Different people play Football Manager 2024 in different ways for different experiences. While some people love tinkering relentlessly like prime Ranieri when it comes to formations and tactics, others relish scouting and signing young players that they can grow into world beaters. That’s the beauty of the series: if you just want to plug and play with custom tactics, you can.
Obviously, though, your results may vary depending on what kind of players you have at your disposal. You can’t simply upload a Guardiola Masterclass 5-2-1-1-1 formation you found on the Steam Workshop into your Dorking save and start dominating every team in the world. It’s also not always a simple fix, as players need to build tactical familiarity with a new setup before they can start delivering — a lot of managers get fed up when they don’t win by four goals a match from day one.
Bear that in mind as we start reeling off the best tactics and formations in Football Manager 2024. There’s no magic cure-all when it comes to Football Manager, and sometimes the greatest learning experience you can have with this series is to lose and grow from those mistakes. But with some of these tactics from members of the community, you shouldn’t be making quite so many mistakes in general. Remember to keep multiple tactics trained at the same time so that you can smoothly adapt on the fly to what the opposition chucks at you.
NOTE: FM tactics must be downloaded from a third-party site during the beta phase as the Steam Workshop isn’t yet open. Also please ignore the Manchester City players below. We’re all weak sometimes.
The Best Football Manager 2024 Tactics
Pie and Mash 4-4-2
Let’s start with a fundamental lesson of Football Manager that every player forgets when they first start out: you can’t make every lower league team into a heavy metal gegenpressing inverted wing-back force. Sometimes you simply have to play direct and fast.
Pie and Mash 4-4-2 is a back to basics tactical style for FM 24 that is all about quick attacks on the break and getting your wingers up the pitch to supply two focal points in attack. If you’ve got a serious underdog in the league, sometimes you have to return to the well of football ‘eritage to survive.
Carloball 4-1-2-2-1
Originally modelled after how Carlo Ancelotti set his team up at Everton before I personally tweaked it into a slightly different beast, Carloball is a pretty typical Football Manager tactic except for one key difference: the playmaker on the wing.
The idea here is that they will be best equipped to constantly ping balls into the box and off the head of a unit of a striker, with the BBM and CWB doing a lot of their defensive work on the right side. Add in a high press and you have a slightly different tactic to the norm that yields lots of goals.
GYR’s Best 4231 – SWANSALONA
Ridiculous name aside, GYR’s Best 4231 – SWANSALONA is a pretty solid tactic for FM 24 that helped its creator to treble glory. While their elite team obviously helped, the combination of sweeper keeper with a roaming playmaker is worth experiencing at least once.
Focusing on short, quick, and controlled play, SWANSALONA is as close to a plug and play bit of excellence that you can get in the upper echelons of the sport, but good luck getting your Lee Cattermole regen in League 2 to do anything but kick the opposition.
Play Like Pep | JD’s PERFECT 4-3-3
Just like the previous FM 24 tactic, this one is really catered to the bigger clubs who have highly technical players (if you couldn’t tell from the fact that it’s modelled after Pep’s tactics). The name is a bit of a boast, as this 4-3-3 really might not work at Accrington Stanley.
While they’re the similar kind of tactics that have been overpowered in FM for years now, you just don’t get enough chances to throw out a libero and inverted full-back unless you’re playing tiwht the best. The always trendy mezzala does a lot of the creative work here in a tactic that focuses on patient play.
Cherusci 343
Listen, if you have a subscription to The Athletic and also buy expensive retro football shirts, there’s a chance you may combust with joy when looking at pepwarne’s Cherusci 343 formation for Football Manager 2024. Two segundo volantes in the middle, a target forward flanked by two other strikers and a libero to boot? It’s almost too much.
The actual tactics themselves are fairly boilerplate (short passing, constant pressing), but it’s interesting to see focus on wing play with two wing-backs doing most of that work. It’s a decent if a bit wild formation for the underdog, so if you want to channel your inner Wilder when he got promoted with Sheffield United, why not try this formation?
How To Apply Downloaded Football Manager 2024 Formations and Tactics
Luckily, the method for actually applying these custom tactics in Football Manager 2024 is the same as it’s been for every prior incarnation. You can even copy and paste last year’s .fmf files into this year’s folders and use them again, though they may need a bit of tinkering and may not work quite as well.
The best way to download and apply Football Manager 2024 tactics is when the Steam Workshop support is included for the full release of the game, which is on November 2nd, 2023. Simply find the tactic you need, hit Subscribe, then load the tactic from your tactics screen in-game.
However, until then, you will have to use respected third-party websites like FM Scout to download custom FM tactics. Luckily, it’s incredibly easy to actually download and apply them for your saves in FM 24.
The files you need will be in .fmf format, which is a proprietary file format that only Football Manager uses. When you download the .fmf files for FM 24 tactics, save them to Documents > Sports Interactive > Football Manager 2024 > tactics.
Then, to use them in-game, go to Tactics on the left side. Above the pitch, select either the plus symbol or the current tactic, then choose Load and find the custom tactic in there.
All being well, you will now have custom tactics loaded for Football Manager 2024. Hit quick pick and see what the AI thinks your best XI for that setup is, then start experimenting.
Football Manager 2024 is available now.
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