The very best thing about Football Manager is how much of it exists only in your head. Whether by design or necessity, the series has always presented just enough information on the world of football to inflame your imagination and become notoriously invested. Simple spreadsheets of statistics become human players you feel actual emotional responses to. A menu showing the past winners of a particular domestic trophy makes your back straighten with pride. And the very best thing about Football Manager 2024 is that its new features deepen, rather than disrupt, that fantasy.
What’s new this year? Does it suddenly look like FIFA, or use Unreal Engine? Don’t be silly. This is the same yin-yang of information-heavy menu screens and text-based interactions, giving way periodically to a 3D match engine where your tactical creations play out on the pitch. It’s where late nights become troublingly early mornings and expletives are freely exchanged.
And often, that alone is enough. Even with the series’ weakest entrants, that tick-tock of slowpaced, methodical consumption of super-accurate data from the world of football and adrenaline fuelled matchday sequences will propel you forwards into multi-hundredhour saves.