Introducing FM27 Tactics Lab — test your tactics with FM27’s native match engine

Hi everyone,

I’m the developer of FM27 Tactics Lab, a free Windows desktop tool for testing tactics. I first shared it with the Chinese FM community, where it’s already being used by a lot of players. Their feedback has helped shape the tool, and now I’d like to introduce it here too.

I built it to answer a question I kept running into in my own saves: Did that tactical tweak actually help, or did I just have a good run of results?

Say you want to see what happens when you switch your striker from an Advanced Forward to a Deep-Lying Forward. You can save your original tactic as a baseline, change the role, and run both versions against the same opposition using the same set of match seeds. Then you can compare the results across a batch of matches.

What you can do with it​

• Build and edit tactics. Set up separate in-possession and out-of-possession shapes, tweak roles and instructions, work with set pieces, and import or export .fmf tactics.
• Test with your own squad. Load an FM27 career save to bring in your players, their attributes, and your saved tactics. You can test home and away against teams in your league. The tool selects an opponent preset based on each manager’s preferred style and formation.
• Set up your own experiments. Change a player attribute, compare two versions of a tactic, or build a weighted pool of opponents to see how your setup fares against different styles.

The tool uses FM27’s native match engine from your local installation. You need FM27 installed, and you can run the tests without opening the game. The interface follows your Windows display language and supports English.

Where to get it​

• Steam: The stable build is v1113.1, tested with FM27 build 27.0.1+2503222. Download the Steam version
• Epic Games Store: There’s a separate test build for Epic FM27 27.0.1. Startup and save reading passed my checks, and I’d appreciate feedback from anyone who can try running a full match on Epic. Download the Epic test build

If you give it a go, I’d love to hear what you tested and whether the results surprised you. If you hit an error, please include your tool version, FM build, and the exact message so I can look into it. Source code and issue tracker

Hey, huge thanks for all the hard work you put into this! I’ve already got the testing environment up and running, and I’ve been grinding pretty much non-stop for the past five days using Vibe Coding (Claude + Codex) to polish it. Right now, I’m just trying to make it completely bulletproof and error-free—so that whatever results come out of this code are universally trusted as the absolute best for everyone. My goal is to take those massive FM-Arena tactical tests—the ones that usually drag on for days or even weeks—and make it possible to run them in just a few hours.


If I pull it off, I’ll definitely keep everyone in the loop and share the results right here for free. I have too much respect for the years of hard work the FM-Arena team has put in to ever do them dirty or undermine what they've built. At the end of the day, it's all for the good of this awesome community and the game we love

Thanks man. You are a legend. I've used your code to make a mac version and some changes. Its here if you want to take a look: GitHub - caiograco289/Fm-Match-Lab: Run Football Manager 27's own match engine on macOS, outside the game: replay your saved matches exactly, change tactics, attributes or instructions, and simulate thousands of matches to see what works. Unofficial; needs your own FM27.. I also been doing a bunch of studies on the engine, listed here: Fm-Match-Lab/docs/studies at main · caiograco289/Fm-Match-Lab

caiograco said:

Thanks man. You are a legend. I've used your code to make a mac version and some changes. Its here if you want to take a look: GitHub - caiograco289/Fm-Match-Lab: Run Football Manager 27's own match engine on macOS, outside the game: replay your saved matches exactly, change tactics, attributes or instructions, and simulate thousands of matches to see what works. Unofficial; needs your own FM27.. I also been doing a bunch of studies on the engine, listed here: Fm-Match-Lab/docs/studies at main · caiograco289/Fm-Match-Lab

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thanks a lot, I'm looking for a developer with Mac. Thanks for your contribution

Feel free to fork my repo into yours. It should be easy to make a mac version of yours with an agent if you give him my repo.

lqf0624 said:

I’m the developer of FM27 Tactics Lab, a free Windows desktop tool for testing tactics.

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Are there recommended settings to make a match as even and unbiased as possible for testing? I made a similar tool for FM 24 and a big factor in that was eliminating the home-team advantage by allowing attendances to be tweaked.

Great work by both of you and I was wondering if anyone has made it worked on Gamepass version. I attempted it but unfortunately was not able to get it working.

Not sure if anyone has any ideas or has been able to get it working.