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FM Match Lab have gone beyond working on the match engine to try and bring improvement to training in FM24 and what they’ve discovered along the way is really surprising.
According to FM Match Lab training is completely broken in FM24 by default because the game doesn’t properly account for days of the week or home and away matches.
They’ve written a dev blog explaining this but you might find it a little too technical so i’m going to do my best to simplify it, you can read the original version here.
Each weekly schedule has been designed around home matches without taking into consideration travel time for away matches. That means if you have a schedule where you’re hoping to train endurance and quickness equally and you have endurance on Thursday afternoon and quickness on Friday afternoon and, for this simple example, we assume every match is Saturday with every other game being away, over 40 weeks you'll have done endurance 40 times and quickness 20 times rather than 40 times each as you might expect when first setting up the schedule. This then leads to an unintentional imbalance in your players.
This is exasperated when you add in mid week fixtures as well, through which you’ll regularly miss activities and there’s no way to force the game to automatically balance itself out.
Essentially, if you spent hours fine tuning and balancing your training schedule, it’s all pointless, because the fixtures your team plays will unbalance it and it’s impossible to resolve.
The solution FM Match Lab have come up with is to offer variations of each schedule. These variations cover every possibility such as “Two games Monday and Saturday” or “Two games on Thursday and Sunday”.
Unfortunately that means alot more manual work for you, as each week you need to look ahead and check which variation to use and manually chose it as shown in this screenshot.
Practical Example
For example if you want to train Wing Play you would have to choose:
Week One
Tuesday: Champions League
Saturday: Premier League
Choose “Wing Play Variant 7”
Week Two
Wednesday: Champions League
Sunday: Premier League
Choose “Wing Play Variant 11”
Week Three
Tuesday: Champions League
Friday: Premier League
Choose “Wing Play Variant 6”
The full list of variants is available below.
FM Match Lab claim that AI should pick the correct variation more often than not, although i’ve no idea how to verify this myself.
How to install the Training Mod
To install simply download the file from here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/ldcx5l3nmurldnr/training.fmf/file
Then copy “training.fmf” into the following location:
Steam: Program files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Football Manager 2024/data Epic Games: Program files/Epic Games/FootballManager24/data/game_simulation/training.fmf
Mac: your username/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Football Manager 24/data/game_simulation/training.fmf
Gamepass: wherever-you-install-your-gamepass-games/Football Manager 2024/content/data/game_simulation/training.fmf
Linux: Home > .local > share > steam > steamapps > common > fm24 > data > game_simulation > training.fmf
The list of variants
1 – All pre-season schedules, with one game per week, have 3″Variant(s)”:
- “Variant” 1, game on a Friday
- “Variant” 2, game on a Saturday
- “Variant” 3, game on a Sunday
2 – All pre-season schedules, with two games per week, have 4 “Variant(s)”:
- “Variant” 1, game on a Tuesday and Saturday
- “Variant” 2, game on a Wednesday and Saturday
- “Variant” 3, game on a Tuesday and Sunday
- “Variant” 4, game on a Wednesday and Sunday
3 – All Tactical Styles schedules, with one game per week, have 3 “Variant(s)”
- “Variant” 1, game on a Friday
- “Variant” 2, game on a Saturday
- “Variant” 3, game on a Sunday
4 – All Tactical Styles, Philosophy and Scenario schedules, with two games per week, have 12 “Variant(s)”
- “Variant” 1, game on a Monday and Thursday
- “Variant” 2, game on a Monday and Friday
- “Variant” 3, game on a Monday and Saturday
- “Variant” 4, game on a Monday and Sunday
- “Variant” 5, match on a Tuesday and Thursday
- “Variant” 6, match on a Tuesday and Friday
- “Variant” 7, match on a Tuesday and Saturday
- “Variant” 8, match on a Tuesday and Sunday
- “Variant” 9, match on a Wednesday and Saturday
- “Variant” 10, match on a Thursday and Saturday
- “Variant” 11, match on a Wednesday and Sunday
- “Variant” 12, match on a Thursday and Sunday
5 – All Semi-pro templates have different “Variant(s)” which are specifically adapted to their unique situation
6 – All youth templates have a more streamlined “Variant” system.
- Date Created
- 16 Oct 2025 08:10:15
- Date Updated
- 16 Oct 2025 08:10:15
- Last Comment
- 20 Oct 2025 00:56:34
Comments
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Sak894
This is not what I thought it was. I generally do tinker and adjust my training schedules. The video on YouTube was a little misleading IMO about the ‘bugged’ training. Of course, the schedule changes, and you need to adjust your training in accordance with it. FM not being smart enough to correctly adjust your custom training schedule when the game schedule changes is not really a bug, but rather a limitation. It's misleading to call it a bug.
Anyway, I was an idiot and did not back up the original training.fmf file. I would like to restore the original file. Does anyone have any idea how to do that other than reinstalling or repairing the game files?
cephas.88
What do you mean by “not what I thought it was.”?
It is not about FM being smart enough. The system itself is very badly designed, very poorly coded and it doesn’t work as intended. The effects are all over the place and the system simply is deficient and code deficient.
This patch to the training mod does what SI should have done. To code properly the realities of today’s football and not sticking to an old approach where there’s only games on Saturday and Tuesday and only games at home. The worst part is that how this affects AI and how the AI uses training and the long term effects. This mod corrects that despite the limitations.
Footygamer
@Sak894 I think you're missing the part about AI, you can manually adjust your training to account for matches, but the AI won't. They claim that this mod fixes that although I haven't been able to verify this myself.
If you're using Steam you can get reset the files this way: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/0C48-FCBD-DA71-93EB