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It's rare to notice a new Football Manager's tweaks as quickly as I did with FM24. It's March 2025, two-and-a-half seasons into my traditional Manchester United rescue job, and deep into a four-way title race between us, City, Chelsea, and Liverpool. First game of my freshly-imported save from FM23 - and so first game in FM24 - and it's City away. A potential early title decider at the Temple of Doom. In a charitably patient mood I have a quick tinker with my freshly reset set pieces - least I could do, given they've reworked the system, I tell myself graciously - but faced with several pages of UI within UI, executive dysfunction wins out and I give up for now to just get to the game. How much difference could it make in one match?
Four goals difference is how much, reader. City score three in 35 minutes followed by a fourth in the second half, every single one from a set piece (header from free kick, header from corner, penalty, header from another free kick) and despite a roughly similar xG of 2.93 to 2.34, I lose four-nil.
It's important to note that what happened next was done purely for the sake of science. I reloaded the save - scientifically - and then worked through every single set piece, meticulously, and then delivered a supreme 0-0 hammering, City scraping together an xG of 1.19 from six corners and twelve free kicks, to our 2.56 (missed penalty: Bruno Fernandes. I don't want to talk about it.) Which of those two branching timelines continued on as my main save will remain confidential, but put it this way: setting up set-pieces in FM24 takes just as long as it did in FM23, and I have no inclination to do it more than once.