How to rebuild Man Utd on FM24

• Man United, want to return to being the top team in the Premier League.
• After Alex Ferguson retired, the team have fallen away from the title challenge.

Welcome to the Man Utd rebuild on FM24. I have always been an admirer of Man Utd as they were so dominant in their time under Alex Ferguson. I remember the treble in ’99, the class of ’92 and every evolution Ferguson put in place. In short, they were the powerhouse of British football.

The problem with Man United now, is that since Ferguson left the manager position they have lost their way. Moyes was meant to be the ideal replacement, that didn’t work out and it hasn’t got any better since. All this makes Man Utd the perfect rebuild save game on Football Manager.

This rebuild is a little different to the others that we have done. We have played the first season and then at the end of the season saved it five times. These five save games will evolve through their different recruitment strategies over 4 seasons.

So while this blog is a rebuild of Man Utd on FM24, it is one with a twist using different recruitment strategies to display various ways to play the game. Will use this blog to intro the rebuild and then follow up with blogs of each save game to show the results.

First Season Results

So let’s have a look at the first season results through the league table.

We came fourth in the first season, which is an improvement on how they finished in real life, but there is more to be done. This means Champions League football and that means one step closer to being one of the biggest teams in the world again.

We managed to score the second most goals in the league, which shows our ambition to attack. Title winners score goals, as simple as that, this is the culture that we want to employ. The biggest problem I can see is that we concede a lot more than the other clubs in the top four. The focus for this rebuild will be defence at first.

Our win rate for the season was pretty good to be fair at 60%. Man City on the other hand achieved a win rate of 68% and that’s the difference between challenger and title winner. While the percentages seems pretty big, it is only 3 games. If we reduce our goals conceded by 10 goals, we could earn on average 2.4 more wins. Now that is starting to look a lot more interesting.

Let’s move on to the recruitment strategies, what is the concept of each one, how will it work, what results are we measuring by?

Recruitment Strategies

Football Manager can be a really easy game, searching for the right attributes, with a super tactic and buying wonderkids. There are other ways to play the game though, just like real life there are more than one way to skin a cat. This is what we intend to do and play the game in a different way.

We have a number of different recruitment strategies available and each should take Man Utd on a different path and be successful. One thing you will notice is that whichever recruitment strategy is used certain players will appear. This just shows the quality of these players and are well worth keeping an eye on.

Current Ability

This strategy is the easiest to follow on FM24, recruit players based on the highest current ability. The best way to employ this strategy in the rebuild is to look at the assistant manager reports and replace the weakest players.

You will replace them with the highest current ability players that your scouts have found. Now this can go one of two ways, either you can be player led or tactic led. What this means is that you can buy players because they are good and create a tactic, or you buy players to play in your tactic.

To further enhance this recruitment culture you can just buy the best current ability and then evolve your tactic to include them. This is what we call organic growth strategy, where you stick to the strategy and see what it grows into.

You can also evolve the recruitment by buying players with the same personality. The idea behind this is that groups with the same personality will work better together. This will make the Man Utd rebuild even more effective on football manager.

Potential Ability

The this is very similar to the current ability recruitment model, but is based on the potential ability.

This means that players will be replaced when they stop progressing, declining or just not good enough anymore. The fun of this rebuild style is that your team has no choice, but to get stronger. You will have an abundance of potential where players will be getting regular football.

This option would be good with Man Utd as you can attract the best youngsters, have one of the best youth academies and some of the best staff.

When you couple this strategy with targeting players who are between 20-22, it makes for an excellent combination.

Win Rate

This is fairly simple and follows a success modelling strategy. We need to first look at the win rate of the teams in previous seasons who have won the league. In our case Man City have won the league with a 68% win rate, so we need to match or beat that.

You can find your team’s win rate on the filters in the squad selection squad. Anyone who is not hitting the standard is potentially exiting the club. The way in which we do that is by selling the bottom 10% of the squad, sorted by win rate. We then invest heavily in replacing those 2/3 players with players that have win rates higher than the league champs.

I would look at filtering the player search to the top leagues such as Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, EPL and Ligue 1. The win rate function doesn’t seem to work with the player search, so I use a minutes and games won filter. I divide the minutes by 100 to rough guide the games and then compare that by the games won.

Average Rating

This rebuild strategy is the closest to ‘Moneyball’, because the average rating reduces every player to one number effectively. You can then use this as an indicator of how a player performs and is really useful when looking for certain positions or roles.

This strategy can really unlock some unusual players on football manager. The team will look very different over the four years you employ this with Man Utd. The main factor is to only recruit from leagues of the same reputation or above, as lower league players playing a 7 are not the same standard.

There could be an argument if you find players in lower divisions that are playing a over a 7.50/8. This would mean that the player is far too good for that level.

The way we employ this strategy is with the silicon valley shuffle, where we transfer list the bottom 10% of the team at the end of the year and then replace with players with better average ratings. This will push the standard of the team.

Again it is a good idea to change the filters to leagues that are on a similar competition level or above.

Goals Scored/Conceded

This has always been an interesting strategy and is used by teams in real life. You need to be looking at the data of the teams who won the division or divisions and how many goals they scored and conceded. We then look at the individuals in the team and who scored or conceded the most in our Man Utd team.

We then go to the football manager player search look at the players who have scored the most in their respective positions. Goals conceded is a bit different as teams defend in units, so we look at goalkeepers. With this we look at the their goals conceded to games ratio and then buy them and their defenders which have played the most games.

It’s a fairly basic strategy, but again it is tackling the fundamentals for Man Utd on FM24. You must remember we want to win things, and to win things we need to score the most, concede the least or both.

What Next?

I will link the blogs for each of the different recruitment strategies as we go along. Each Man Utd FM24 rebuild save game will evolve over the seasons and the teams will look different.

We will measure the success of each game by the trophies that are won. This will give us a good idea of what strategy has worked best.

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