While Football Manager 2021 may offer the most immersive, in-depth simulation of football on the market, it can’t possibly cover every single facet of the sport, especially when it comes to licensing for different competitions and clubs. To fix this, you will need to download some Football Manager 2021 badge packs.
Licenses are very expensive in football and while FM is very popular, it doesn’t have quite the same financial power as something like FIFA 21. Instead, players can download badge packs from third-party websites to override the game’s rather naff defaults badges and crests and instead. It’s straightforward and something the community has grown accustomed to over recent years and it’s something that you can do too.
Here’s how to add real badges and logos in Football Manager 2021, whether that’s for competitions, leagues, or clubs.
The Best Football Manager 2021 Badge Packs
There’s no shortage of places to find badge packs for Football Manager 2021 and we have a few places to recommend. These third-party websites aren’t affiliated with Sports Interactive, but they’ve shown themselves to be very dependable over the years, FM release after FM release.
SortItOutSi is probably the best place to go if you want Football Manager badge packs as they not only have current badges and crests, but also those from years and seasons prior. You can even choose exactly what style of badge you want, whether that’s metallic, shiny, or basic. You can go nuts with a complete pack that has over 300,000 badges, if you so wish.
As an alternative, we can also recommend TCMLogos, who are also a good resource for custom designs for other aspects of Football Manager. Their designs aren’t exact replicas of their real life counterparts because of licensing crackdowns, but they are pretty much as close as you can get.
How To Install Badge Packs Packs In Football Manager 2021
Once you’ve hunted down the badge pack you want, it’s time to install them to Football Manager 2021. Don’t worry about getting it wrong, all you have to really do is move a couple of files around. If you downloaded a badge pack to use in Football Manager 2020, you can actually just copy and paste those old files. If not, read on.
Most badge packs will usually come as ZIP files, so make sure you decompress/unzip the pack before you do anything else. Just right click on the folder and then you should see the option to extract the contents.
Drag and drop/copy and paste your unzipped pack into Documents > Sports Interactive > Football Manager 2021.
With that done, enter the Football Manager 2021 folder and then create a new folder called graphics. Simply drag and drop or copy and paste your face pack into the new graphics folder to complete this step.
Next, you have to go into Football Manager 2021 itself.
Either from the main menu or in a save, go to Preferences > Advanced > Interface >Â Skin and then tick off use caching to decrease page loading times while making sure reload skin when confirming changes in preferences is ticked. Finish off by hitting confirm or reload skin at the bottom and then the screen should take a moment to load all of the real player faces.
If you don’t notice that the badge pack has immediately worked, check where you have placed the files as well as if you have unzipped the pack properly. One of the most common mistakes people make is to not unzip their badge packs, so make sure you do that if you encounter any issues. If not, try closing and restarting the game.
Football Manager 2021 is available now for PC.
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