The In-Game Editor is a great tool that can be used to alter a wide variety of aspects of your save ‘on the fly’. From editing player Attributes and viewing all of their hidden stats to boosting your finances during a transfer window, it gives you the flexibility to customise your save as you want it, when you want it. In this respect it differs from the Pre-Game Editor, which focuses more on competition rules and requires you to think about your changes before you play. The IGE gives you the freedom to truly make your save yours.

The tweaks you can make aren’t limited to just yourself or your squad. You can also tweak information, get an advanced look at the Attributes of a potential signing before your scouts are finished or amend the abilities of your staff. Jordan Millward provides a brief run through some of the things you can do.

“Never let a stumble be the end of your journey.  Never let an injury crisis be the cause and effect of your Football Manager demise”.

Injuries are often a hot topic for Football Manager players.  Injuries can prevent a Wonderkid from reaching his full potential and, perhaps more worryingly, can derail an entire season if they mount up to create what is commonly dubbed ‘an injury crisis’. FM Grasshopper has come to The Byline today to see if we can prevent that crisis from happening in the first place. Are there steps you can deploy to fight fatigue and limit the injuries?  

In short: yes there are, and in order to prove that I am going to pose four questions to you...

The Winter Update is where we start to plot our next FM journey, our heads turned by ideas for new saves and the chance to get stuck into updated squads and the latest player data. It can be tough to find the right club to create your story with but to help you out we’ve pulled together eight of the most interesting sides waiting for you to lead them to glory.

By the end of the January transfer window, we’ve all usually got a good sense of how a league is going to play out and whether this year might actually be our team’s year. Things can still change of course but by the mid-point of a campaign it’s usually pretty clear who is leading the pack, who is prime for the drop and the teams more than capable of springing a surprise. 

We’ve picked out eight teams that have either underperformed or outdone their expectations going in to the 2020/21 season. Can you outdo the overachievers and turn around those who’d like to quit and restart?
 

If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably got a go-to save for every edition of Football Manager. It might be your local team or a club that has a special place in your heart. That traditional save is like a comfy pair of slippers.

It can be the perfect way to test out the new features in each game within familiar confines. However, we thought it was about time you looked at spicing up those go-to saves and doing things a little differently for Football Manager 2021, so here’s our list of six ways to give your traditional career a twist.

Life is full of important decisions. Choosing where your latest Football Manager career begins is one of them. @MaddFM shares five things to consider when choosing a team to lead in Football Manager 2021.

One of FM21's headline features is the Recruitment Meeting - a handy addition that allows you to harness your backroom staff’s knowledge and experience. As well as the now-familiar Scouting Centre, Recruitment Meetings give you an opportunity to fine-tune your club's transfer policy and plan for the long-term. Correctly using these meetings is an effective way to focus your Scouts on priority areas. Hopefully this article will help you understand the full potential of the Recruitment Meeting.

It’s fair to say that podcaster and lifelong Football Manager fan Iain Macintosh has a mixed record of success on the game. Silverware was easier to come by in the early days of FM, when having one fitness session on the training schedule each month was considered the pinnacle of sports science.

In recent years, while the game has grown more realistic and intricate, Iain’s tactical blueprints have been chewed up and spit out by the match engine year after year regardless of how much tinkering, tweaking and loving care had gone into crafting them.

This year, Iain promises it will be different. That’s mostly because he’s hosting a brand new podcast – The Football Manager Show by The Athletic – where he’ll actually get to hear wisdom, advice and tips on how to master some of the core aspects of FM, directly from the people who make the game which will hopefully help Iain (and more importantly you, the listeners) get more out of FM21.

We sat down with Iain to discuss his love of the game and what it is that makes him come back year after year.

For me, the most influential section at the beginning of any FM save is the Team Report. This area shapes how I set up tactically and which areas I focus on in the transfer market. Football Manager 2021 improves the Team Report with additional functionality that will most likely lead me to visit it regularly throughout the season. I’ve come to The Byline today to go over this area and the improvements in FM21. Let’s begin…

With Early Access for Football Manager 2021 on the horizon, we’re sure many of you have already been contemplating which corner of the globe you’ll head for first. Picking the place where that all-important first save in the new game begins can be a tricky business though. To help you, we put our thinking caps on and picked out eight of the most exciting teams to manage in FM21. 

We’ve been crunching the stats at Football Manager HQ to illustrate your collective FM20 journeys by the numbers - how many of you played the game, how many goals you scored, the number of trophies won and, sadly, how many of you got asked to attend that dreaded board meeting at some point over the last nine months. Let’s break down those numbers in more detail.

Our series interviewing our Head Researchers has seen us speak to people living and working in three continents and four very different countries – South Africa, Scotland, Switzerland and Argentina. This time we head to the footballing hotbed that is Portugal to speak to Carlos and Bruno, who have been contributing to our vast research team for a combined 16 years. 

Carlos: My name is Carlos Bessa and I’m from Porto. I started working on the Football Manager database for Football Manager 2010, when I was an assistant researcher. Since I was a kid I’d played hundreds of hours on the previous games, starting out in 2001 – this is a passion that has almost accompanied my whole life. I’ve played every single edition since FM10.

Bruno: I’m Bruno Luis, from Lisbon. When I was just a young kid, I used to go every other weekend to my cousin's house, where they had computers. They would spend whole days playing the older games, with just the English divisions, and I would be standing next to them, watching them play. By 1999 I had got my first computer and was finally able to start playing the game that I loved. Since then, I’ve spent uncountable hours playing most FMs, and ultimately joined the research team in 2014.