FM 2022 Training Overhaul

Lore & Background

In the world of Football Manager, the training ground is where the quiet, invisible work happens. While the press and fans fixate on the ninety minutes under floodlights, the manager who truly understands the game knows that a striker's composure at twenty-three is shaped by the thousands of small repetitions logged on a muddy pitch in January. FM22 leaned into that philosophy. The training system was reworked so that the manager's choices in the training menu carry more visible, longer-term weight on individual player trajectories, making the development of a raw eighteen-year-old into a first-team regular feel like a genuine campaign rather than a passive wait.

The community response was immediate and passionate. Forums and Reddit threads filled with managers comparing training splits, debating whether to push a young midfielder's tactical awareness or his physical attributes first, and sharing spreadsheets that tracked weekly training load against injury risk. The overhaul gave rise to a new genre of community content: 'training rotation' guides, 'development path' walkthroughs, and long-form save videos where the narrator spends as much time in the training menu as in the tactics board. It reinforced a core identity of the franchise—that the most satisfying victories are the ones you engineered over months of small, deliberate choices rather than a single brilliant transfer window.

What made the FM22 iteration resonate was its balance. Earlier entries had training as either too granular to manage for a full squad or too abstract to feel impactful. FM22 struck a middle ground: enough agency to make the manager feel responsible for every point of growth, but not so fiddly that it became a chore. That balance became the new baseline players expected, and subsequent titles were measured against it.

In Their Own Story

The rain had been falling since six, a fine November drizzle that turned the training pitch at the academy into a slick, green mirror. Marcus stood at the touchline in his waterproof jacket, clipboard tucked under one arm, watching the U-18s run their passing drills in the grey half-light. He'd pulled the training schedule three times that morning. The left-back—seventeen, electric, but a liability in the air—needed another week of technical focus before he could handle the physical load. The centre-midfielder was two points off the composure he'd need for the cup final in March, and Marcus could feel the temptation to push him harder, to steal a session from the group and put him through individual reps. But the physio's report on his tablet said the kid's hamstring was already whispering warnings. Marcus exhaled, made his call, and typed the adjustment into the system. No one would ever see this moment. No highlight reel, no post-match interview. Just a quiet decision on a wet Tuesday that might, six months from now, be the difference between a player who peaks at twenty and one who's still climbing at twenty-six. He walked back toward the dugout, the rain beading on his jacket, and for a moment the whole season felt like it fit inside that single, unglamorous choice.

Reader's Guide

The FM22 training overhaul restructured how managers interact with player development on a weekly basis. Rather than setting a broad squad focus and walking away, the system gave more granular control over individual and group training assignments, with clearer feedback on how those choices translate into attribute growth over the course of a season. The practical effect was that training became a recurring decision point in every save, not a one-time setup.

Why it mattered: for players running long saves—five, ten, twenty seasons—the ability to steer a young player's development path through targeted training made the difference between a squad that stagnates and one that compounds. A midfielder who gets two seasons of tactical-focus training at seventeen looks fundamentally different at nineteen than one who was left on a generic squad plan. The meta shifted toward 'development rotations,' where managers cycled players through different focus areas to build well-rounded profiles.

The lasting impact is cultural as much as mechanical. FM22 cemented the idea that the training menu is a core part of the game's identity, not an afterthought. Community content, YouTube walkthroughs, and forum strategy threads now routinely treat training planning with the same seriousness as tactics or transfers. Even players who don't run the most granular setups report feeling more invested in their young players' arcs because the system makes their input visible. It turned the training ground into a place where the manager's hand is felt, week after week, long after the transfer window has closed.

Did You Know?

• The training system in Football Manager titles has existed in some form since the very early Championship Manager days, but FM22 is widely cited by the community as the version where it became a true pillar of day-to-day
• A common community strategy that gained popularity around FM22 was the 'development rotation,' where a young player's training focus is deliberately cycled between technical, tactical, and physical sessions over a season
• The overhaul sparked a wave of community-created spreadsheets and tracker tools that logged weekly training assignments against injury risk and attribute growth, turning the training menu into a data-driven discipline fo
• Because the changes made individual training choices more visible and consequential, FM22-era saves are often discussed in community threads as 'development saves,' where the primary goal is watching a specific young pla