Summary of recent findings for optimal play in FM24 & FM26

by GeorgeFloydOverdosed, Oct 31, 2025

GerardFM24 said: @GeorgeFloydOverdosed
Thanks for the reply! Looking forward to seeing your final filter.

To at least have a decent chance of reaching the essentials of a top player you would need:

11 acceleration, concentration
10 pace, anticipation, determination
9 natural fitness
8 stamina, jumping reach, dribbling, aggression, composure, work rate
6 balance
5 agility


However very few age age 15-17 newgens can meet that criteria.

To make it viable, as well as easier to filter, I recommend:

7 aggression, anticipation, composure, concentration, work rate, dribbling, determination, acceleration, jumping reach, natural fitness, pace, stamina

10 professionalism, pressure, consistency, important matches

10< dirtiness

>100 PA

Age 15-17, but also consider age 18 players


In my test save, there still weren't that many results, but you only need a few each year. You could drop it the visible attributes to 6 if need be, but I wouldn't go any lower than that.

If you can't buy anything at 6, say because you're a lower league club, it's best to then just focus on high pace/acc/sta players. That would be 11+ pace/acc and 7+ stamina starting. I wouldn't even add anything else to it, as things like work rate can be trained up adequately and hiddens such as pressure & important matches matter less in lower leagues.

Each year about 7 players will need to graduate from the u18s, so if we assume a squad size of 21 players. If 3 of these are from intake, that leaves 4 for purchases. So we only need a few viable options to be available.

Of course there's the option of loan farming 100 u18 players, but players on loan won't train correctly, so this can be considered as an extra rather than alternative.

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Nice thread :thup:

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@GeorgeFloydOverdosed
4-2-3-1 double BBM, using PL 2.1 as filters.

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Question - is it possible to mod the way that the game highlights player attributes to make them align to the recommended attributes in the opening post?

I very much enjoy just trying to do everything within the game rather than using external tools and this is a major barrier to being able to easily see important information purely within the game.

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1st as default Luton tally:

433 Mars Attacks V4 (+custom variants) 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

EF 424 IF HP V2 P101 AC (+custom variants) 🏆🏆🏆

I will refer to 'V4' as 'V7', as it is actually named V7 in the file. On the site, it is V4.

I didn't record the data neatly and most of my samples are for variants not mentioned here, so there's more to it that I will talk about in my notes below, but this data provides you with some direct comparisons.

To give you some bearings, at Rushall 'FM24.4 WARPIGS 4231 RM P111 CC' placed 20th and LxS 433 placed 6th.

V7 Variant A:

Rushall - 2nd(96pts), 4th(83pts)
Luton optimized selected - 5th, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 5th, 5th, 4th, 1st(85pts) = 3.875
Man City - 1st(87pts,83gd)

V7 Variant B:

Rushall - 2nd(103pts), 2nd(94pts), 3rd(91pts)
Luton - 4th, 5th, 5th, 5th, 6th, 3rd, 6th, 5th, 4th, 5th, 6th, 1st = 4.583
Liverpool - 1st(101pts,114gd)
Man City - 1st(100pts,106gd), 1st(101pts,105gd)
Full Haaland Luton - 1st(103pts,152gd)

V7 default:

Rushall - 2nd(100pts), 2nd(97pts), 2nd(88pts)
Luton default unselected - 4th
Luton optimized unselected - 2nd
Liverpool - 1st(99pts,117gd)
Man City - 1st(100pts,100gd), 1st(107pts,113gd)
Full Haaland Luton - 1st(110pts,137gd)

EF 424 IF HP V2 P101 AC:

Rushall - 1st(95pts), 4th(83pts), 5th(81pts)
Luton default unselected - 4th, 5th, 8th, 4th, 7th, 7th = 5.833
Luton optimized selected - 3rd, 4th, 1st, 8th, 4th, 3rd = 3.833
Man City - 1st(101pts,124gd) - taken from FM Arena tactic screenshot
Full Haaland Luton - 1st(105pts,147gd)

