Football Manager 2023 review – in the league of champions

Still gets you obsessed with soccer and managing.

Juventus is in a bad shape, and it feels like the right time for a complete rebuilding of the club. I’m up for the task, and put together a few ideas for the transfer window. Push out Rabiot, let Lazio’s ace Milinkovic-Savic in; Fiorentina’s Dodò and Roma’s Zalewski are very decent replacements for older Danilo and Alex Sandro. 

Our season kicks off pretty well, despite only racking up three points against Man City in the Champions League, and until the World Cup, looking at where Juventus was a few months before we joined the club, performances and results are at least tolerable. The World Cup breaks our momentum, though, and seven losses lead our President Mr. Agnelli to sack us, even though we won the last couple of matches.  

I’m luckier with Atalanta. In the first year, executives want us to reach the Conference League, but we end up in second place in our debut Serie A run. We get an 83-point record, and the club had never placed so high in the Italian league – despite losing Koopmeiners to Arsenal, and our budget only affording us a few youngsters. The second year starts with a lot of our best players wanting to leave: some of them, such as De Roon and Zapata (27 goals last season!), feel it’s time for them to jump onto a bigger club, and I replace a few others with wonderkids returning from their loans, like Carnesecchi for Musso. 

All these people leaving results in a higher budget for transfers, but I still decide to bet on younger talents: Udinese’s Beto keeps refusing as he thinks he might aim for bigger clubs, so I move to Broja, Ricci, Samardzic, and Parisi, some of the best wonderkids around. Thanks to these moves, we lower our average age a lot, so you might think we’d have a rough start in the season. Instead, it’s three wins out of three. And we now have Chelsea waiting for us for our Champions League debut… 

Football Manager 2023 is still able to suck you out of society and make you live a full weekend totally obsessed with soccer and managing. That’s despite years passing by, and only minor gameplay changes coming to the game season after season. 

In my experience, it was much easier to start off a soccer project in a small-to-medium-sized club, rather than in a bigger one, which typically comes with higher expectations. That’s because you don’t have huge budgets outside of a few Premier League and LaLiga clubs, so don’t expect to be always free to do whatever you’d want with all your money.

Especially during the first season, transfers can be a bit frustrating. You’ll see youngsters or emerging players such as Empoli’s Vicario and Salernitana’s Mazzocchi refuse bigger clubs like Juventus as they’ve just renewed their contracts, or Torino’s Singo not willing to join La Vecchia Signora because of the rivalry between the two clubs, like he’s a veteran. 

A few things happening in the transfer season are quite different from real soccer, and you should approach them with a pinch of salt. At least, the game is open to creative formulas, when it comes to payments, which means you can always do something on the market despite the initial budgets.

Also, thanks to the World Cup devastating soccer calendars, Football Manager 2023 makes you feel like you’re playing more than the previous games: there’s a smoother flow this time around, and the usual summer break doesn’t take hours to lead you into the regular season. On top of that, developer Sports Interactive has taken note of all the lessons when it comes to focusing on things players really care about – press conferences, or decisions your staff can take care of in your stead, take this.

However, more matches due to the busy soccer schedule mean your players will face even more injuries, compared to the last few FM games. This is something the franchise has always had issues with, especially if you have older players in your team, and hasn’t changed a lot this time around. The same goes for your club’s performances collapse at some point in the season (FM23 seems to make it happen just after the World Cup, so in January), with no apparent reason and not much you can do to fix it. These days, it’s refreshing to have a game you can actually be bad at, or even allows you to fail, but it’s not much fun when you don’t understand why.

Something you’ll need to take care of, instead, is the mood in your dressing room. Football Manager 2023 isn’t only about tactics, but also about sharing some love with your players and caring about their feelings, as this is likely going to impact how they perform on the pitch. SI really nails this dynamic in the sport, offering plenty of nuanced options to handle your players, even though some of them are lacking – for example, you can’t tell your players one of them has left because he wanted to do so, which means your other players will blame you. 

In terms of additions, the new game comes with a UEFA license, and this means you’ll see the likes of the Champions League, Europa League, and Conference League joining the series. FM23 isn’t content with the usual logos, but also features official sponsors such as PlayStation on the pitch, as well as realistic visuals when presenting the squads. It’s a shame this works side-by-side with a massive lack of official licenses, like Serie A’s Napoli or the entire Premier League, but I’m sure modders will get at it shortly.

Managers will now be evaluated by supporters, too, and their opinion can influence what the club will think of you in the long run. On top of that, you’ll also get a detailed timeline of your season and career – despite not being entirely new to the series, it’s nice to have ratings on scouted players and pretty much anything you’ll have to pick decisions on, as the series has previously always seen you decide based more on intuition than information.

The biggest addition this year is the Squad Planner. This feature responds to a need I’ve always felt, splitting the entire team based on roles in your current tactics, and allowing you to set hierarchies for each of them. That’s something I’ve always done in my head, or taking notes outside of the game, so it’s great to see it happen right where it needs to be, and makes you feel like you’re the head of a functioning staff.

Especially in a club you’re not familiar with, this is key, as it allows you to know how many players you have in a specific role, how many of them you could sell, how many more you’d need for your team to be considered complete, whose contracts are expiring, who’s on your transfer list, and so on. You’ll also be able to get rid of players you won’t need in a specific role’s list, so you have a clear view of what’s happening there, and there only – useful when you only want “Natural” fits for that role. 

The same tool allows you to set your scouting efforts in a role and based on certain player features you want, with one or more scouts going on the hunt for you depending on the priority. It’s very laser-focused and much faster, both in the setting up and in the execution, and made it so that I got back to using talent scouts with a massively higher frequency this year. As finding out unknown youngsters and players overall is where the pure joy of Football Manager sits, FM23 really does a great job in making that joy easier to access, and not because of that less deep.

All in all, Football Manager 2023 is the FM you’ve always known. Injuries and transfers have their typical weirdnesses, new and old, but the Squad Planner does have an impact during the day-to-day managing, and the game feels much smoother when it comes to getting you to the important moments in a season. This might not be a game for the history books, but it’s another solid slide tackle.

Written by Paolo Sirio on behalf of GLHF.