Everything We Know About The FM23 Squad Planner

Football Manager has announced the headline features for the latest instalment in the series, and one of the frontrunners being the all-new squad planner. Here's everything we know about it.

The need to plan your team is essential for any good manager wanting to sweep up the cups and the Football Manager team have created just the tool for this. The in-game squad planner allows you to plan up to 3 seasons in advance, considering players in your current squad, youth players, and even players on your shortlist. It's essentially a visualisation diagram within Football Manager 2023.

You can rank players based on your preference, and it won't affect their morale. If you want to put your star player at the bottom of the list on your rankings, then that's fine - they'll never know! It does, however, inform your staff's opinions and how highly they rank players in the squad, and players in scout reports.

It's tailored specifically for your tactic, and can actually be adjusted to fit any alternate tactics you may want to test out, or tinker with.

The squad planner is aimed to be primarily a recruitment tool, says FM game designer Cyrus Yeganeh, but it can also help organise the youth development scene at your club. You can directly compare the progress of your younger players to the first team, and each other.

The squad planner really allows for a sense of what it's really like as a Football Manager. You oversee the development of the whole club, and work alongside the other staff at your club to ensure development across the board.

Another interesting addition to the squad planner is that your staff will rank your players into 4 categories based on where they are in their career - development, emerging, peak and experienced - and are colour coded based on their standing in the squad under 3 categories - important, squad depth and youth.

You can visualise your squad depth really well on this screen, which is quite similar to the "squad depth" screen in FM22. It's not yet known whether that screen will still be included in the new edition of the game.

I think we can all agree that the squad planner is a welcome addition to Fm23 and truly enhances what it's like to be a Football Manager.