With Football Manager 26 now out of Beta, it’s time to pick a save for the full game. While we’ve already looked at some suggested clubs for both experienced managers looking for a challenge or beginners new to the game, maybe you’re looking for a little more choice in your save picking. Today, we’re looking at some styles of careers you may choose to pursue with your next save.
Whether you’re a seasoned FM player or taking to the virtual sidelines for the first time, these save challenges will ensure you have something fun to play for.
Evolve A Minnow Into A Megalodon
The first challenging save type players often take on, the minnow challenge is a favorite for a good reason. In this approach to a save, you start with a team in the very bottom tier of your chosen nation. For extra challenge, you can pick one near the bottom of that league, too, or start with a team expected to do well, to have a season to come to grips with things before promotions start to come into play for a more forgiving approach
The reason this is among the most popular ways to play is that it provides an excellent difficulty curve. By starting with several leagues to climb through, you are constantly getting a new level of challenge with each successful season. Once you hit the top flight, you can then progress to targeting the continental cups, as well, for a challenge that keeps evolving.
Rise From The Ashes
While the pyramids of world football allow for amazing stories of triumph as teams climb through the ranks, it can also provide the inverse as former giants crumble and tumble into the depths of their national leagues. In this challenge, you pick a team that has a strong history but is currently struggling. Things like sanctions or enforced relegations are excellent difficulty boosters when choosing your preferred club.
With this save, you start with a side that has seen better days and is struggling, but may also have a larger budget if its fall was not from total financial collapse. You can also lean into the narrative of a save like this as you watch your manager become a savior to the fans of a historic club.
Conquer The Continental Cups
Perhaps the most well-known specialty challenge is that of the Pentagon Challenge, in which players attempt to start their careers as an uncredentialed free agent, then progress and build a reputation until they capture a continental cup. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to move on because to complete this challenge, you also have to win every other continental cup on offer. Often, this will mean starting in a smaller confederation and ultimately building to chasing down the UEFA Champions League to complete your set.
An interesting twist on this game arrives with the inclusion of women’s clubs and women’s competitions. If you want to add to the challenge and play length for this save, you can add in winning the corresponding women’s cups to truly complete your full set of every continental trophy in the game.
Win Everything With Kids
“You can’t win anything with kids” didn’t take long to age poorly — just one season later, Sir Alex Ferguson’s young Manchester United side went on to win the title. That squad was driven by a golden generation of academy talent, but this challenge pushes the idea even further: an All-Academy save, where every player in the squad must graduate from your club’s youth system.
That means you are only allowed to field players who came up from within your club’s own internal academy system. This calls for a drastically different approach to the game. Cultivating a strong academy system and youth development infrastructure will help you get the most out of your player production as you keep the gems while moving on any players who don’t make the grade to fund the next generation until you have a juggernaut of homegrown talent.
Create A New International Power
One fun way to change up your challenge with Football Manager is to think bigger and take on a nation-building save, something popular FM streamer Second Yellow Card is fond of. In this save type, you take over a club in a minnow nation, and while your goal is still to win big trophies with them, that is in service of the larger goal of growing the nation into a prominent footballing power.
The trick with this save is that it requires staying atop your national league while also building up the other teams in it enough to raise the nation’s ranking. More ranking earns more European spots, which raises the level of play in the nation and the type of players the nation can develop as you slowly but surely take your tiny nation up through the FIFA rankings. This is often accomplished by becoming a talent farm, hoarding players that smaller sides in your league can’t afford and loaning them out, slowly growing the number of competitive sides in the league.
Join The Women’s Game
While not a specific type of save per se, Football Manager 26 comes with a unique new challenge in the form of the women’s game, so jump on in and see what it’s all about. While the core mechanics of the engine remain the same, the real-world structures of the various women’s leagues differ from their men’s counterparts, making them a new challenge you can take on.
You can simply start up a save in the NWSL, WSL, or one of the other major women’s leagues included, or go big and try to take on a challenge, too. Raise a minnow to challenge Barcelona or build a youth-powered world beater and prove you can win trophies in both the men’s and women’s games.
What’s your first save of Football Manager 26 going to be, one of these challenges or something entirely different?
