The Football Manager Editor is a very powerful tool that allows the community to really express their creativity and showcase the huge potential of the Football Manager database. Firstly those unaware the editor is a free tool created by Sports Interactive that allows players to see the in-game stats and then edit and create players, teams and competitions. A few of the following points will be covered in this guide:

• How do I use it?
• What can I do with it?
• Things for you to try in the editor.
• How to then start saves with the changes you’ve made.

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How to open the editor

The Football Manager Editor is available, even if you didn’t own the game. For some strange reason you could edit the game files without any knowledge of the game or franchise. When you load up Steam, hover over the Library tab and select Tools from the Drop-down box. There you’ll find similar programs for other games, either dedicated servers ported via steam or other tools for editing games. Football Manager dominates the tools category, with Editors and Resource Achievers for years back to 2012 when Sports Interactive transferred to Steam. Just download the Editor as you would any other game or tool and then double click to begin using it! This is the screen you’ll be presented with in a windowed (or full-screen) program.

The FIRST thing you must do, is load the database. This is for a few reasons:

• The Editor currently hasn’t got any specific data loaded, such as which clubs players play for. Therefore you need to load in the information.
• Also you can choose (when the January update is released) whether to start from the original database or the updated one.

To do this, click file in the top left, then click ‘load database’ in the drop down. After a few seconds of loading the screen will revert to the image above but its important that you do it. After that the world is your oyster! You can really do anything you would like, however I’ll give you a few tips to get started.

Categories

The following is a list of ‘database options’ if you will, these are the 18 categories of items that are editable via this program:

1. Agreements: Things like the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States. With this you can edit agreements between countries regarding foreign players, and competitions. It might be possible to create new alliances between countries or remove the EU entirely?
2.  Awards: Things like the Balloon D’or and Manager of the Season. Adding or re-naming awards to be more appropriate might be amusing!
3. Clubs: If you’re creating new clubs or editing old ones this will be the most used tab. When creating clubs ensure you have a founding year, and make sure they have a stadium to play at!
4. Cities: You can add cities, or edit current ones to match the weather, location and attraction you desire.
5. Competitions: Another fairly self explanatory tab, from which you can edit current competitions or create new ones. Try not to fit too many competitions into a small space.
6. Continents: Simply lists the 6 in-game continents and gives you limited changes, you cannot add continents to the game 
7. Currencies: Lists all in-game currencies and their exchange rate, you cannot add currencies to the game 
8. Derbies: Fairly obviously this collects all derbies for either club or country and allows you to add and edit rivalries in the game.
9. Descriptions: This allows the user to change the current descriptions of players, for example: ‘Young Winger’, ‘Tireless Fullback’ or ‘Wonderkid’
10. Injuries: This allows you to remove, change or add injuries to the game.
11. Languages: Add, edit or remove languages from the footballing world.
12. Local Regions: In essence just areas of a country, like the East Midlands, New Hampshire and Normandy. You can choose which cities reside in which regions to allow new local rivalries to form, or to recreate nations using the renaming function.
13. Media Sources: From Sky Sports to BBC Radio Yorkshire to 90min.com. The respective sites will automatically take you to their real world websites when clicked on in game.
14. Nations: Another very important tab. Although you cannot add new nations, you can rename and replace current nations with your brand new idea for a country! Previously I’ve replaced Gibraltar with ‘Trolland’ and created a series of competitions for Trollish players in the Trollish Premier League etc.
15. People: This includes non-players! Everyone from Pep Guardiola to the 16 year old Wonderkid from the Brazilian 2nd division. You’ll receive different stat options for different people but the more you play with the editor the better you’ll understand it.
16. Stadiums: The house of your clubs can be renamed, resized, fitted with training facilities and even made into clay!
17. Stage Names: A bit of an obscure one, but you can actually edit the names for the Semi final or quarter final of a competition. All you can change is the name though.
18. Weather: This one is a bit mad; you can change the precipitation, temperature, wind and seasons for weather in certain regions. This could really mess with the game mechanics regarding wind and rain!

So that’s quite a lot to take in. My advice to you is to load up the editor and just have a look around. Play with some numbers, maybe add a player to your favourite team, change a colour using the colour palette scheme. Making new kits for your teams can really bring a save to life rather than using default kits from the previous team.

Some pointers:

• When you select an editable number in a box, as well as making the text bold you’ll see a range of numbers at the bottom of the screen:

This is the maximum and minimum numbers that can be put in this box. Assume the number should be whole i.e not decimal (but it’ll normally correct you anyway)

• Most options for numbers either go to 20 or to 200. Players Potential ability and Current ability are ranged from 0-200 as shown above
• Players with negative potential or current ability mean that their ability can vary in save. For example a player with -10 potential ability will have a potential ability between 180-200. This will vary from save to save so this adds some variability to saves.
• If you are unsure what to do, hover over what you’re stuck on and occasionally a tool-tip will appear to help you out. If not there is a good community of people that use the editor and either them or myself would be happy to help you out!

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Creative Challenges

Now that you have the basics in where everything is kept in the editor, here are some ideas for what you could do with this new engine:

1. Recreate your childhood team! Remember Andy on the wing and Big Ben in goal? Well you could recreate the original squad that you were in as a youngster and take them to the very top of the footballing world.
2. Recreate an iconic team from the past! Whether its the Arsenal invincible’s or the England 1966 team that won the World Cup. To recreate that side and bring them to modern football would be an interesting experiment. A lot of things like this have already been done though and it would be worth checking the Steam Workshop for similar work.
3. Create a new nation based on the things you love!
   Game of Thrones last year: https://www.footballmanagerblog.org/2018/05/fm-2018-game-of-thrones-database.html A Women’s database: https://www.footballmanagerblog.org/2018/06/football-manager-2018-women-database.html And even a 1995-96 remake: https://www.footballmanagerblog.org/2018/03/1995-1996-database-for-football-manager.html If not a nation I’ve seen funny injuries databases too which are just plain hilarious alongside a casual save: https://www.shortlist.com/tech/gaming/football-manager-edit-funny-scurvy-wayne-rooney/327089
4. Try experiments! Many of our experiments on our site such as our look into whether Christian Pulisic will be successful at Chelsea: http://dictatethegame.com/2019/01/04/will-christian-pulisic-be-successful-fm19-experiment/and our Ruining English football simulation: http://dictatethegame.com/2018/03/21/ruining-english-fooball-part-1
   Try a new experiment and really mess with the games mechanics. A few good examples to try would be release every player from their contracts, see what happens? Add a winter break to England? Change the way teams qualify for European competitions perhaps?

As corny as its sounds, the true limit of the editor is how creative you are. If you have an idea and think ‘I wonder if this player would cut it at this club’ then try it out! Edit to your hearts content and let us know how you get on! If we get enough interest we could host peoples creations here on the site to display to all our readers and allow them to enjoy the work you’ve created. We already have two databases on our site found here: http://dictatethegame.com/category/databases/

These are both lower league databases, finishing off the English lower league system and updating transfers across the world.

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If you have any questions about the editor, let us know!

• Dictate The Game’s Facebook
• Dictate The Game’s Twitter

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Make sure you check these articles out, they might interest you:

• Project Aswijan | Introduction
• Dynamo Project FM19 – Guide to The Regista – Orchestrating the Play
• How to Build Your Midfield in FM19 | Football Manager Guide
• Starting a New Save | Football Manager Guide
• How to Manage in MLS | FM19 Guide