WHEN you enter the Sports Interactive offices, you’ll notice that everyone has a club shirt on their chair.
Being in London, you’ll see some Spurs, some Arsenal, but even clubs from all over the world are represented.
Each shirt represents the employee’s favourite team, and the year they joined Sports Interactive. In short, these developers love football.
We were invited here to get our hands on an almost finished build of Football Manager 2024, complete with multilingual options.
This entry in the FM series represents the climax of everything it has done so far, with the new era ‘Project Dragonfly’ launching next year.
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FM24 is more than just a roster update, and the next entry will be a complete overhaul for the series.
One of the biggest additions is the inclusion of the J-League, which coincides with the series’ debut in Japan.
But there are a whole host of smaller changes: smarter transfers, intermediaries, market platform Transfer Room support, individual targets for players, positional play, and set-pieces coaches.
You will now have three different options when it comes to the starting database: original, real world, and your world.
In original, you’ll begin with season transfers already completed, and all the consequences on your team’s budget.
Real world will see you start off with last season’s roster and you can transfer players in line with the dates of the real world.
Your world will allow you to interfere with any negotiations that come your way.
While there are plenty of changes on the management side, we also wanted to see tweaks on the pitch.
At first glance we don’t see many changes here, it opens with a number of meetings which you may skip at your own risk.
Set-piece coaches add small variables to the opening gameplay, which could have a bigger impact later on.
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While it appears overcomplicated at first, FM24 walks you through the process, which gives you more input on the pitch.
Intermediaries will help you sell players, but don’t really let you find new talent. This can still help you gain some much needed money.
Some say Football Manager never changes, and that appears to be the case with injuries and transfer market prices.
Moving to injuries, after only four friendlies, our team lost Mario Rui, Anguissa, Osimhen, and Politano.
This could be just bad luck, but it felt bad to lose so many players only a few minutes into the game.
There are new pre-match animations, and you can see more clearly where the ball will go.
Ball physics are more polished than ever, and the lighting is more responsive to the time of day.
While fans await Project Dragonfly, FM24 works as a stop gap that is more than just a roster update.
If you want to know more about current football games, you can check out our EA Sports FC 24 review.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
