The time machine is a group of save games that you can download and start playing. You can start your game in any year up to 2020 which can be used for a number of different reasons. Some people would rather start there managerial career a couple of seasons in as they find the first year two boring in Football Manager, others may just want to download a random year in the future to check on the best wonderkids and how they have developed.

No matter how you want to use the time machine, I hope you enjoy the resource!

Football Manager 2012 Time Machine Download

2012 – Download Here

2013 – Download Here

2014 – Download Here

2015 – Download Here

2016 – Download Here

2017 – Download Here

2018 – Download Here

2019 – Download Here

2020 – Download Here

In each game, England, Spain and Italy are the loaded nations to keep the file sizes down, but remember the new feature added for FM12 allowing you to add/remove countries as you please!

How to Start Playing

1. Download the year of your choice

2. Place the .fm file in My Documents/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2012/Games

3. Load up Football Manager 2012

4. Click load games and then load up the save game

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask me in the comments below. Enjoy the game guys and don’t forget to check out your favourite players and how good they are 9 years in!

The Ultimate Football Manager Walkthrough Guide is the biggest and most comprehensive strategy manual for FM2012 containing 132 pages of in-depth hints, tips and advice.

What are Regens?

Regens or regenerated players are randomly created players in Football Manager that will start to appear in your save as you play. Regens are created to make sure there is no shortage of players when the real players retire throughout the years. Just like there are some world class real players (Messi, Ronaldo etc), regens are no different and there will be a lot of regens who will become superstars.

The Football Manager 2012 Regen Dates

These dates are the dates in which players from their respective countries will be created. Each country creates their regens on different days, but it is always the same day every year. Knowing these dates can really help you when scouting for wonderkids.

• 26.01(Jan) – Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Costa Rica, Cuba, Curaçao, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, St Kitts & Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent, Surinam, Trinidad & Tobago, Turks & Caicos Is.

• 23.02(Feb) – Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia & Herz., Cyprus, Estonia, FYR Macedonia, Fiji, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tahiti, Tonga, Vanuatu

• 03.03(Mar) – Mexico

• 08.03(Mar) – Australia, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, N. Ireland, Russia, Scotland, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Wales

• 13.03(Mar) – Austria, England

• 17.03(Mar) – Slovakia

• 18.03(Mar) – Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Indonesia, Italy, Poland, Portugal

• 19.03(Mar) – Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia

• 25.03(Mar) – Holland

• 28.03(Mar) – Serbia, Spain

• 02.04(Apr) – Argentina, India, South Africa

• 19.04(Apr) – Hong Kong, Uruguay

• 07.06(Jun) – Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Venezuela

• 19.08(Aug) – Sweden

• 27.08(Aug) – Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Chinese Taipei, Guam, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Macau, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, North Korea, Northern Mariana, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, U.A.E., Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen

• 02.09(Sep) – Malaysia

• 14.09(Sep) – South Korea

• 19.09(Sep) – Chile

• 20.09(Sep) – Brazil, Ireland

• 23.09(Sep) – Iceland

• 25.09(Sep) – Finland

• 28.09(Sep) – Colombia, Singapore

• 03.10(Oct) – Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Rep., Chad, Comoros, Congo, DR Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, São Tomé & Príncipe, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zanzibar, Zimbabwe

• 08.10(Oct) – China, Norway

• 16.10(Oct) – Peru

• 02.11(Nov) – Belarus

• 27.12(Dec) – U.S.A.

The Ultimate Football Manager Walkthrough Guide is the biggest and most comprehensive strategy manual for FM2012 containing 132 pages of in-depth hints, tips and advice.

This download contains over 80,000, yes 80,000 images for almost every player in Football Manager 2012 which is superb and will really make your game look a lot better when playing. There are a number of ways you can download this facepack and as you can imagine, it’s a huge file so it will take a while, but trust me it will be worth it!

Download Football Manager 201w Facepack (Free)

You can chose to download the files for free from FileFront in 7 different parts and then collate them together once you have finished downloading ready to install. Don’t feel like this will be hard because this is what I used and it was a very easy process.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

I recommend downloading the parts one at a time otherwise your internet will be very slow and you will get frustrated. Once you have downloaded each part, scroll down to find out how to install the facepack.

Download Football Manager 2012 Facepack (Premium)

If you wan’t to avoid the hassle of downloading the facepack in different parts and would prefer one big file on it’s own, then SortItOutSi offer you the chance to download the file straight from their server at a super fast speed by signing up to their premium membership program. This costs £10 a year  but it’s not required so that’s why I put the free download links above.

How to Install

Once you have downloaded the facepack, you will need to install it in Football Manager 2012. Here is what you have to do:

1. Unzip all of the facepack parts and put them all into one folder you create called ‘Facepacks’

2. Place this Facepacks folder in My Documents/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2012/Graphics (You may need to create the ‘Graphics’ folder if it isn’t there already.

