Introduction
Custom Views are a valuable addition to your Football Manager experience.
This Megapack includes 41 fresh views you can import across a number of key screens in FM23 to give you instant access to much more information than is given to you by default. Once downloaded, each one takes just a few seconds to import. They have all been tested on the default FM23 skin, but will work on most custom skins too.
Want to see key performance statistics at a glance for players on your Squad screen? Hierarchy position and Social Group for your potential captains? What about significantly more detail in Staff Search helping you choose who is best to approach? Or the ability to see every outfield attribute all on one screen for results in a Player Search?
This pack contains these custom views and many others that I like to use to enrich my Football Manager 2023 experience. Hopefully you can get some value from them too.
How to download and install
Hit the big yellow download button above and unzip the contents into your FM23 ‘views’ folder beside the folders for games, graphics, editor data and tactics etc. By default on Windows, this is usually C:\Users\username\Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2023\views. On Mac it’s Users/username/Library/Application Support/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2023/views. If there is no ‘views’ folder in there currently, just create one and drop the unzipped contents folder ‘FM Stag – FM23 Views’ in it.
The folder names explain which area within FM the view should be imported into, for example Tactics. The filename will tell you specifically which screen the view should be used on. For example, Penalty Takers Selector.
Navigate to the appropriate page in FM23, click the box at the top left, select Custom and then Import View. Navigate to your views folder, select a view to import for the correct page, and it’s job done!
Key things to point out
Firstly, these Custom Views contain columns that I feel are most helpful to me while playing FM. If there is a certain column on a screen that you don’t like, simply right click and remove or replace it with another and Export the view with the same file-name to overwrite it as your own customised version.
Secondly, I play on a 32″ monitor in 3840×2160 resolution. BUT all of these views have also been checked by a very helpful tester (Dan Gear of Grass n Gear and View from the Touchline fame) who uses the more popular 1920×1080 resolution, and hasn’t encountered any problems of note.
Thirdly, right clicking on any column in any view and selecting “Auto Size All Columns” is your best friend. Creating Custom Views can be a balancing act with dimensions, so regularly right click and auto-size to make sure the views look as lovely on your screens as they do in your wildest dreams.
Lastly, the custom views have no impact on the actual contents of any of the columns. You might see the odd mathematical anomaly with a stats column or two. An example today is that some goalkeepers may currently show a strange result like -200% for Save Ratio % in the Goalkeeping views. Rest assured that any and all weird and wonderful statistical bugs have been appropriately logged with Sports Interactive and are being looked at by the right team.
I’ll go through some of the views below and explain my thinking behind them. Click on any of the screenshots for them to open up full size in another window to let you have a closer look. I won’t go through all of them, just the ones I want to highlight.
Thank you for downloading the Custom Views megapack and happy managing!
Squad Screen
Your Squad Screen in Football Manager is where you will probably spend most of your time. Analysing your own team, weighing up selection options, resting players who need it and many other activities.
Here we have six available views to import – Main, Main inc Stats, Youth Teams, Training, Selling Considerations and All Attributes.
The ‘Main’ squad view covers all of the main factors you may consider for player selection and general management of your team. Age, ability/potential, trained position/role/duty, condition, player status and more.
In the right hand side of the screen, there are handy sections separated by the dividers for mostly ‘per 90 minutes’ key striking, creating and defending statistics. For me, I find this really handy at a glance to, for example, compare my central midfielders on how many Open Play Key Passes per 90 they have made. Or which of my strikers has overperformed their Expected Goals the most. The statistics included aren’t hugely intensive, but I’ve captured everything on this screen that helps me with general FM play.
The ‘Youth Teams’ squad view is similar, but focuses more on key areas of interest for young players – release clauses, development progress and media descriptions among others. Stick that on your B, Reserve, U23 or U18s squad screens.
The ‘Main inc Stats’ view is the one I imagine most people who have clicked on this link are looking for. I love a deep dive into football analytics, and as such have built a dashboard view for your Squad Screen which covers almost every applicable performance metric you could care to analyse across general, attacking, creative and defensive statistics respectively.
This is like the Main view above, but if it watched Moneyball on a loop and played FM attributeless.
