If you’re new to football, new to Football Manager™, or just fancy a little bit of a refresher on some core game principles and information, this section should provide some assistance on how best to go about your managerial career. It also contains information about some of the more complicated leagues available to manage in as well as a glossary of terms that you’re likely to encounter as you play.
Beginner’s Guide
Welcome to Football Manager™ Touch and Football Manager™ Xbox Edition 2022! We’ve created a beginner’s guide to walk newcomers through getting to grips with the various aspects of management, and to hopefully answer any questions that might come up along the way.
Your first step is to create your managerial profile and begin a new Career. Follow the steps in the Quick Start guide to get stuck right in.
Football Manager™ is, as the name suggests, a football management simulation in which time advances upon clicking the ‘Continue’ button found in the top right corner of the screen. Although time exists as a fundamental concept, whenever the game returns from processing time forward, the ‘clock’ effectively stops for you to go about your business in as much (or as little) depth as required to action the items of the day. ‘Continue’ moves through your calendar incrementally; days become weeks, weeks become months, months become years, and so on.
Tutorials
Football Manager™ 2022 Touch and Football Manager™ 2022 Xbox Edition feature a host of specifically tailored in-game tutorials designed to help you better understand some of your more common day-to-day managerial duties. Your Assistant Manager, or an appropriate member of the club hierarchy if an Assistant isn’t in place, will come to you at various junctures in your first few days and weeks on the job (and at appropriate intervals thereafter if something happens that requires an explanation) and guide you through the hows and whys of things like scouting and making transfer offers, getting to know your players, playing your first match, navigating around the game, and more. They are fully immersive and will hopefully improve your level of comfort with everything you need in order to be a success.
Please note that these are only sent to you if you have selected ‘No’ from the ‘Experienced’ section during the Create a Manager process. If you selected ‘Yes’, you can find them by clicking on the ‘?’ icon in the title bar.
Your Inbox, Your Home
Your ‘Inbox’ is the central point around which your experience is built. Communication crucial to the management of your chosen team is delivered to you in a prompt and timely fashion – the game brings you back from processing whenever your input is required – and the majority of your key decisions and actions are taken in response to content arriving here.
Look at things that interest you
When you move the mouse cursor around the screen, it highlights people, clubs, and other entities you can click on and interact with. Take some time to do this to familiarise yourself with the layout of various screens and with the scope of what you, as manager, are able to do, and what the consequences – both positive and negative – are.
Become familiar with the look and feel
The Side Bar on the left of the screen is the primary navigational tool providing you with quick access to all key areas of your team. Each screen also has a horizontal bar containing tab menus sitting below the ‘menu bar’ at the top of the screen, which features a contextual menu as well as a free text search box for swift navigation around your game world. Please refer to the User Interface section of the manual for a more detailed breakdown.
After reading through the first few items in your Inbox, it makes sense to devise a tactic and pick your first team. This is where the Tactics Tutorial should be of tremendous assistance; it guides you through picking a playing style, formation, and first team selection.
Taking the time to explore each section of the Side Bar, and the many sub-options on each screen, will help you become acquainted with Football Manager™ and, in turn, increase your enjoyment of playing. There is more integrated assistance in the form of delegation/automation to and from your capable backroom staff team.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help
The ‘Responsibilities’ tab on the ‘Staff’ section of the Side Bar allows you to delegate any number of tasks to your responsible and reliable backroom team. It is advisable to do this in the short-term while getting to grips with the scale of your managerial task, before taking back some of the responsibilities when you feel more attuned to handling them.
The more you explore and the more you play, the more comfortable you’ll become with some of the more complicated areas of management, and hopefully your enjoyment will continue to increase!
Keep your players happy
A happy team is a winning team, and very little is more important to your chances of success than ensuring that your players remain happy. Pay close attention to each individual’s (and therefore the squad’s collective) morale and personality, and be aware of their short- and long-term happiness, details of which can be found on their ‘Information’ screens. They often come to you directly with their concerns, and how successfully you deal with them goes a long way to determining whether you succeed in your job. The ‘Players’ section of this guide also walks you through everything you need to know about managing them and finding the right approach for you.
Be patient!
Clichés become clichés for a reason – there is inherent wisdom in there somewhere – and Rome really wasn’t built in a day. Be ambitious, but remain realistic at the same time, and understand that there is a learning curve involved here. You can enjoy Football Manager™ as a complete novice by heeding some of the advice in this guide, as well as the myriad of helping hands provided in-game, and you can in turn use the experiences you encounter in your fledgling days as a manager to sharpen your skills as you become more knowledgeable and comfortable in your surroundings.