FM24 – How to improve team cohesion in Football Manager 2024 explained

Wondering how to improve team cohesion in FM24? Team cohesion is one of those background mechanics that you might not notice at first, but in the long run it’s key to making sure your squad are working towards a common goal and winning games. That’s why we’re here to explain it all and how to improve it.

Have a read of our FM24 review to see what we’ve made of this year’s game. And if you’re wanting to start your save off strong, check out our FM24 best wonderkids list to see some of the best young talents to sign in the game. With that, let’s take a look at an overview of how to increase team cohesion in FM24.

What is team cohesion in FM24?

Team cohesion in FM basically determines player partnership and how well your team work with each other during matches. This sounds vague, but it can affect a huge number of things during matches, including how well they implement tactics, positioning in games, and player morale, and bad team cohesion can have a significant negative impact on your team.

Teams with a low team cohesion will play worse, make more mistakes, and be unable to reach their full potential, while teams with high potential play well together, making your team play with more teamwork, fluidity and understanding. Essentially, the higher your team cohesion, the better. You can view your team cohesion in the Dynamics menu on the left-hand side of the screen.

How to improve team cohesion in FM24

There are four major ways to improve team cohesion in FM24. These are:

• Training
• Team meetings
• Playing matches
• Keeping players

Training

In the training menu, you can schedule specific training sessions to have your players focus on different areas such as Attack, Defence, and Possession, with a menu showing the impact of each training session on various team attributes. The best time to schedule these sessions is preseason, but they are useful at any time too.

Adding certain training sessions that boost team cohesion to your training schedule is a must if you want to make sure you’re boosting team cohesion. Schedule sessions like Match Practice, Match Tactics, Team Bonding, and Community Outreach and you’ll quickly see increases to team cohesion. Make sure to schedule a match review after every game, too, as this is effectively free team cohesion.

Team meetings

A key aspect of team cohesion is how happy your players are. If you have a group of happy players, they will want to play games and play together, increasing team cohesion. Conversely, unhappy players will play worse, lowering team cohesion. Club atmosphere is important, and if you keep the dressing room happy, you keep them together.

A great way to ensure your player happiness is high is through team meetings, where you can encourage or praise your players to make them happier. Just be careful, as a bad team meeting can be catastrophic, making happiness even worse. We would recommend this as a last resort, like if you’re already on a bad losing streak. Good team talks can also have this effect over time.

Playing matches

The best way to increase your team cohesion is to play matches. Playing matches together increases tactical familiarity, as well as your players’ links with one-another. Over time, your team cohesion will naturally increase from playing matches, especially if you’re winning matches. Combined with good happiness and regular training sessions, playing matches will see your team cohesion quickly increase – just make sure not to change your tactics too often.

If you’re trying to get your team cohesion up in preseason, schedule as many friendlies as you can, and have match reviews after each one. As well as ensuring your players all have maximum match sharpness for the upcoming season, they’ll also massively increase team cohesion. Just watch their workload and make sure their stamina doesn’t drop too far.

Keeping players

This is less about increasing team cohesion, and more about preventing it from falling. The longer your players have played together, the higher their team cohesion will be. If you start selling your longest-serving players and bringing in new faces, team cohesion will plummet, and players may even be unhappy at this rapid change in team dynamics.

Check who your team leaders and most influential players are, what social groups there are, and keep your most senior players happy. By all means bring in new players and stick them in a mentoring group to help them bond, but don’t completely overhaul your team every season, or else you’ll have to start building that team cohesion from scratch every year.

That’s everything you need to know about how to increase team cohesion in FM24. Check out the FM24 best clubs to manage if you haven’t settled on a team yet. And if you’re wanting to sign some quality players for nothing, our FM24 best Free Agents guide is something that might interest you.