About

FM Match Lab: Elevating Football Manager to a new Level

At FM Match Lab, we’re a team of passionate Football Manager fans united by our love for the game. Like you, we’ve obsessed over tactics, celebrated last-minute winners, and endured the agony of missed promotions. But we also dreamed of something more—a version of FM that pushes realism and immersion even further. FM Match Lab is a modding project, dedicated to improve Football Manager. We believe that our work will elevate your game experience to unique heights.

Our Philosophy

We respect Sports Interactive’s incredible work—FM is already the gold standard of football management sims. But like any game, it has room to grow. Our mods don’t reinvent the wheel; they polish it. Through careful adjustments to the Match Engine, and other areas of the game such as how the AI behaves during matches, training and player development, player ratings, and other areas we are still working on, we aim to deliver a more dynamic, realistic, and rewarding gameplay experience. We are running endless tests, to ensure, that our files are as balanced as possible, while keeping intact the fun of playing this game we all love.

The Beginnings

Our journey began from frustration—with the cancellation of FM25, the limitations of the current game and the unmet potential of what Football Manager could be. When we discovered the tools to modify the Match Engine, we finally saw an opportunity. We quickly gathered a team that includes FM nerds, game devs, data analysts and we evolved from a pub-like spirit to an organized, professional and efficient team. And then we starting working on our goal – a refreshed FM24 experience.

The Challenges of Our Work

While we take pride in enhancing what you see on screen, it’s important to clarify the challenges of our work. Our work consists in understanding all the parameters related with how the Match Engine works under the hood, alongside how the AI operates during a match and how it handles the training system and utilises young players, how the game calculates the ratings you see during a match (which will affect how your young players develop), how the training system works in order to develop your players (besides game time), how the media system can feel more immersive, how through audio you can feel inside the stadium and how, through a redesign of stadiums, you feel you are living a manager’s dream. This also means making sure our understanding of the game code and its several parameters are in line with what we see on-screen. Then we adjust each parameter, while making sure that our work with the game code is stable, balanced and that the player has a smooth experience. Our mission is to work, as a team, via a professional approach based on rigorous testing, to deliver the most realistic and enjoyable visual experience possible. And our work continues with the move to a brand new reality – Unity.

Ultimately, we want to offer something unique and different to players. Something refreshing where each player can tailor FM to its style: a more realistic match engine experience, more tactical variety that can allows you to win and avoid “meta” tactics, a more challenging AI that can push you to be an even better manager, and a more balanced and refined training system that will mean long-term saves will be, finally, worth of your time and passion.

We love this game just like you and this is our love letter to FM

Thank you,

The FM Match Lab team