424 Classic v164:

Rushall - 3rd(88pts)
Luton optimized selected - 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 7th, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 3rd = 3.375

FM24.4HGF4231 V3X RM P107 ALL CUPS:

Rushall - 2nd(88pts)
Luton default unselected - 3rd, 6th
Luton optimized selected - 4th

PERFECT STRANGERS 42112 WIWBA P107 EF:

Rushall - 1st(96pts), 4th(88pts)
Luton optimized selected - 2nd

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Notes:

The 433 V7 tactic is neck and neck with the Knap tactic. By virtue of the fact that it's a different formation to the 424, I was planning to upload my own variation, but it turned out that default V7 is about as good as the best variations I tried. So I simply credit the author.

Now the FM Arena testing has given V7 a dud score putting it on page 30. You can't see it in the data presented above, but what I noticed during testing was that V7 more temperamental than the Knap tactic. An unselected Luton could get 9th for example. Variant B did a good job of tamping this down I believe. My speculation is it's that there is more variance in the opposition's DCs (vs V7's extra ST) than their DL (vs Knap's AMR), and that the opposition quality is more likely to pip your own in the central areas in the Premier League.

Whatever the cause, the stability of Knap's tactic does matter, and so I would personally still stick with it over the V7, but the V7 does give another option, particularly if you lack decent wingers. What I've found through this testing is that team selection matters quite a lot. Again the data above doesn't fully show it, but I would often get consistent 2nds with Luton with the right team selection (you can see this with 424 Classic v164). Delegating to the assistant, as low as 6th-8th becomes much more frequent. So that's ~2nd-8th > consistent 2nd through team selection, which is bigger than the difference between many of these tactics that get uploaded.

As you can see from Variant A, sometimes a tactic can do great in one league and yet relatively poor in another. Both the Knap tactic and V7 are exceptional well-rounders. Generally speaking though, 8 or 9 times out of 10 the better the tactic, the better it does in all conditions. So I don't think the 'underdog' tactic is really a thing - and it's certainly not switching from 'attacking' to 'positive' or the like, which does nothing at best and ruins the tactic at worse. You have to keep in mind these tactics have already been refined to select the optimal mentality it performs with.

I found that 'Position/Duty/Role' in tactic familiarity makes no observable difference. You can get 0% in this if you don't make your player train in that specific role. Since specific role training is detrimental to attribute growth through training, be reassured you don't have to chose between them. 0% role familiarity is fine. This will also show up in your 'partnership' green lines on the tactic, which will say the role combination is suitable/unsuitable if you hover over it - again, this doesn't seem to matter, so ignore this.

The stars your player has for the role also doesn't seem to matter. Selecting the player with the highest % score in FMSS or Genie Scout is what matters. Leave the role as what the tactic dictates it is, as role changes do change the tactic effectiveness.

I had the idea that perhaps less instructions = more adherence/more familiarity = better results. So I gradually stripped down the V7 tactic until I ended up with this:



The result was 2 x 5th. I reckon it's probably true for other tactics as well, but it's still a slight disbenefit rather than a benefit. And we see with the Rushall results that it doesn't matter how crappy your players are, they handle the extra instructions fine.

I should also note that Diabolo4480 has uploaded a number of variations the same fundamental tactic, up to version 30. I haven't tested all of these, but I tried a few and settled on V7 as the best starting point to work with. V28 for instance is roughly equal, but not better.

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The Reddit post I highlighted a few days ago (the one where the guy got the game's match engine running independently of the game) has inspired me to get serious about disassembling the logic for FM 24. So far I've managed to find where the game's seed is supplied to the match engine, which means you can set a breakpoint before going to the match (it only works for when you click the Instant Result/Simulate Match button right now), set the seed to a fixed value (right now it comes from your machine's current date/time) and then get the same result every time.

I can share this if people think there's a use-case for it, but I'm going to be cracking on with my digging regardless.

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