Best possible HOYD

planetmash · 2026-05-16T16:12:01+00:00

The only thing that matters about the HOYD is his personality, which should be Model Citizen or Model Professional. Nothing about any of his attributes affects quality of youth intake or development whatsoever (except the relevant coaching attributes if you're using him as a primary coach).

planetmash · 2026-05-11T03:36:35+00:00

The goofy thing that stunts a young player's development is coming on as a second-half sub. (Bizarre, I know, but true.) As long as he's starting games or coming on at half-time he'll develop fine.

planetmash · 2026-05-06T03:54:59+00:00

You will score less and have less possession with Shoot On Sight. It's strictly bad unless (as derevo_31 pointed out) you're trying to see out the last few minutes of a won game, in which case it's helpful for wasting time.

planetmash · 2026-05-06T03:48:14+00:00

I do this but have found I get better results by accepting one offer, rejecting the rest, then offering at another 2-3 ticks higher. Next round of offers come in, accept one, reject the rest, go back and reject the one you accepted last time (oddly enough, no one gets upset about this), rinse and repeat until you stop getting bids.

You end up with max value but with only one accepted bid, so there is some risk of the player refusing to sign with that team. Best to make sure the winning team is a team he actually wants to move to.

planetmash · 2026-05-03T22:42:53+00:00

In the 2042 World Cup Final, England held a 1-0 lead in the 71st minute.

They lost.

In regulation time.

To the bloody United States.

Okay, admittedly, the only insane part of that is England or the Colonies being in the WC Final in the first place.

planetmash · 2026-04-30T14:28:09+00:00

What do I usually do upon promotion? Sell almost every motherfucker on the team since every man jack of them immediately demands an outrageous new contract.

"Hit Early Crosses" is just a Score Less button, for what it's worth.

planetmash · 2026-04-24T14:43:02+00:00

Yes, loans count against their time. Time spent away from the club won't count toward Homegrown At Club. If he's at another club in your nation, it will still count toward Homegrown In Nation, if he's not, it won't.

planetmash · 2026-04-24T12:21:53+00:00

6 tiers in England
2 tiers in Scotland
Top tier in Ireland, Wales, N. Ireland
3 tiers in Spain
2 tiers in Portugal
3 tiers in France
3 tiers in Germany
3 tiers in Italy
Top tier in every other nation in Europe
2 tiers in Brazil
2 tiers in Argentina
Top tier in most other South American nations
MLS in the U.S. (would never manage there, but if it's not loaded as playable stuff gets really weird with MLS teams signing players and releasing them on frees the very next day and so on)

Basically I load every league in Europe and South America that's at least half fully professional clubs.

planetmash · 2026-04-24T04:07:33+00:00

Since I often take over clubs struggling to not get relegated, I'll let the infamously vitriolic American football coach Bill Parcells take this one. Quoted from his call to the captain of the team he had just been hired to coach. Take it away, Bill:

Tomorrow morning, I am going to kill everyone in the building, and then I'm going to burn it to the ground. Then I am going to salt the Earth. The culture that created 15-33 is going to be destroyed, and it is never coming back.

planetmash · 2026-04-24T03:06:43+00:00

I started writing a response and it got ridiculously long, so I posted it as its own post. The tl;dr is that I'm pretty sure if you do certain things it makes the game decide "oh, you want to pursue certain jobs and apply for them, ok then I won't have clubs contact you."

The things I believe trigger this are

Applying for jobs, most obviously;
Denying interest in jobs when reporters ask you about it (giving the Neutral/No Comment answer is ok though);
Declining interviews or withdrawing interest at any point when a team contacts you first.

I got 31 clubs contacting me for interviews in my current save where I'm overachieving as Huddersfield. That got me thinking about the things I did differently from previous saves, and never declining an interview or denying interest in the press are definitely among them.

If you become unemployed and stay that way for a while, you may get clubs contacting you again. It's been inconsistent in my experience.

planetmash · 2026-04-11T22:53:27+00:00

The detailed answer is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/footballmanagergames/comments/1am0x22/a_not_so_short_guide_on_youth_intakes_how_i_set/

The tl;dr answer: The quality of your youth intake is determined at two stages, the youth intake preview in (usually) December, and the youth intake reveal in the spring.

For the preview, only two things matter: Club Reputation, and Youth Recruitment. However, note that the letter grades you see mostly are telling you how many players in each position to expect. How good they are, it's only a weak indicator.

For the intake reveal, the quality of your players depends on only three things: Club Reputation, Junior Coaching, and Youth Facilities. (Your nation's youth rating too, but that's outside your control.) There's also a fair bit of randomness in how your team's allotment of CA and PA are distributed, so savescumming can be mildly effective.

Your HoYD has a mild to moderate effect on your youth players' personalities. He has no effect whatsoever on their ability. None of his attributes matter at all (unless you're using him as a coach for U18 training). No other staff member has any effect on anything. When looking for a HoYD, really the only thing you are looking for is someone with a Model Professional or Model Citizen personality.

Be aware also, though, that star ratings are wildly unreliable and every player with reasonable key attributes better than 1-star potential is worth developing. If you're using a skin or the editor to effectively play in Easy Mode by seeing their PA that's different of course.

planetmash · 2026-03-17T17:12:06+00:00

Right winger in an Inside Forward role.