This stats view covers all of the shiny new per 90 statistics introduced in FM23 (Open Play Key Passes, Progressive Passes, Expected Assists and more) and many old favourites too. This is one of the few views in the pack where on a lower resolution you may need to scroll left and right to see everything, even after the trusty right click > Auto Size All Columns trick.
The last Squad view I want to highlight is ‘Selling Considerations.’ When we analyse our own players, there is a lot to consider. Despite the name, these considerations have other applications, like helping you make a more informed choice when deciding who’s contract to renew, for example.
As such, this screen covers age, ability and home-grown status (those pesky registration rules!) as well as value, contract expiry date and any sneaky release clauses you may wish to try and remove by renewing a player’s deal (or cash in on by selling them). This view will also cover a player’s ability and potential ability, along with their Determination, which is often an indicator of a player’s willingness to improve to reach that potential. Caveat – I’m not saying that these two are 100% correlated and that low Determination players won’t reach their potential and high Determination players will. It’s simply a factor I like to consider when judging a players development trajectory. Another consideration is if they have a recurring injury. If a player has a recurring muscle injury coupled with low Natural Fitness, this is sometimes a signifier that the player may spend more time on the treatment table than out there on the pitch. This view also shows the player’s development progress over time, personality and happiness levels. For me, bringing all of these factors together on a single view gives me a really useful dashboard when considering who is part of my long-term plans and who I should perhaps move on.
Scouting Screens
There are three sets of almost identical views in the pack, but (painfully) they had to be individually created for the Players In Range screen, the Scouted screen and the Shortlist screen within the Scouting area. The views between the three pages are more or less the same, apart from the lack of an Analysts view for your Shortlist, as unfortunately the appropriate fields don’t exist in there in order for me to build it!
There is a Main scouting view with key information, plus one which shows all Outfield Attributes together on a single screen so you can rank targets and survey their attribute spread at a glance. The others are Stats views for Defending, Creating, Finishing and Goalkeeping, and the aforementioned Analysts view.
The Defending, Creating, Finishing and Goalkeeping Stats views across Players in Range, Scouted and Shortlist follow roughly the same format. Key information about the player’s club, nationality, age, home-grown status, preferred foot and world reputation (sign those big-name targets!) accompanied by key performance metrics for those categories of play. Want to sort all of your potential midfield targets by Progressive Passes per 90, then review all of the strikers you have already scouted, sorted by their Non-penalty xG per 90? Now you can in a few clicks. Sorting potential goalkeeping targets by their Expected Goals prevented by 90 is another personal favourite.
Recruitment Analysts have been a part of FM for a couple of years now, but sometimes it’s hard to clearly see their value. This custom view, which is available in two locations, one on the Players In Range player search screen and one in the Scouted players screen (both within Scouting), seeks to bring to light the work they do. You could click to rank potential targets by their number of pros or positive performance observations noticed by your Analysts. Or rank them by Analyst Recommendation level (A-, B+ etc) and simply glance at the Notable Pros and Cons columns for some context without having to dive into detailed performance reports for everybody on the list. It’s entirely up to you if you use these insights and how!
Other Screens
There’s an optimised view to track the development of your players out on loan within the Development Centre. Also an updated Schedule view which brings together key information normally split across more than one of the default options. There are also screens which compare potential incoming staff in more depth, compare set piece taking prowess more effectively and more. Here are some screenshots of a few of those.
The final two views I want to highlight are ones which may not be immediately obvious where you import them to.
The first is the Tactics – Popup Player Selector custom view, which is loaded on your Tactics pitch after clicking the little down arrow to the right of a player’s role and duty. I think adding the Game Win Ratio % for each player is a nice consideration between players as it can help point to some of the intangible effects a player has on his team that are hard to quantify by other metrics; like their influence, personality and morale level.
The second is the Tactics – In-Match subs view. As the name suggests, during a game if you click to bring up your Tactics screen in the bottom left, this squad view which appears is also customisable, and that’s where this view is for. Auto Size All Columns is definitely your friend here as this screen loves a random column resize, especially if you open and close the tactics pitch on the left a lot.
Summary
So there you have it. A whistle-stop tour of some of the key views within the pack of 41 you can download and import straight away.
These views certainly make my life easier when navigating around all of the information Football Manager 2023 throws at you. Please let me know on Twitter if they help you too.
Thanks for reading (and downloading!).
FM Stag