A Dan Gear FM23 Save Reveal

As I’m sure you saw from my FM23 save reveal video (if not, you can watch it below),

I’m going to be doing a European Journeyman. But it will be a bit different from your standard journeyman. I will be starting unemployed with no badges or any previous experience. Then I tried to work my way to the top of European football by moving clubs and building clubs along the way. I’m a big advocate of using all my staff on Football Manager. People will point out they have flaws and aren’t perfect, but I like that.

I want there to be mistakes made. I feel that adds more to the save. When we start, we will lean on the Director of Football to do all the signings if the club has one, as it’s unlikely in mainland Europe they’d leave transfers to a new employed manager. If the club doesn’t have one, I will delegate the hiring of a Director of Football to a board member. Then, if they choose to hire one, we will use them. 

As I improve and grow in stature, I’ll use stats to add players to the transfer targets list for DOF to sign, but this will take away the option for him to sign who he wants. I think I need to establish myself with a reputation before this point, though. The DOF will also be in full control of contracts, both renewals and new players joining the club. He will likely fail to get some deals done, but it will be interesting to see how I can cope with this. 

Next up, I will ask the Technical Director to deal with staff recruitment, hiring and firing of staff and contract renewals. Whilst I might ask to take certain staff with me as I move jobs, if the Technical Director feels he can improve on these then that’s his discretion. If the club doesn’t have one, I will delegate these duties to the DOF.

The Chief Scout will be in charge of all scouting assignments and report back to the DOF. Hopefully, between them, they can find targets to improve my sides. Once my reputation improves I will get more involved with recruitment. It is at this point we will start to dive into statistical analysis, here I will try and find players who I believe are outliers through stats. Then ask for them to be scouted then if I want them to be signed ask the DOF to work on the deal.

Now with my coaching staff, I will be using their reports and their judgement of player abilities and potential to understand the squads we inherit. Using that alongside training ratings and match ratings will help us pick the team for every match. This will be crucial as I will also be playing with no attributes. So it will be vital to use their reports to understand the player’s pros and cons and what type of players they are.

The reason for no attributes coming back to my save (I did this before in Football Manager 2019 with Kaiserslautern) is because I feel it adds another layer of realism to the game. In real life, a player isn’t judged against another by a score of crossing attributes of 11 vs. 12, they’re judged by their ability through performances and that’s what we will be doing here. Performances will matter more than player attributes. Add this in with my plan to go down a statistical route later on in the save when I get more involved in recruitment, and the use of attributes will become redundant anyway. 

I talked on the GrassNGear podcast about using a manager identity. My manager will have an identity, a philosophy. Whilst the formation will change from club to club depending on the players available, the main philosophy will stay the same. The philosophy will be defensive-minded football. I will start this from day one at the first club and carry this throughout my career. Whilst the style of defensive football may change, we will stick to our principles of being a defensive-minded manager throughout. There are different ways to be defensive, and I’m hoping to do a tactical piece with each club to show you the evolution of the defensive tactics as we progress through the save.

I will make sure that the manager’s contract will never be more than 24 months when I join a club. Any extensions will only be 12 months in the final months of the deal to ensure we have the flexibility to move between jobs. 

I will be bringing updates throughout this save as we play along and intend to start it on release day, November 8th. It will be my only save of the year.
I’ll address things like game setup, club introduction, and how I create a tactic for a side with no attributes and just coach reports. We will dive into the Director of Football and his recruitment, and hopefully, you will all follow along for the whole of the save.

Thanks for reading.