FM24 USA to D4 (now with San Diego FC)

Have you considered updating? Teams in the usl have been promoted or folded.

Open Cup, Leagues Cup etc are up to date.

As for leagues, it's much work removing all the dead teams, adding new ones, moving rosters around (this is the big one), creating and tweaking players etc. That can be a project for someone else, if they did then I'd consider adding it here. Or if people have a specific city/team they want included I could do a custom version. 

I would love to have a US file with updated USL and adding an option for relegation/promotion as well.  I would be willing  to help with this but will need to learn about how to do it.  

The last official update made some of the rosters non-compliant, so players were getting cut right off the bat. I've sorted this out with some IRL moves, and in the process added some of the big DPs like Son at LAFC, Muller at Vancouver etc

Hi The Modelcitizen, ¿What things do you change in the last updates?

Thanks for your amazing work!!

I would love to see Santa Barbara Sky in the USL Championship and I wish we could have a New Orleans team in the USLC as well, the Jestyrs are the ones I know the most. (I know there has been a lot of talk in the USL about New Orleans getting a new team in the USL (most likely at the USLC level or possibly the new top league soon).

Thanks for the feedback, for now I might not touch the team structure until I see how FM26 is for editing, it might be full steam ahead in FM26 at that point. As for recent updates, nothing major, just some small things like adding the Baja Cup (midseason friendly between San Diego and Tijuana) and other derbies and stuff that emerged in 2025. If you run this with my Leagues Cup and Liga MX files the North American universe is even more expanded to realism

@themodelcitizen any interest in working together in making college divisions for the US ready for FM26?

I've collected data to add all the NCAA D1, D2, D3, NAIA, NJCAA D1 teams to the Database.

I'm working out the kinks to make sure all the teams are right and have the right details.

It may be a little tricky to implement the college rules into the game since it has a different calendar as well as the transfer rules.

Recreating just the NCAA will be a challenge on it's own but we could try to figure it out.

I would be happy to help as well.  I have been making kits for my own teams using FM Kit Creator.  Would be willing to help make kit files for these league files.

Sounds tempting, let's reconnect when it comes out and we get a look at the editor. I'm based in Canada so the NCAA thing isn't as high on my radar (other than Division 2 team SFU based around here) but I know it's a big part of an ideal US database, maybe by dropping the USL2 completely (doesn't make a lot of sense to have both IMO). Can think about this some more

Sounds good!

I think it's a fun idea to add the college competitions because it's a bit of an oversight in the US football landscape for them to be missing since almost all American players come through the college system in some form.

 In adding the teams I've already noticed there's hundreds of college Stadiums and current college coaches in the current game database so maybe SI wanted to add the NCAA to the Database at one stage but ran into licensing issues.

To get the college teams in the existing structure within FM my idea was to put it as a division 5 tier just beneath the USL2 and that way the players from the college teams can transfer or maybe go on loan to USL2 teams like in real life.

Agreed, sucks they don't have the NCAA rights, you can even see when some younger players in the DB move from an MLS academy to a college in real life, they just remove them from the DB (or at least from the version we can see). They have that weird “US college system” extinct club for history entries but it's not applied consistently,

USL2 and NCAA have so much player (and even coach) overlap, it would be hard to replicate that properly, which is why I always see it as one or the other. Plus with USL2 already set up as part of the MLS draft, and some of the USL2 divisions (but not all) are hard-coded to produce newgens for that draft, NCAA would fit nicely over top of it. But we might be able to get creative and think of a way to have both

A few years back, I was working with UncleSam and Aljarov to try and put together a US College database that worked. Considering that at the time, I was a US National grade referee and NCAA referee, it was something that I would've liked to see happen. Then again, I am trying to re-add some individuals into the database as non-players because they are still coaches with some USL1 clubs (Richmond in particular as I used to be on staff before Rob Ukrop fully took over).

Not to mention, the college game is even MORE important for women's soccer, so it would be great there too.

If MLS does change it's schedule then NCAA would work even better, right now I guess you'd have the fall season crown the champion like IRL and then the spring season would have a series of exhibitions? Ideally the game would then see summer as the off-season (and loan guys to USL2 teams, but I haven't thought of a way to make that happen)

I'd love to see my local Fort Wayne FC expanded on. They're promoting from the USL2 to the USL1 starting in 2026 and they're building a new stadium, but in-game they're one of the teams with generic no-face players with a generic logo.

https://www.fortwaynefc.com/professional-team/

https://www.fortwaynefc.com/roster/type/2025-roster/

Thank you for all your hard work in setting all these U.S. teams! 🙂

If you would be open to it, maybe you could help with some advice when adding college teams.

I have a large dataset of nearly 2000 colleges across different conferences and divisions that I've been gathering information to fill out all the details relevant to the men's soccer programs for all the schools.

I'm happy enough with the data I have for now to get all the teams created. eventually I'll work on adding players and staff from school roster pages/transfermarkt but for the moment I'm working on 2d kits for D1 Schools.

I haven't bought fm26 yet so I don't know the ID numbers to assign to graphics but once I buy it I'll work on matching things up with graphics so it looks nice.

An Idea to get around the hardcoding regen issue of USL2 could be to rename the USL2 divisions so they become the NCAA conferences and then have USL2 as newly created leagues.

The fix to draft players in the MLS from newly created leagues is actually quite simple in the editor because in the draft settings you can add and remove leagues that the draft selection pulls from.

I think a big thing missing that you don't get from having college teams in the database just working in the background at the very least, is a reliable source of regen talent in the US from teams with good facilities.

Since the MLS only pulls draft picks from USL2 teams they are almost always unusable because the facilities of USL2 teams are probably worse than National league in England. In contrast to the colleges in real life that have facilities comparable to very high standard teams that would likely produce a lot more decent regens in your save.

Most of the time the draft is completely useless in FM and draft picks only good for a bargaining chip in trades.

Are you interested in helping me make kits?

Yes I would be willing to help!

Yeah good point, I remember some FM players used to edit the draft class with FMRTE every year to make it worthwhile, but it's obviously better just having them come out already polished via good facilities and coaching.

Currently some of the MLS Academies have decent setups, but at a certain point they're then distributed to USL2 teams (seemingly randomly), and then they get 14 to 18 or so senior games and part-time or amateur training in poor facilities