3. Open Football Manager 2012 and go to preferences/display and sound.

4. Untick ‘Use skin cache’

5. Tick ‘Always reload skin on confirm’

6. The faces should now appear for all players in the game, sometimes you may need to start a new save for this to come into effect but usually it should be ok!

So there you have it, that is how to download 80,000 player faces and install them in Football Manager 2012. If you would like logos for every team in the gam, then check out my Football Manager 2012 logos post with download links and installation instructions.

The Ultimate Football Manager Walkthrough Guide is the biggest and most comprehensive strategy manual for FM2012 containing 132 pages of in-depth hints, tips and advice.

I have been using the following logopack for the past 2 years and in my opnion it is by far the best logopack around. What makes these special is that they have some nice effects on top of the original logos but the creators have not overdone it, perfect!

It contains logos for ALL playable teams, competitions and logos in the game, and they will be continually adding new ones that they’ve missed.

This is the perfect pack to complete your game logo packs, and with a subtle design, they don’t add any annoying ‘orbs’ or backgrounds reducing the size of the logo.

> > > Download Football Manager 2012 Logo Pack < < <

How to Install

1. Download the logo pack from the link above

2. Create a folder called ‘graphics’ in My Documents/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2012

3. Place the unzipped logo pack in the newly created graphics folder

4. Open up FM2012 and in preferences/display and sound, make sure you tick reload skin on confirm and un-tick skin cache.

> > > Download Football Manager 2012 Logo Pack < < <

The Ultimate Football Manager Walkthrough Guide is the biggest and most comprehensive strategy manual for FM2012 containing 132 pages of in-depth hints, tips and advice.

There will be two separate competitions so you can enter both to maximise your chances of winning a copy.

How to Enter:

Copy 1

Head over to our Football Manager 2012 Wonderkids post and leave a comment with your favourite youngsters/wonderkids on the new game.

I will then pick one comment at random and send that person an email with the code to activate their free copy in Steam!

>> Football Manager 2012 Wonderkids <<

Copy 2 – Giving yourself another chance at winning couldn’t be any simpler. All you have to do is join our facebook page where I will pick one fan at random and send them a message letting them know they have won!

The winners will be announced on the 19th of October so you have 10 days to get entering! Have fun and good luck to all of you.

This is the best list of wonderkids you will find packed with some of the best players under 21 in Football Manager 2012. I have tried to include a wide range of youngsters ranging from cheap to expensive but all of these kids have the potential to be great!

Football Manager 2012 Wonderkids

Goalkeepers (GK)

Wing Backs (DR/DL/WBR/WBL)

Centre Backs (CB)

Defensive Midfielders (DM)

Central Midfielders (CM)

Attacking Midfielders (AMC)

Right Midfielders (MR/AMR)

Left Midfielders (LM/AML)

Strikers (ST)

There you have it! 118 of the best Football Manager 2012 wonderkids! This is a great resource to have so I suggest you bookmark it. The list will be continually updated as I discover more amazing youngsters on the game, and you can also refer back to it whenever your looking for a certain position for your team.

This list took me ages as I wanted to list only the best of the best for readers of Aid The Boss so I hope you enjoy it!

The Ultimate Football Manager Walkthrough Guide is the biggest and most comprehensive strategy manual for FM2012 containing 132 pages of in-depth hints, tips and advice.

Football Manager 2011 recently jumped back to number one in the PC charts a staggering 8 months after release. Paying testament to the longevity of the Sports Interactive series not only from one title to the other but the titles themselves which will rarely seem outdated quickly.

What makes us keep playing these games for so long? What makes the series so popular over the long-term? One of the many area in which it can boast key attributes is within it’s flexibility, allowing the gamer to choose how they want to play the game within a framework. Different levels, depth of approaches and teams each bring it’s own unique scenario and challenges can be found from Barcelona to Icheon United to Southport.

I am now in my mid 20′s and have grown up playing the each of the SI Games titles since 2009. Thats a lot of game time to commit to one thing, hell if I would have committed so much effort and time to my degree I may be a Dr now, but without changing things up a bit, challenging myself with new objectives it could have been a tiresome task to load up FM2012. Understanding and implementing the moneyball concept has been my latest enriching task.

UEFA financial fair play rules set to take affect this year is creating a footballing world where to compete you have to live within your means and get more bang for your buck. Moneyball has become the vogue word as if it is now the right and only way to play. Liverpool are the highest profile name to be adopting this approach at the moment, but you will also seem such concepts feature in the strategies of Celtic, Udinese and Lyon.

Moneyball a book originally written by Michael Lewis based on the approach of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane who gained his playing advantage by exploiting player drafts, bringing in players based on the study of sabermetics and doing away with the traditional scouting techniques.

