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Realism is hard to achieve in EA FC 24 Career Mode. You’ll see Athletic Bilbao ditching their Basque policy on day one because they want to sign Kalvin Phillips. You’ll see real Madrid playing Joselu over Mbappe and Haaland. And you might even see Onana making a save.
Here, I will share some tips that I found that can actually make your experience a lot more realistic from transfers to squad planning. And hopefully, they’ll also make the game a lot more fun for you.
1. Sign Players
Let’s start wiih one of the most important things in FC 24 – signing players.
Unless you’re doing a Career Mode ‘Youth Academy Only Challenge’, the chances are one of the first things you’ll do in every single save is signing a player by using your FC 24 Coins.
The whole negotiation system is actually pretty good, and it is fairly challenging to get a player significantly under their value. But it is still quite rare that a manager will go and negotiate a deal all by themselves.
Instead, for the majority of transfers, I think it makes a bit more sense to just delegate this, probably to the director of football. If you want to keep transfers even more realistic when signing your players, make sure you fully scouted every single person and buy FC 24 coins in advance. This will reveal their overall rating.
So, if it looks like a player is either too good for the league or maybe overpowered in a certain way, you’d be able to dodge signing them without having to go back, reload a save, and lose all the progress that you’ve just made.
2. Delegate The Signings
Going back to delegating the signings, this is actually really easy to do.
Instead of pressing ‘Negotiate’ or ‘Delegate’, you can still give the values for the transfer values and the wage that you want to pay. But delegating helps with realism in a couple of different ways.
The first is the amount of time that it will take to sign your player. With a normal transfer, you can begin to sign a player on the day of the match. And if you finish signing them, they’ll instantly be in the squad and ready to play the same day.
Delegate works a little differently. The director of football will take a few days to get back to you for both the transfer fee and the wage. And at this point, you can accept and reject and then they’ll instantly join the team at that point instead.
The second way that delegating is way better than negotiating is that there’s a real chance the transfer talks can break down. This means that you’ll have to move on to your second or third choice in that position.
It makes scouting way more important. You have to have a short list of options. And it also makes the squad planning part of Career Mode way more hardcore.
3. Plan Your Squad
Speaking of squad planning, it’s so tempting just to keep the same 25 players as you progress throughout your save.
You’ll know how they play. You’ll be developing in the way that you like them. Also, you’ll be saving your EA FC 24 Coins. But realistically though, only about 60% of your team will actually stay each time you get promoted.
If you stay in the same league, it would probably be about 20% of your club will still leave that summer. From a squad of 25 players, that’s about 10 new signings every time you get promoted. Maybe two or three players would grow with you all the way up the leagues. But anything above, that is actually pretty unlikely.
When you’re on day 1 of your Career Mode save, why not plan the FC 24 Players that you’d like to take on this journey? If you want to look at some real-life examples of players that made this journey, then check out Lewis Dunk, Leighton Baines and so on. They all played for the clubs in either League 1 or League 2 and also in the Premier League.
All these players were young players with high mental stats. So in FIFA, that would be composure, aggression, and positioning. When I see these attributes in FIFA on a Defender, I think this means they’re a young professional player off the pitch. A player like this is definitely a future captain and someone you can build your entire team or even just the defense around.
4. Consider How Many Players You Can Keep
While you’re rebuilding the squad after each promotion, also make sure to definitely consider how many FC 24 Players you can keep.
Don’t forget that if you rebuild your squad with 16 to 20 years old. They will probably be too fast for your club, so do throw in some players that are in their mid 20s as well (maybe even a couple of players who are over 30 just to have a little of experience in the squad).
Personally, some of my most memorable signings in Career Mode of all time have been EFL veterans who I could give one less trophy or one less promotion to before they retired.
But if you’re not actually interested in having a front three of Jordan Rhodes, Ross McCormack, and Lewis Grabban, you’re probably more interested in using the Youth Academy. I’ve kept this for towards the end because to know how to use it, you really need to know how to look at your squad and plan out how you want your team to grow.
5. Keep An Eye Out For Some Youth-Focused Clubs
Certain clubs just make more sense when it comes to youth-focused Road to Glories.
Columbus Crew is a big example. This club has got tons of future Premier League players who come through their academy while they were in League 2 thanks to the amount of FIFA 24 Coins investment and some of their dependence really on bringing through some youth players to keep them alive.
Thankfully, this is one area that the youth objectives do actually make some sense in. Any team that has a critical objective really should be investing most of their budgets into youth players.
6. Look At The Location Of Your Club
If you want to keep things super realistic, also have a look at the location of the club that you’re managing.
Going back to Crew, their location in the northwest of England is near Liverpool, Manchester, and Stoke, which gives them access to millions of young players.
If you put Crew somewhere down south in Cornwall or Kent, they would have nowhere near as many players to choose from and nowhere near the success even if they invested the exact same amount of EA FC 24 Coins. This means before you start your save, have a look on a map, and see if there’s any big cities nearby to your club.
If there’s a bunch of really big cities, then definitely give yourself slightly better Youth Academy staff than you normally would. But if you’re in the middle of nowhere, maybe in a desert or just surrounded by forests and trees, then give yourself a little worse.
7. Improve Your Academy Staff
If the squad starts off with a bunch of very young players, you can also boost the level of the academy staff slightly more.
It’s usually a good hint that the team is either trying to develop players or they’re very poor and probably won’t be signing any first choice players, anyway.
This information can be combined and work out what kind of strategy your team would realistically go for.
8. Watch Your Squad’s Overall Ratings
The last big thing you can do to increase realism is to watch your squad’s overall ratings.
Try not to grow too quickly when you’re doing a Road to Glory or even staying in the same league. A good limit is to usually sign players who are only two overall higher than your best players. If you check who your best players are at the start of every single transfer window, this won’t actually increase the value too fast and you’ll progress quite slowly and in a more fun way.
I think the best way to manage overalls is to stop signing players who are both better and younger than your existing best players. If you want to be realistic and your best player is a 21-year-old with 70 overall, don’t then go and spend a bunch of EA Sports FC 24 Coins on a 17-year-old who’s 69 overall. They’ll outgrow the older player way too quickly and this can make your squad a little unbalanced.
Of course, don’t be afraid to sell players that were too good as well. It can be a great way to raise cash and improve the rest of your squad. In my opinion, the game is more fun when you have a squad of 80 rated players rather than 10 players who with 65 overall and then just a single one who’s a 98.
So, hopefully, if you follow some of these tips in EA FC 24, then you will actually have a slightly more realistic Career Mode save.
