FM24 Guide: "How to increase realism in Football Manager 24

I'm very happy to finally release my guide how to increase realism in Football Manager 24 - extended version. This should give you a general better understanding how the game works and some cool extra tips how to make your experience even more realistic.

General:

There are differences between unloaded leagues, view-only, playable and playable with full details:

unloaded league

• No schedule, games are fully simulated in the background

• No visible league table

• No full squads (only if you load them via the advanced DB)

• No staff (After the first sacking of the real manager, there will be in most cases no new head coach and other staff members)

• Low transfer-activity

• „fictional“ finances (no existing bank balance, only a „fictional“ calculated one)

• Games will be simulated with the quick Match-Engine

League „view only“

• League-schedule

• League table

• No full squads (only if you load them via the advanced DB)

• No staff (After the first sacking of the real manager, there will be in most cases no new head-coach and other staff members)

• Low to medium transfer-activity

• „fictional“ finances (no existing bank balance, only a „fictional“ calculated one)

• Games will be simulated with the quick Match-Engine

League playable

• League-schedule

• League table

• Full Squads

• Existing Staff

• Realistic transfer-activity

• Accurate simulation of the financial system

• Some games will be simulated with the Full Match Engine.

League playable + full details

• League-schedule

• League table

• Full Squads

• Existing Staff

• Realistic transfer-activity

• Accurate simulation of the financial system

• Games will be fully simulated

What is the benefit of simulating Leagues in full detail?

You will get more realistic stats and results. The player development takes more calculations into account (Development per average is similar, but more diverse).If you simulate other leagues in Nations where you’re not currently managing with full detail, you will get a stronger AI, especially when you play against them. It is also the best way to play «moneyball-series» because you can make accurate comparisons of stats between leagues which are fully simulated.

What slows the game processing speed down the most:

• Setting leagues to simulate in full detail uses multicore pretty heavy.

• A lot of leagues are playable

• custom data in general slows down performance. There are big differences in what kind of custom data is used. As an orientation you can go by file size. Larger files need more processing time. (not always, but especially lower-league-files do have quite a big impact.)

• An incredible amount of players loaded also affects performance. Down to my experience, if you don't load 200k+ players, this effect is not that big compared to the others mentioned above

• All custom graphics loaded do not have any influence on the game speed at all. As far as I know it has some influence in terms of RAM usage

Extra Tips:

1. Do not use financial «exploits»
As a human manager you have some "benefits" over the AI. You can be much better in transfers because you don't "feel" pressure or concerns about which teams have IRL. I think that's a reason why the AI is not that aggressive vs a human player fighting against a specific talent. It looks like a weak programmed AI, for me it is just insane programming skills by SI-devs.  With that in mind, you might not just buy a  wonderkid for 20 million while managing a team that would never do that IRL, even if it would be possible. This gave me a much more immersive game experience. The same goes for salary negotiations or selling players. If you’re playing for example in the Swiss Football League and a Club offers €20m for your player, IRL, that club will sell this player almost 100% of the times. You may be able to keep him happy with giving him a massive pay-rise which wouldn’t happen IRL to some extent to keep him at your club.

2. Disable the first transfer window.
The game starts (in most cases) in summer 23. In real-life, transfers already happened, so if you enable that transfer window you’ll get much less accurate transfers, especially in the first year. I always recommend to disable the first transfer window.

3. Enable enough playable leagues
This is an important point. The more playable leagues, the more competitive the game/other teams&leagues will be in longterm-saves. If you only have the San Marinese Football league as playable, it will be much easier to improve the league compared to a setup with all european nations having at least 1 playable league. If you are struggling to choose the right setup for your Laptop/PC and it’s only about 2 or 3 more leagues, then even add 5 more;)

4. Keep things consistent
Stick to the setup you’ve chosen at the start during your save game. I wouldn’t add additional leagues or remove some. If your game becomes too slow I would first set some fully simulated competitions to default. This has a much bigger impact on the „day to day“-performance.

5. Stars won’t always tell you the truth
Ignore the performance stars when you choose a setup. They are only a rough orientation and can be misleading. Especially with the advanced database-setup and custom detail levels.

6. Proper AI-squads
As a general rule: In every Club, where you see existing players (not the greyed out ones), There will be newgens generated. If the whole Club has no existing players in 2023, there won’t be any in 2032.

7. Removing advantages for you own manager ego
As a human manager, you always get extremely good job offers relatively early on. The reason for this is that the human manager has a PA of 200. So the manager is like the best wonderkid for clubs to get -> so the manager get’s are signed early on by top clubs.
However, you can use the official ingame editor to lower the PA of yourself (i.e. the human manager) and thus ensure a more realistic career progression. I always recommend readjusting the value after the end of a season. Optimally, the difference between CA and PA is 20-30 points. So if your manager has a CA120, give him a max PA150. Furthermore you may adjust/lower values like home reputation, world reputation or current reputation. As a guideline I would compare your «achievements» with similar managers in a similar position (within the same league or similar) and adjust those stats at the end of every season.

I hope you enjoyed this guide.

Cheers

Daveincid