FMBackroom reads your save and gives you additional tools to add to the experience: every season's stats and every season's attribute panel kept across the rollover that wipes them, scouting by game performance ability rather than your scouts stars, attribute projection for future growth, generated newgen faces, a squad planner that stays planned, and the fun stuff — takeovers and youth intakes you can shape. Free to start, from £2.99 a month for the rest.
What it is
FMBackroom is built around six pages that read and, where you ask, rewrite your save — with custom consolidated scores, and stats and attribute history that outlive the season rollover, threaded through all of them. And one feature that is not a page at all: generated faces, drawn for every newgen and aged with him - unique and realistic.
Every player in your save on one grid, split into player and ratings columns, with Effective CA, positional familiarity and development score sortable like any other column. Every tier searches every player in the save; Backroom adds value rank - a unique score that rates thier match performance against their value.
Every field FM records for a season, kept across the rollover that destroys them, so year ten still holds year one. Free keeps the current season as the game does - Backroom keeps every season of the save.
Now, next and targets on one pitch, every position holding the player in it today, potential additions and the one you are grooming for the future - with attribute projection - for your whole squad.
Pick the challenge you are running — Glory Hunter, Pentagon, your own — and watch each trophy light gold once it is won.
Name the club, pick the kind of owner, and the companion writes the takeover into your save. The board you have always dreamed of, organically added into the world the next time you play. One per career on Free.
The sixteen profiles FM rolled in your initial intake, readable before the game reveals their full attributes, then reshaped — coach, re-roll, build — until they walk through the door in March. One intake per career on Free, every intake on Backroom.
A realistic portrait for every newgen, drawn from his nationality, age and build and written into the game by the companion. It keeps aging with him, season by season.
What runs through it
Effective CA restates every player's match-engine output on the current-ability scale, calibrated position by position and fitted to what players actually produce in game. It already carries positional familiarity, and a signed vs CA chip shows whose attribute profile is worth more than his number says. Add the development score, scored from personality, and you can narrow a save to the players the model expects to produce most in the match engine, in a couple of clicks.
Football Manager throws a season's detailed numbers away at the end of season rollover. The companion keeps them, so every season a player has played is still on his page in year ten, and you can scout the moneyball way — on who performs season after season, in the stats you value, rather than on who is having a good spring. Free keeps the current season as the game does. Backroom keeps the lot.
Football Manager shows you what a player is today and not much about what he was. The companion snapshots every player's attribute panel each season, so you can step back through them on the player page and watch a sixteen-year-old's grid become a first-team regular's — or catch the decline a season before the game admits it.
Attribute projection shows every attribute, and everything computed from one, as it would read at their expected full potential: the position scores, Effective CA and the percentiles, ranked against today's players. Free projects your own squad, so the planner's next picks are real. Backroom projects every player in the save, so you scout the future with more certainty.
FM's own version takes a player's highest attributes and hands you a list of everyone who is good with those attributes. Ours compares attribute shape — the same strengths and weaknesses for a player's type and level — so the list is players who play like him, with a Why column that says what matched. One click from any player page.
A landscape pitch where every position holds the players in it now, potential targets and the players you are grooming for it next, so the one-year plan, the five-year plan and the teamsheet are one view. I love the FM squad planner, but it keeps undoing my hard-earned planning, and it is very star-rating-centric. This one compares on the columns you choose and never forgets.
Every newgen gets a portrait drawn from his nationality, age and build and it keeps aging with him, so the sixteen-year-old from your first intake does not still look sixteen when he retires. Those five faces are real output: one newgen at sixteen, then the same face moved to each age band, and they are unique accross similar build newgens. Included in Backroom only.
Visualise your progress in your Glory Hunter or Pentagon challenge — add the competitions your save is actually about and watch the cabinet fill.
Instigate a tycoon takeover of a club of your choosing, or reshape the youth intake that walks through the door on youth intake day. You choose on the site; the companion writes it into the save while the game is closed. Every career on Free gets one takeover and one intake; Backroom has no limit.
How it works
The website never sees a save file. The companion app reads it on your machine, decodes the players, clubs and competitions in it and sends only that layer to your account, where every score is calculated. Read once per save, then re-read whenever you want the numbers caught up.
No card. One career at a time on Free, up to three on Backroom.
A small Windows app that sits in the tray. Pick your database version, then your save — no exporting from inside FM, no copy and paste.
A Mac companion app is in development
Effective CA, familiarity, development are columns you can sort on like any other. With attribute projection you can search on what they are likely to become as if their attributes are that now.
Search, plan and read in the browser alongside the game, or on the train, or at work (We don't officially advise this though!). Anything you write — a takeover, an intake — the companion applies to the save for next time you load it.
Pricing
Two tiers and an annual pass, no trial clock. Everything you need to search a save, shortlist and plan a squad is free and stays free, and every career gets a taste of the pages that change the game. The features that go deeper (and require storage) — every season of stats, every season of attribute history, newgen faces, and as many takeovers and intakes as you like — sit behind a subscription, because they take real work to keep alive when Football Manager updates.
£0forever
One career. The scouting and planning half of the site and a taste of the half that changes the save, with no card and no expiry.
Same account, same companion. Upgrade later if you want the rest.
£2.99per month
Everything above for every player in up to three careers, no limit on changing the save, and a face for every newgen.
