Football Manager 2024's advanced access is available now

Football Manager 2024 launches on November 6th, but it's available now for those who pre-order. As always, the "Advanced Access" offers the full game, albeit with a higher chance of encountering bugs.

If you've bought the game on Steam, you should be able to restart the client and find FM2024 available to download, according to Sports Interactive's instructions. The same is true if you've purchased via the Epic Games Store. If you've bought it from another approved digital store, you should have been emailed a Steam code that will grant you admission.

I'm generally dead-set against pre-ordering games, but Football Manager is at least one instance where you know what you're getting each year - for good and for ill. The slow rate of recent change between editions has even been admitted by Sports Interactive, who say that FM2024 is the last of an era and that Football Manager 2025 will make the leap to a new engine, Unity.

In the meantime, FM2024 does have a handful of new features that sound interesting to me, including the addition of Japanese football leagues and the ability to carry over saved games from Football Manager 2023. Save games will now be portable between all future additions too, SI say. My best ever Football Manager (or Championship Manager) saves lasted for more than twenty seasons, but that's hard to do in the modern era when seasons take so long to play (and I have a life). Carrying saves between games maybe makes those journeyman careers possible again.

Other new features include smarter transfers and team building by opponents, new set pieces, and plenty of quality of life updates. We'll have a review along near November 6th to determine whether this amounts to much.