John W Henry’s has made use of such techniques at his own baseball side and now is learning how he can introduce and adapt this for Liverpool. I have been really interested in this way of playing and it has added something different to my games. So I thought I would introduce you to some basics of the approach to begin with.

1. Plug the Gaps

“Imagine that you’re a cost-conscious consumer who finds himself starving and without food in the middle of nowhere, with just one shop – and it sells overpriced food. You have the money, so do you choose to go hungry, or pay to fill the void? (in this case, in your stomach).” Quote from Tomkins Times

Arsenal have been that cost conscious consumer as of late who seems to want to starve (itself from silverware)

Many people mistake moneyball for getting players as on the cheap. Moneyball is not about this but about exploiting the market and playing it well. Before you can start implementing any of the other tactics you have to sort out your first team first and make sure that it is a competitive force. Using your resources effectively.

Since the new owners arrived, Liverpool have spent a massive £105m on players. But near  £60m has already been recouped from player sales with more players soon to leave. The team now looks a much improved squad as a whole and not just by splashing alot of money on one player, the average age has dropped and many of these players will keep their value for along longer. Take the Torres deal for example. Out went a injury prone player whose stats suggest is running out of steam, not surprising after years of none stop competitions for £50m. In came two younger players, whose numbers suggest are on the up.

Spend the money to get your team to the place where the resources will allow you, work to build a competitive base before moving on to other aspects of the side.

For those working on a tighter budget think about how you can exploit the market. Strikers are always more expensive then goalkeepers. Two stats that suggest a successful team are percentage of shots on target and number of saves made. Buying a decent defense and goalkeeper on with a small budget could be worth more then splashing all your cash on a star striker, and if you do find someone that will hit the target. Look at Peter Odemwingie, £1m and has one of the best % rates on target then any other striker in the league.

Once you have got your side together you can risk you time on using the rest of your resources to find those bargain players who will go on to make a profit.

2. Invest in Your Scouting Network

To exploit the transfer market, you need to know the products within the market. This is where your scouting network comes in, constantly scouring the leagues for young talent that you can bring into your side. Talent that you can bring in for a good price with potential re-sale prices.

My own scouting network is geared towards spotting the best talent as it emerges, scouts with knowledge in a particular country will be my eyes in that country. I will scout the major leagues for knowledge of the best players and scouts in the youth competitions to pick to grab the young players early, for cheaper and potential re-sale values are massive.

Investing the time and effort in to doing this correctly can help compensate for what is at the moment a terrible system of bringing youth in from academies in which you have little control of. Completing your own recruitment from around the world will bring a lot of benefits and start to build up your sides moneyball success.

3. Develop your players

Developing players yourself is always going to be the cheapest way to find success. Look at Everton who consistently hit a top 10 without the cash resources of the clubs around them. Rooney, Rodwell, Vaughan and Osman have all been key parts to Everton’s success.

Paying close attention inside your club and creating a clear route from Under 18 team to First team can be a powerful thing. You can build that team that will replace the next or sell for a profit.

Bringing in the best coaches, putting together training schedules that will develop players in the correct way and putting together that scouting network can be a very rewarding activity when your own generations come through. It can often be too easy in Football Manager just to splash the cash on buying the best player in the game and running with it and ignoring the youth team you have at your disposal.

4. Every player has a price

Would this be a moneyball discussion without mentioning Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s book Soccernomics? Well no! The most interesting and widely quoted of their 12 rules to the transfer market. Two I would like to point out though here are, ‘make sure you have a replacement for your best players’ and ‘every player has a price’.

You have got your scouting network bringing those players of the future, but to make sure that you are going to be able to bring a player to come into the first team if/when needed. That means then you can take that unbeatable offer that comes in for your star striker. You want to make a profit, you want to create a sustainable side that spends less then it makes. The profits you make on building up players will be a big part of this.

5. Win!

The whole strategic approach is not to make money but to ‘Football Manage’, it is to be successful on the pitch. The two go hand in hand, success should offer bigger profits, bigger profits should offer bigger success. So it is important to invest and improve your first team as much as possible before you look to concentrate on other areas of your squad.

Lyon’s business strategy is to win the Champions League in the next few years, because it is the next step in their commercial gains. Liverpool are investing heavily to get back into the Champions League because that is where the money is to take the club forward and back on track.

But most of all what the moneyball approach is is a holistic approach that should encompass all parts of the Football Management and for that reason should be embraced in creating a gaming experience which is much more enjoyable and exploits the game itself to it’s full potential.

This post is by Thomas Levin, you can find more of his work at FM Pundit and his real football blog Touchline Shouts.

