WE ARE FOOTBALL 2024

My first honest reaction to WE ARE FOOTBALL 2024 was relief. Not excitement, relief. After years of Football Manager leaning ever harder into press conferences and transfer jargon while quietly abandoning stadium construction, finances, and anything resembling a club-ownership fantasy, here is a management sim that actually asks you to run the whole operation. You are handling sponsorship deals, expanding stadium capacity, managing HR, plotting preseason tours, and optionally simulating your manager's private life, including whether your kids eventually join the squad. That breadth is genuinely rare, and the team behind it, led by Gerald Kohler who previously worked on the Anstoss and EA FIFA Manager series, clearly knows what a total football management game is supposed to feel like. The depth-versus-accessibility balance is where WAF 2024 makes its clearest argument. Over 100 difficulty sliders let you tune injury probability, transfer budgets, and board expectations before you even kick off, which means a first-timer can strip the game down to its fundamentals and still feel in control. The interface is cleaner than FM's notorious spreadsheet layout, and the menus are organized around tabs you can actually internalize within a session or two. That said, the onboarding is not quite as smooth in practice as the option count implies. The initial setup screen, covering squad targets, seasonal objectives, and training schedules all at once, can be overwhelming if you approach it without a prior frame of reference for the genre. Stick with it, because the game does open up meaningfully once you reach in-season rhythm. On the pitch, the 3D match engine runs nine camera angles, slow-motion replays, live rating changes, and a Tactical Analysis readout that breaks down how the result actually happened. You can shout real-time instructions at players and intervene in set-piece situations. The visual quality is modest, the player models have been critiqued fairly across reviews, and the simulation realism trails what Sports Interactive produces. But WAF 2024's match engine is a clear step up from the first game, and post-launch updates added over a thousand new match scenes plus improved foul and tackling logic. For a small studio output, it does enough to make your tactical formations feel traceable on the pitch, which is the minimum bar. The bigger strategic loop, watching player skill development trees progress, building out youth infrastructure including boarding schools and international centers, and managing team chemistry through player relationships and hobbies, is where the hours actually disappear. The no-license situation is the most practical barrier. Every club name is fictionalized out of the box, so Manchester City becomes something adjacent but legally distinct. The saving grace is the Steam Workshop, where the community has produced a fan database covering over 130,000 real players across 113 nations. Installing it is straightforward and transforms the experience significantly. Without it, you are managing a fiction; with it, you have a genuinely competitive alternative to the FM data layer. Women's leagues are included natively across 29 competitions in 19 countries, which is a real differentiator, though community coverage for the women's database is thinner than for the men's side. Local hot-seat multiplayer for up to four players rounds out the feature set and gives it a social angle that FM has never prioritized. The 73 Metacritic score is a fair reflection of where WAF 2024 sits: a step forward for a small team, praised for accessibility and breadth, critiqued for match engine limitations and simulation realism. For FM lifers looking for a change of pace, or for newcomers who want a management game that respects their time and does not demand 40 hours before the depth shows, WAF 2024 with the fan patch installed is a solid weekend investment. Go in expecting a focused alternative, not a feature-for-feature rival.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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