Football manager game: where to start
Also available in: 🇧🇷 Português (BR)
You open a football manager game for the first time and the screen is full. Squad, table, finances, a training tab, a message from the board. Nothing is broken. The game just handed you an entire club at once, and nobody told you which end to pick up.
This is the map for that first week. What each area does, what you can safely ignore at the start, and the order that keeps you from being sacked in May.
That is the core difference from a normal football game, or soccer game if you are reading this from the United States. There, you take the shot. Here you decide who takes it, with what instruction, alongside whom, and whether the club could afford to sign that person in the first place.
Footy Manager works this way. It simulates more than 690 clubs across 27 countries at once, with leagues, domestic cups and continental competitions all running in parallel. While you sort out Sunday's lineup, the rest of the football world keeps playing without waiting for you.
Yours:
A deal has more moving parts than the fee:
In Footy Manager, renewals happen at a table: the player asks, you answer, and bonuses and clauses weigh on the deal as much as the wage does.
The youth setup is the pool of young players the club already develops. New names appear every year, a few worth keeping, most not. It is the cheapest source there is, because the player comes from inside the club with no fee attached.
Trials are open testing days, where players without a club turn up. On average they return less than the youth setup, and occasionally one of them is far better than anything your club could have bought.
Neither solves next Sunday. A seventeen year old rarely holds down a starting place in a first division. What they do is keep the club alive three seasons from now, and smaller clubs live on exactly that: develop, sell, and use the money to breathe.
If you follow football, yes. The game formalises the argument you already have on a Monday: why that side does not work, whether selling the top scorer was right, what to do with an expensive midfielder who cannot get in the team.
The difference is that here you get an answer. You build it, run the season, and see what your idea produced. Sometimes it produces tenth place.
Footy Manager was built with that player in mind, including anyone who follows Brazilian football and wants to see the clubs they watch inside a real season. You can read more about the game at https://www.footymanager.net/en/jogo and follow the release on Steam.
This is the map for that first week. What each area does, what you can safely ignore at the start, and the order that keeps you from being sacked in May.
What is a football manager game
A football manager game is a simulator where you run a club from outside the pitch, without controlling players during the match. You pick the squad, set the tactics, negotiate contracts and manage the money. The match then plays out from those decisions.That is the core difference from a normal football game, or soccer game if you are reading this from the United States. There, you take the shot. Here you decide who takes it, with what instruction, alongside whom, and whether the club could afford to sign that person in the first place.
Footy Manager works this way. It simulates more than 690 clubs across 27 countries at once, with leagues, domestic cups and continental competitions all running in parallel. While you sort out Sunday's lineup, the rest of the football world keeps playing without waiting for you.
What you actually control
It helps to separate what is yours from what is not. Most of the early frustration comes from trying to control the second column.Yours:
- The lineup and the formation
- Who arrives, who leaves, and for how much
- Contract renewals, wages, signing bonuses and release clauses
- Training, the youth setup, and trials to find new players
- Where the club's money goes, infrastructure included
- The result of any single match
- An injury
- A rival outbidding you for a target
- The board's patience, which runs out
How the transfer market works
The transfer market is the window when clubs are allowed to buy and sell players. Outside it, the squad you have is the squad that plays, which is why one badly used window can cost a whole season.A deal has more moving parts than the fee:
- The transfer fee, which goes to the selling club
- Wages, which leave your budget every month until the contract ends
- A signing bonus, paid to the player for agreeing to sign
- A release clause, the price that forces the club to let him go
- A loan, when a player comes for a season and then goes back
In Footy Manager, renewals happen at a table: the player asks, you answer, and bonuses and clauses weigh on the deal as much as the wage does.
Where new players come from
Outside the market, a club has two sources: the youth setup and trials.The youth setup is the pool of young players the club already develops. New names appear every year, a few worth keeping, most not. It is the cheapest source there is, because the player comes from inside the club with no fee attached.
Trials are open testing days, where players without a club turn up. On average they return less than the youth setup, and occasionally one of them is far better than anything your club could have bought.
Neither solves next Sunday. A seventeen year old rarely holds down a starting place in a first division. What they do is keep the club alive three seasons from now, and smaller clubs live on exactly that: develop, sell, and use the money to breathe.
Where to start in your first season
An order that works at almost any club:- 1. Learn the squad before changing it. Open the player list and see what you already have. Half of all bad first signings are a full back bought while two decent ones sat in the squad.
- 2. Pick a shape that fits the people. Do not pick the formation you like the look of. Pick the one that uses the players you have. Without a quick winger, a system built around wingers will fail every week.
- 3. Read the board's objectives. They define what counts as success. Avoiding relegation and challenging for the title are different jobs, and being sacked for meeting the wrong one happens.
- 4. Check the budget before the market. Wages are a recurring cost, not a one-off. A squad that is too expensive breaks the club within two seasons, even while winning matches.
- 5. Make few signings, and good ones. Two or three that fix real gaps beat ten names.
- 6. Only then touch training and youth. That is the medium-term work. None of it rescues a Sunday, which is exactly why it comes last.
Is it worth it if you have never played one
First, the question that always comes up: how much time it takes. Less than it looks. A full season takes a few hours, and most of the game happens in short bursts: settle the lineup, answer an offer, decide whether to renew a thirty-three year old centre back. The market is what eats the clock, because that is where the decision carries the most weight and takes the longest to prove itself.If you follow football, yes. The game formalises the argument you already have on a Monday: why that side does not work, whether selling the top scorer was right, what to do with an expensive midfielder who cannot get in the team.
The difference is that here you get an answer. You build it, run the season, and see what your idea produced. Sometimes it produces tenth place.
Footy Manager was built with that player in mind, including anyone who follows Brazilian football and wants to see the clubs they watch inside a real season. You can read more about the game at https://www.footymanager.net/en/jogo and follow the release on Steam.