Tennis Manager 2024

I went in expecting a modest niche sim and came out having lost a full weekend micromanaging topspin attributes and injury recovery schedules. Tennis Manager 2024 puts you in charge of a tennis academy, handling everything from facility upgrades and contract negotiations to per-tournament training plans - and once you accept that scope, the depth is genuinely impressive for a small indie studio. The management layer is where the game earns its keep. You create a manager character, pick an academy (smaller ones offer tougher financial constraints, which I recommend), and then build outward. The redesigned training system lets you set separate programs for pre-season conditioning versus tournament prep, and you can now tune physical fitness, mental resilience, and technical attributes like topspin and underspin independently. The new injury system adds real teeth to scheduling decisions: push a player through too many clay-court qualifiers back-to-back and you will be nursing them through a six-week recovery window instead of chasing ranking points. Morale tracking layers on top of all this, so a losing streak compounds into a motivation crisis if you ignore it. These interlocking systems are the reason to buy. The Fantasy Court mode deserves a mention for anyone who finds the full career loop overwhelming. It lets you build and run custom tournaments with whatever player pool you like, including cross-era matchups, which is a low-commitment way to learn match tactics before committing to a long save. The database ships with around 2000 competitions across junior and professional circuits, plus roughly 5000 players - wide enough that scouting genuinely matters. There is, however, a licensing problem: real pro names are either absent or deliberately misspelled. The mod community has already solved this via the Steam Workshop, and I consider that fix essentially mandatory before starting a career save. The weaknesses are real and worth knowing about. The match engine renders in 3D but has animation glitches - rackets occasionally miss the ball entirely, and shot trajectories can look physically wrong, which matters because you rely on visual feedback to judge whether tactical tweaks are working. Sound design is thin: sparse crowd noise, a robotic announcer, and a short music loop that you will replace with your own playlist inside the first hour. The business side of academy management is also shallower than it looks at first glance - staff upgrades mostly reduce to spending money on linear stat bumps rather than any interesting structural decisions. Returning players from TM23 should know that the surface-level presentation is nearly identical; the meaningful changes are under the hood in training depth, the upgraded opponent AI, and the Fantasy Court addition. For a newcomer, though, none of that is disqualifying. The tutorial is functional, the adjustable difficulty settings scale earnings and negotiation pressure so you are not immediately bankrupt, and the overall UI surfaces the information you need without burying it. This is closer to a Football Manager lite for tennis than it is to a casual sports title, and that framing should set expectations correctly. If you are already a fan of the series, the incremental improvements are genuinely there - just do not expect a visual overhaul. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable.

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