something that you could be very analytical about, you could, in the same breath, call a 5-match run for the league or a trophy some of the most heartbreaking or exciting moments in gaming. From my limited experience before and returning once again, I thought I’d really dislike Football Manager as a series.

Yet, despite that preconceived notion, I’m left thinking Football Manager 2024 is to this point the most complete the series could have gotten before this FM25 engine change in a few months. Does it always feel fair? Is it the most consistent? Is it accessible? Does it have everything you could want? Do matches feel natural? To quote some men who call themselves a Queen, “No, no, no, no, no.” I’ve come to understand that some hold on to the belief that there is an element of RNG every time you open the game, and to a degree you can actually “save-scum.”

It is (for the most part) a single-player game. I find saying such a thing stupid, but hey-ho. If you want to use tactics that break the game, if you want to save-scum, if you want to do whatever, so be it. Unless you are talking out the side of your mouth about certain things breaking the game and they shouldn’t be done while live streaming it, and then doing that very thing, no one should care. At the end of the day, you are living out a fantasy football league controlled by a bit of code on a computer; it isn’t that serious or important.

Ultimately, despite thinking I’d be bored like I was playing Kingdom Hearts, Football Manager 2024 has sapped lots of hours out of me taking a team with potential and squandering that by growing too quickly. That’s in addition to eventually learning how to manage a side by delegating all the boring bits and calling the ref some very rude words whenever VAR gets involved to override whatever his initial decision would have been.

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Football Manager 2024

$59.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• The most complete version of Football Manager.
• As deep and rich or as shallow and enjoyable as you like.
• Once you are involved, it has its hooks in you.

Cons

• Easily overwhelming with a dull tutorial.
• Match engine could be a touch better.