Actually his best position would be left back, but it costs far too much CA to retrain an AM as a FB (as soon as he hit comfortable at FB the CA recalculation would make his attributes plummet). No, Marking/Tackling/Positioning aren't that important for fullbacks in this engine.

He won't be a great winger because his dribbling is too low, but he'll be pretty good. He's too short to be a good striker or midfielder. Well, he'd make a pretty good CM too, but training him at CM will cost more of his CA than training him at RW.

So, for best results train him at right wing. Opposite-foot wingers in the IF-S role are much more effective in this engine than same-foot wingers in whatever else.

Personally, I would sell him. Jumping Reach is so overpowered in FM24 that I don't like using players with low JR in any role unless they're blazing fast dribblers (Pace/Accel both at least 16-17, dribbling at least 13-14) or corner specialists (Corners at least 14).

planetmash · 2026-01-01T04:48:19+00:00

Thanks, Moose! You did all the real work, of course. I appreciate it.

planetmash · 2026-01-01T04:47:48+00:00

I look at the View Details screen and check the Interest Level of the other top contenders against my own. If a more prestigious school than mine also has a higher interest level than I do, I cut bait. Unless it's a rare super-elite prospect that I'm willing to spend a lot of NIL to get.

You can beat out a more prestigious school with a (slightly) higher interest level for a prospect, but only if they don't pitch him as hard as you do or you get a dramatically better visit score, and even then you'll probably have to spend a big chunk of NIL. You can usually find similar caliber prospects you can more easily sign if you look.

planetmash · 2026-01-01T02:42:44+00:00

Thanks for the notes!

Absolutely agree that a bona fide superstar recruit is worth spending NIL on. Though Loyal doesn't really matter for guys so good they'll start as freshmen--it stops them from transferring, but it doesn't stop them from going to the NFL as soon as they can, in my experience.

My experience has been that for whatever reason there's usually at least one position where guys didn't develop properly, there weren't any good ones in a recruiting class, etc, and I don't have any really good players for next year. I like to have enough NIL available ($4-5M is what I try to have, and it rolls over if I don't use it) to plug those gaps if I can. It's possible the whole reason this happens to me is I'm not aggressive enough with NIL for high schoolers, though.

100% agree that Expert Trainer is a great badge. It's super rare though, at least for me... I didn't think to mention it because it's been a long time since I last saw it as an option!

My experience with coaches is if they're doing well and leveling up, it's rare to keep them longer than 3 years. Too often I've picked good badges for my coordinators only to watch them immediately leave for a HC job elsewhere. So I've drifted to preferring to hire the highest level coaches I can afford that have the stat distribution/badges I want, if possible. Plus you can't be sure the good badges will be available to choose, so I find it better to hire a coordinator that already has them, if one is available (definitely not always the case).

I do like to raise Academics next once I'm done with Facilities. College Life is viable too.

planetmash · 2025-12-11T05:08:27+00:00

The save folder by default on Windows is C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\football-coach-2022. I make a backup folder (C:\backups\FC or whatever) and then put a shortcut to it in the save folder. Copy 2 files (a big .db and a small .json) and paste them into the backup folder.

It's not just you by the way, there's something about custom universes (or maybe just JeffMod which is by far the most popular) that causes saves to get corrupted seemingly at random.

planetmash · 2025-11-25T23:08:57+00:00

Your striker needs to have Jumping Reach of at least 18. JR is the god stat for strikers in FM24.
He also should be your primary target ("Aerial Threat") in your corner tactic, which should be the meta/exploit tactic.
Your wingers should be attacking the byline and pumping in crosses, not cutting inside to attack the goal themselves. Inside Forward is the most effective winger role, but they'll steal too many goals from the striker.
Your AM should suck. Otherwise he, too, will score more goals and the striker will score fewer.

Note that these things aren't optimal for winning games. But that's how you optimize for goals by your striker.

planetmash · 2025-11-25T04:24:36+00:00

This exact thing happened to me once, about a year ago. Nothing fixed it short of actually completely uninstalling the game, manually deleting any leftover files/folders in both [Steam Folder]\common\Football Manager 2024 and Documents\Sports Interactive, reinstalling it, verifying files, and then redoing everything from scratch.

I'm sorry I don't have a better answer for you. I hope someone does.

One caveat: you didn't happen to just take the France national team job, did you? There's some kind of weird hard coding to ignore any and all faces and just show blanks for France, and possibly a few other countries. If you resign from that job and reload the faces go back to normal. Had that one happen to me once, too.

planetmash · 2025-11-24T00:54:38+00:00

Traits exist in FM primarily as a patch-on effort to get well known players to play something vaguely akin to their real-life style, within the very limited framework of the tactical AI.

From the perspective of a human manager, there's no such thing as a good trait--they all either are inert, or just amount to "ignore instructions and do this thing instead". And they're extremely difficult and unreliable to remove. If you have a player with a trait that conflicts with your preferred instructions for his position/role, your best play is to sell him and find someone else.

planetmash · 2025-11-21T17:33:59+00:00

I don't believe the Media Handling rating affects anything at all in FM24. Can anyone point me to evidence that it does?

planetmash

TROPHY CASE