Deciding on which club to start your save with on Football Manager can be a tricky task. There are so many leagues to choose from, so many titles to aim for and so many roads to glory to walk.
Thankfully for you, we’ve picked out five of the best saves for you to try. They range from near-impossible challenges to rebuilds but be prepared to be in it for the long haul. Some of these saves require some serious dedication.
FC Vaduz
Our first save on this list is probably the most iconic. To win the Champions League with the giants of Liechtenstein, FC Vaduz. There’s just one significant problem with this save, there is no professional league in Liechtenstein. That means that Vaduz plays in the neighbouring Swizz leagues and currently sits in the Swiss second division.
That all sounds well and good so far but it does present a problem. As Vaduz are not Swiss, they are not entitled to win the Swiss first division should they reach it and equally can’t qualify for European places via the league.
Therefore, the only way to qualify for European competitions with Vaduz is to win the Liechtensteiner Cup and this only qualifies you for the very first qualifying round of the Europa Conference League. That means, that if you want to win the Champions League with Vaduz, you first have to win the Liechtensteiner Cup.
Then you have to win the Conference League to qualify for the Europa League. Then you have to win the Europa League to qualify for the Champions League and then finally you have to win the UCL. If you should fail to win any of those trophies then you start again from the Conference League qualifiers.
That means three European trophies on the bounce to reach your goal. Luckily, Vaduz has won the Liechtensteiner Cup 50 times and only failed to win it once this century. The rest of the challenge though, that’s the tricky bit. Good luck!
DSC Arminia Bielefeld
For the second time this century, Arminia Bielefeld has found themselves in a rapid decline after suffering back-to-back relegations from the Bundesliga to the 3. Liga. When something similar happened in 2011, they were able to bounce back and work their way back up to the Bundesliga.
Can you recreate this recovery but this time go one step further and create Germany’s new dominant club? That’s the goal of this save, stop the rot and take Bielefeld to the top.
Everton
Everton were widely considered the best of the rest under David Moyes but in recent years they have been on a gradual decline to the point where they have become a constant in the Premier League relegation battle. This season, these problems were exacerbated when Everton were handed a 10-point deduction for breaching the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules.
Luckily for the club, this was later reduced to a six-point deduction; although a further two-point deduction was later added. Although Everton has comfortably survived in real life, this save offers a great opportunity to manage a club struggling with finances and starting with a handicap.
When you start a new FM save, Everton start the season with minus six points. The goal here is to turn that deficit around and rebuild Everton as one of England’s strongest clubs. Alternatively, if you fancy a longer but similar save, Wigan Athletic in League One start the game with minus eight points after suffering financial difficulties of their own.
Deportivo de La Coruña
At number four we have a fallen giant in the shape of Deportivo de La Coruña. In FM24 they are called Coruña and start as a team in Spain’s third tier. Not so long ago, however, they were La Liga Champions and Champions League regulars.
In the 2003-04 season, they even reached the semi-finals and between 1992 and 2004, they finished in La Liga’s top three nine times. They even won the competition in the 1999/2000 season and also won the Copa del Rey twice in this same 12-year period.
After these glory years, Deportivo became a bit of a yoyo club in the 2010s, bouncing between La Liga and the second division before collapsing completely in 2020 and falling into Spain’s third tier. Although in real life, they have just earned promotion back to the second tier, this is yet to happen in FM24.
The goal here is to rebuild this fallen giant and take them back to their glory days of the nineties. The infrastructure is already in place, they just need to be taken back to where they belong. If Deportivo doesn’t interest you, then Malaga offers a near-identical alternative having also slipped from the UCL to the third tier in recent years.
Budapest Honvéd FC
This last save option is perhaps a little more niche than the others on this list but it also offers the opportunity to rebuild a fallen giant. Although Budapest Honvéd FC is perhaps a name unknown to most, it once housed a large majority of one of football’s greatest-ever international teams.
That is the Hungarian ‘Mighty Magyars’ team of the late 1940s and early 1950s that was widely thought of as the greatest team on the planet during that era. The Star of both Budapest Honvéd FC and the Hungarian national team was Ferenc Puskás. During the 1950s, Honvéd dominated the Hungarian top flight and even went on tour around Europe.
Unfortunately, the political situation within Soviet-controlled Hungary led to the collapse of this incredible team in 1956 but that didn’t stop the club from winning many more titles over the years.
Now though, the club sit in Hungary’s second tier and needs to be taken back to the top of Hungarian football. Once you’ve achieved that, taking a Hungarian team to the peak of European football is your next goal. Winning the UCL with a team outside of Europe’s top five leagues is something that hasn’t been done since Porto in the 2003/04 season and a team from Hungary has never won the competition.
These challenges will keep you focused and busy until the next edition of Football Manager drops on the market.
