Is this the Best AI Tool for Football Manager?

Someone built the perfect tool for Football Manager because the game was ruining his sleep

Football Manager has a habit of getting under your skin. One minute you’re cruising along with a tactic that looks unstoppable. The next thing you know, you’re five matches without a win, conceding goals on the counter, and staring at your reflection in the mirror thinking how can I be so bad at this game after playing for 10 years. If you’ve played the game long enough, you’ll know the feeling. Hours disappear while you try to figure out what went wrong. Is the defensive line too high? Are the roles clashing?

One frustrated, sleep-deprived player decided to try something different. Instead of spending another late night tweaking instructions and testing ideas, they built an AI assistant coach designed to analyse poor runs of form and suggest tactical fixes.

What is the tool? 

The tool is called FM Assistant Coach, and the idea is simple. You enter a short description of what’s going wrong in your save. That might be something like:

• Five matches without a win
• Conceding goals on the counter
• Struggling to create chances
• Losing control of midfield

From there, the AI analyses the issue and produces a tactical breakdown of what might be happening. Instead of just spitting out generic advice, the tool tries to structure the feedback in a way that mirrors how a real coaching staff might analyse a problem.

It produces four key outputs:

• The likely tactical cause
• A primary tactical adjustment
• Supporting adjustments to try
• Things you probably shouldn’t change yet

The goal is to identify the most likely structural issue and suggest a small change that could stabilise things. In theory, that stops players from going down the classic Football Manager rabbit hole of changing six things at once and accidentally breaking their entire system.

How the tool works

The process is deliberately straightforward. First, you describe the situation you’re dealing with, essentially summarising the bad run you’re on. The AI then attempts to identify the main tactical problem behind it. In the example shown by the creator of the tool, the system diagnosed the issue as defensive organisation problems. From there it suggests a clear starting point. In this case, the primary adjustment was:

Simplify defensive roles.

The reasoning was that too many aggressive or roaming duties can break a team’s defensive structure, leaving gaps when possession is lost. Simplifying a couple of roles could stabilise positioning and improve defensive shape.

Alongside that, the AI provides a secondary adjustment to try if the first one doesn’t solve the problem. In the example provided, it recommended reducing the space between the defensive and midfield lines to create a more compact structure.

Crucially, each suggestion also points to where in the Football Manager tactics screen the change would be made, which helps newer players understand exactly what the advice refers to.

Could AI actually help with Football Manager?

Football Manager is an incredibly complex simulation. Tactics are about how roles, instructions, mentality and player attributes interact with each other rather than just the simple formations that they might appear on the surface.  That complexity is what makes the game brilliant, but it also makes troubleshooting difficult. Often when a tactic stops working, the problem isn’t obvious. It might be a role combination that leaves space in transition. It might be pressing behaviour that’s dragging players out of position. It might even be something as simple as squad fatigue affecting how your system functions.

Tools like this attempt to act as a second set of eyes, pointing out structural issues you might have missed. Whether AI can genuinely solve those problems is another question entirely. Football Manager players are famously sceptical when it comes to tactical advice, especially from something that hasn’t just watched 90 minutes of their match engine chaos.

Still, the idea is interesting. If it stops at least a few managers from spending another sleepless night desperately tweaking their tactic, it might already be doing its job.

If you want to try it

The creator has made the tool freely available online. You can test it yourself here:

https://fmassistantcoach.bubbleapps.io/version-test/home_page

There’s no login required, just enter your recent run of form and see what the assistant coach suggests. Whether it turns out to be genuinely useful or just another fun Football Manager experiment remains to be seen. But if you’ve ever found yourself awake at 2am wondering why your once-perfect tactic has suddenly collapsed… you might be tempted to give it a go.

 

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