Football Manager 2024 will release November 6th

New features revealed from next week

Football Manager 2024 has now been officially announced, kicking off the weeks-long process of dribbling out information about how the sports’ simulations systems have been tweaked this year. It also now has a trailer, below, and a release date: November 6th.

The end of that trailer explains how exactly information about new features will be revealed. The week commencing September 18th (that’s next week) will bring news on “smarter transfers, squad building and finance”, as well as introduce intermediaries. The week of September 25th will bring news of “truer football motion, match authenticity and positional play. There will also be a features wrap-up video week of October 2nd, and details of quality-of-life upgrades from October 9th.

While the trailer also claims that progress never stops, Sports Interactive recently admitted that progress within the Football Manager series has been less than satisfactory of late. In a long post about the future of the series, studio head Miles Jacobsen said that they “cannot ignore that some of our longer-serving players felt that FM23’s progression had not lived up to the standards and expectations we have set over the years – and to be frank, we agree.”

To resolve that issue, Jacobsen said that Football Manager 2025 would be “for the first time in decades, a true sequel”, with a more radical step forward and a switch to a new match engine. (Unity, which they may now be regretting.)

Football Manager 2024, by comparison, was described as “the most complete version in the series’ history”, but also “the last of its kind.” It’s also the first game in the series that will let you import your saved game from the previous version.

I’ve been a little cool on Football Manager recently, mostly because I no longer have time for full-fat careers and Sports Interactive binned the faster, sleaker Classic mode from the PC desktop release. It does live on in some capacity as FM Touch, but these days that’s only available on the Nintendo Switch. Boo, sez I.