Cancel whenever you like. £19.99 a year on the Annual Pass, five months free. Your saves get priority in the build queue over the Free tier.
| Feature | Free | Backroom |
|---|---|---|
| Careers (save files loaded) | 1 | 3 |
| Player search over every attribute | All players | All players |
| Effective CA, positional familiarity, development score | ✔ | ✔ |
| Value rank | — | ✔ |
| Shortlists | ✔ | ✔ |
| Attribute projection | Your squad | All players |
| Find similar players | — | ✔ |
| Player attribute history snapshots | — | ✔ |
| Squad planner, now and next | ✔ | ✔ |
| Competition tracker | ✔ | ✔ |
| Detailed statistics | This season | Every season |
| Youth intake | Preview, 1 edit per career | Preview and edit every intake |
| Club takeover | 1 per career | Unlimited |
| Face generation and face aging | — | Every newgen |
| Save build queue | Standard | Priority |
| Annual Pass, five months free | — | £19.99 / yr |
FAQ
What it needs, what it costs, what it can and cannot do to your save, and where it sits next to the tools you already use.
A Football Manager 26/27 assistant in two parts: a website where you scout, plan and read your save, and a small Windows companion app that reads the save on your machine and keeps the site up to date. Six pages: player search, detailed stats, squad planner, competition tracker, youth intake and takeover, with attribute projection, similar players, attribute history and generated faces threaded through them.
No. The companion reads the save file from disk, and the pages that write — takeover and youth intake — are applied by the companion too, so you see the result the next time you load the save.
A career is one save file the companion has read into your account. Free holds one at a time and Backroom holds up to three; delete one from Change save on the site to make room. Reading the same save again after you have played on updates the career you already have rather than making a new one.
The website works in any modern browser. The companion app, which reads the save, is currently Windows only and is built and tested on Windows 10 and 11 against the Steam release of Football Manager 26/27. Other storefronts are not tested. A Mac version of the companion is in development.
The companion builds a database from Football Manager's shipped data, applies your save on top, and sends only the decoded in-save layer to your account, where every score is calculated. That takes roughly two minutes once per save. Later reads send only what has changed since the last one.
The free tier - yes, and it stays free. You will have one career at a time with player search, shortlists, the squad planner, the competition tracker, the current season's detailed stats and the youth intake preview, plus one takeover and one edited youth intake in every career so you can see what the story pages do. Backroom is £2.99 a month or £19.99 a year; the comparison table has the full split.
Indeed, and similar to the editor or other paid additions/mods it's up to you if you value the additional functionality. For us, there are so many ways to play the game, and thats why we love it. People have different time constaints on how they play, and different preferences. So each of the different features we offer can aid with that or introduce new functionality to add the experience we've all played and loved so many times. We offer the free version to support fans that dont want to pay more than the game itself with features that are less of a cost in terms of cloud infrastructure, and the paid tier supports the parts that require more storage, processing or have proprietary value.
Pay for twelve months of Backroom up front for £19.99, which is five months free against paying monthly. It renews once a year, and you can switch renewal off at any time from your account.
Your account drops back to the Free tier at the end of the period you have paid for. You keep your account, one career and everything the Free tier includes, and you can subscribe again whenever you like. If you've got 3 stored you will need to delete 2 before the end of that time.
The reading pages never write anything to your save. Takeover and youth intake do write, and carry the ordinary risk of any editing tool, which is why the companion automatically takes a backup save before it starts.
There is nothing to be banned from. FMBackroom is for single player saves only and does not touch online or network games. It does not interact with any Football Manager account, storefront or leaderboard.
Most pages will likely be fine depending on the content of the update, but some features will require updates and maintenance — probably the companion app more than the website.
Your save file and Football Manager's own data files never leave your machine. The companion decodes the players, clubs and competitions in your save and sends that decoded layer to your account, because that is what the website shows you and what the scores are calculated from. It is yours, and it is not shared with anyone else.
Match-engine output restated on the current-ability scale, calibrated position by position and fitted to what players actually produce across ten-season careers rather than to the star ratings. It replaces the old match engine score, it already carries positional familiarity, and it comes with a signed vs CA chip so you can see whose attribute profile is worth more than his number says.
Genie Scout and FMRTE are scouting and editing tools, and they are good at it. There is some overlap with FMBackroom in searching for players, but it exists separately with different features — so both can work together!
Largely the features are meant to add to the FM experience, or improve certain features that we feel have more potential.
Football Manager is a single player game, so you decide how to play it. You have likely played it a million times, so anything new added to the mix breathes new life into an already brilliant experience. Use or don't use whatever features you like! I've played FM through many different phases of my life - and some of them require a drastic change to the way you play to be able to enjoy it and it not take over your life, so more options to enjoy the game in each of those phases is worth it to me!
We have developed and produced a model that can generate realistic faces in milliseconds based on basic appearance information that FM players have available. Whilst the newgen faces have improved recently, they still can't quite shake that '3D rendered' look! In a large save, aging and not having all the players start to look similar can break immersion, and we believe this model solves this problem.
No. It is an unofficial community tool with no connection to Sports Interactive or SEGA. As a software engineer and a football fan I greatly respect, admire and appreciate SI and their staff — it is not easy to build successful, engaging software for a fanbase as passionate, and at times as demanding, as us FM stalwarts, so when I mention improving on certain features I mean no slight to the game or the people at SI.
From the Help link inside the site, or by email to backroomfm@pendragondevelopment.com. Bug reports from Free members are just as welcome as ones from subscribers — they make the tool better for everyone.
The Free tier is one career with the whole scouting and planning half of the site, no card and no trial clock. Create an account, install the companion, read a save, and see whether it earns a place next to the game.