FM Crowd is a newest community around solely dedicated to our beloved Football Manager. It gives all FM players to create their own blog and share with the rest of the community on how they are doing.

The main idea behind FM Crowd is creation of a friendly community of Football Manager bloggers and their readers. Here people enjoy sharing interesting stories and experience from playing The Game. It inspires other gamers and helps them to have more fun and feel the real gameplay. We are all friends here!

So far, there are a huge 492 blogs and  almost 2500 blog updates. This is rapidly becoming one of the hottest communities around. Here are some of the advantages of blogging at FM Crowd:

• Use one of the  50+ best WordPress Themes
• Participate in Top Blogs and Most Active Blog rankings
• Blog of the Day Award for being the most active blogger
• Your blog posts will appear on the FM Crowd home page
• Get many readers by becoming an active writer
• Blog together with the new True Football Manager Blog
• Free advertising and growing amount of readers for your blog

Not only does FM Crowd come packed with features for your blog, it is FREE, and takes just a few minutes to set up and join the rest of us in blogging about Football Manager. Of course, there are lots of websites around that allow you to create your own blog, but this is just for FM players, your blog audience will be people just like you.

Sign up free today! [/button-yellow]

Let me start by saying FM-Britain are the ultimate authority for FM tactics. They have been around for a couple of years and have hundreds of in-depth articles to help you become a better manager. One of my personal favourite FM fansites!

* * *

Tactic Guides & Tips

• How To Set Up A Back Four – This is one of the latest articles from FM-Britain and goes over some tips and techniques for setting up an effective back four in FM11.

• Match Preparation – Fellow blogger Vitaly from TrueFM talks us through match preparation in Football Manager 2011. This is quite a new feature in FM but Vitaly gives us some good tips!

• Intro to Formations and Tactics – An amazing guide over at FM-Base, it contains lots of information to help beginners and experienced players to understand the tactical side of FM.

• FM2011 Training Masterclass – This is the most in-depth guide to training I have seen. It is a great guide filled with tips on effective training and helped me understand training a lot more.

• Chalkboard Analysis – My good friend Thomas Levin from FM Pundit wrote a good guide on chalkboard analysis, a new feature in FM2011. Chalkboard analysis is a great way to improve your tactics!

* * *

Tactic Downloads

• 4-3-2-1 Tactic – Vitaly is a respected FM blogger in the community and he decided to share his tactic with his blog readers. Lots of the comments are positive so it looks like it has good success.

• Tactical Theorems & Frameworks – This is a monster e-book from the guys over at FM-Britain. Although the latest one was written for FM2010, it all still applies to FM2011 so I definitely recommend it.

• Mr Hough Wingers Tactic - Yet again Mr Hough impresses us with his awesome tactics. Last year his tactics were downloaded over 50,000 times so it shows how popular they are!

• Ghost Tactic – Probably the most popular tactic of FM11 so far, this was posted over at the SI Games forums, I tested it myself for a while and had some great success with it.

• Ultimate FM Walkthrough Guide – This is a 132 page e-book for FM2011, although it’s not all about tactics, the tactic sections are awesome and go into lots of detail so check it out.

Requirements:

• Obviously a copy of FM2011
• An internet connection
• Hamachi (Download here)

Note: You will all need to be on the same patch to be in a network game, so if you want to play on 11.2, then you will need to all have the 11.2 update installed

Step One

Decide who will be hosting the network game. Preferably the person with the best internet connection as they are who you will all be connecting to. Whoever you have chosen to host,  should then start a new game normally, selecting the patch you want to play on, and the leagues you want loaded. If you are hosting, go into preferences, then display and sound, then network and tick the box ‘run as server’, this will allow everyone else to connect to the save after everything has been set up.

Step Two

Install hamachi, and once installed and loaded, click the power on button:

Step Three

If you have going to be hosting the online game, then you will need to click the network tab at the top and click Create a New Network, a box will now appear where you will have to put in a unique ID and password.

If you are joining your friend who is hosting the network, you need to click network tab and click Join Existing Network and enter the id and password your friend used.

Step Four

At this stage, the host has created a network on hamachi, started a new FM game and ticked run as server, and any one that is going to join the network game has joined the hamachi server. Everyone who is going to join the host’s game, will need to load up FM2011, click the huge Join Network Game button on the home screen, and click the button in the bottom right corner which says join other server. A box will pop up asking for the network address. You should put in the network address which is displayed on the Hamachi server which is displayed for the host.

Step Five

Once everyone has joined the network game, you should be inside the host’s FM save, and ready to add a new manager and select a club. Everything from now on should run normally, and this is where the fun begins! My final step is to enjoy the network game, and absoutley destroy your friend’s and show you are the king of FM2011!

If you have any questions or run into any difficulties, don’t be afraid to leave a comment on this post and I will attempt to answer any questions!