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In Football Manager 2024, the manager creation screen gives you two major choices that shape your entire career:
- Your Coaching Badges
- Your Past Playing Experience
I tested multiple manager profiles with different combinations of badges and experience to see how they influence job opportunities, reputation, and coaching ability. Importantly, every club in the test setup was without a manager — this meant that every single club in the game was looking to hire a new manager ensuring a wide example of every level of club and that the results reflected your manager profile’s effect alone, not whether the position was actually vacant.
The findings were clear: these choices define your early-game path more than most players realize.
Coaching Badges: A Better Coach, but Not Always a Better Candidate
Coaching badges primarily increase your Current Ability (CA) — which determines how many points you get to distribute across your coaching attributes, like Tactical, Technical, and Working With Youngsters.
The higher the badge, the stronger your manager is on the training ground. A Continental Pro License will make your manager highly effective from day one, even if they’ve never played professionally.
Badges also give a small boost to your Home Reputation (HR). However, this boost is limited. Even with a top-level badge, your reputation caps out somewhere between the level of a Professional (National) and International (Continental) former player.
Importantly, badges do not increase your Current Reputation (CR) or World Reputation (WR) — both of which are key to landing high-profile jobs.
In short:
- Badges = More coaching points to spend on coaching attributes
- Slight boost to home reputation
- No boost to current or world reputation
- Without strong past experience, you’re likely to hit a ceiling on job quality
Past Playing Experience: Get More Attention, More Offers, More Respect
Your past playing experience heavily influences your reputation in the football world. The higher your level (e.g., International Footballer – Global), the more respected and well-known you are.
This translates directly to:
- More job offers
- More interviews
- Greater trust from players and staff
- Better chances with bigger clubs, especially abroad
Past experience also gives you a small boost to CA, but more importantly, it grants mental attribute points — which go toward Determination, Motivation, and Level of Discipline.
This makes you mentally stronger as a manager, even if you’re not the best coach yet.
In short:
- Past experience = More reputation and mental attribute points
- Makes you visible and respected
- Doesn’t significantly improve coaching ability unless combined with badges
Coaching Badges vs Past Playing Experience
Here’s the most important thing I learned from the experiment:
- Badges give you coaching ability.
- Experience gives you reputation.
- You need both to unlock the top jobs and succeed in them.
Some Results of the Experiment
Here’s a simplified overview of the results I saw when applying for jobs with different manager profiles:
- No Badge + Sunday League
Very few job offers. You’re invisible. A true “from the bottom” challenge.
- Continental Pro License + Sunday League
Technically strong, but clubs don’t rate you. Got interviews at mid-tier clubs from 1st tier leagues (Southampton, Montpellier, RB Leipzig, Villarreal)
- No Badge + International (Global)
Lots of interviews and attention — even from top leagues — but your poor coaching ability holds you back from higher reputation clubs.
- Continental Pro + International (Global)
The most powerful combo. You’ll receive offers from top-flight clubs across major leagues — but not from the elite tier like Manchester City, Real Madrid, or PSG right away. These clubs typically only recruit well-established, world-renowned high reputation managers or require long-term success and trophies (this will increase your reputation).
- Date Created
- 26 Mar 2025 16:23:34
- Date Updated
- 28 Mar 2025 19:53:06
- Last Comment
- 26 Mar 2025 16:23:34
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