FM 2023
FM23 Training Schedules: Best Football Manager 2023 Training Guide
Whatever you are doing, STOP! Football Manager 23 is the year you stop ignoring training, and the FMS FM23 Training Schedules are here to help.
No longer will you leave training to your Assistant Manager. Leave it to us. We will even provide the FM23 Training Schedules.
This guide covers everything, how to structure your schedules and why you should never leave training to your staff.
You can download all the FM23 training schedules discussed at the end, but if you want to learn more, read the entire guide and watch the videos to gain more insight.
Leaving training to chance will always mean the AI will train your players harder than needed. You will not be working on tactics as much as you’d like and that Brazilian Wonderkid you love so much, will never win the Ballon d’Or.
One huge tip for developing players, especially wonderkids is: playing matches is the most important element to development.
Others will have different approaches to training in Football Manager, but these have worked for us in saves across different levels and countries.
Regardless of how many times SI discuss them, there is still confusion and myths surrounding the green circles and star ratings, so let’s address role familiarity.
Football Manager 2023 Training Guide — Myths
Players need individual training for role familiarity 
Individual training is used for one thing, and one thing only, it decides which attributes a player develops. That’s it.
In the below video, a centre-back was transformed into a winger, but in order to round out his game we used finishing training to improve composure. It doesn’t mean he can play as a forward.
The roles in which a player shows in their profile is completely down to their attributes and how your coaching rates them. Not role familiarity.
However, you do have Positional familiarity and this will improve through a player being used in this position. Same with the video above, the Newgen ‘Jagacic’ only became natural as a winger, by playing as a winger. It’s that simple.
Training only impacts player development
While player development is a huge part of training your performance on the pitch can suffer too. Include adequate match preparation to ensure the team is familiar with your tactic and work on attacking movement plus defensive shape to better your chances of success.
Are you using a Gegenpress system but failing to win possession back quickly? Teamwork match preparation directly targets pressing play on the pitch so could be the answer.
Training like Attacking, Chance Conversion and Attacking Direct all improve your team’s happiness. Cohesion is huge when it comes to getting results.
Training is best left to my Assistant Manager
No, no, no, no, no. Your staff is important and can get you 80% the way, but that last 20%, the elements which will take your Wonderkid newgens to the next level comes from being hands on.
Your Assistant Manager does a cracking job of general training and week-to-week development but he includes no match preparation and team bonding.
He will never include match reviews, or work on things like Defensive Shape, Attacking Movement, Match Tactics or Teamwork in the build up to any game. Being hands on with development will in turn help you max out your team cohesion and tactical tactical familiarity.
FM23 Training Schedule — Four Step Process
We recommend a simple four step process at the start of every save and will use this structure to explain training in FM23, you can then download all of our FM23 training schedules at the end.
Step 1: Rest/Training Intensity
You can’t just work everyone at Double Intensity, as much as you’d want to. By adjusting the rest/training intensity which is accessed from ‘training’ > ‘rest’. Each player follows the team training intensity as default and it should be left this way but the intensity scheduling itself needs tweaking.
This is pictured below and dictates how hard a player will train dependant on their overall condition.
Overall condition is represented by a little heart 
Then just ‘half intensity’ when they are tired, and no pitch or gym work when the hearts have gone red.
Step 2: Hire & assign Coaches correctly
Before we touch on the specific FM23 training schedules, one of your jobs on Day One of your new job or season is to make sure you have the best coaches you can. Also, make sure you are maxing out the amount of coaches you can employ.
If you are not sure what area to target, check the team comparison and see how your staff compares to the rest of the league. Low down in the goalkeeper section, hire a goalkeeping coach. If Attacking is low, approaching coaches with a high rating for attacking.
By default, coaches are assigned too many responsibilities which lowers their star rating in the assigned categories. Look to assign your best coach for each category to maximise those star ratings and only one category per coach (this will not always be possible.)
Then utilise a ‘floating coach’ to train all categories because this will lighten the workload. Always remember, we need high star ratings and low workload for this to work.
The theory is quite simple. If you have 20 players and two coaches, it’s hard for them to give them adequate attention. If you have four coaches for the same amount of players, they can be more hands on.
Find the best FM23 Coaches — broken down by category — HERE
Note: When hiring coaches look for good personalities and high Determination, likewise your Assistant Manager. Coaches can pass on their personality to players so this is very important.
Step 3: Setup individual training in FM23
Now jump into training > individual and start assigning appropriate role training and focus (focus is not as important) for each player. This is vital for two reasons, a) role training dictates a players appropriate unit and b) many of the schedules directly train the role you select, failure to select a role and fail to train.
You should select the relevant position, as this helps the player learn the tactic, then a role which targets the most suitable attributes you want to improve.
Some roles target many attributes and will take longer to see improvement, like the box to box midfielder, other roles are select and accelerate the growth of a few attributes while neglecting broad development. You can see the attributes trained for each role when selected.
You should then set each players ‘focus’ to an area you need improvement, you can use this to train areas they may be lacking and won’t be covered by the positional training selected.
Step 4: Load all schedules and assign to the calendar
OK this is the complicated part but luckily we have done all the work so you can just download and import.
FM 2023 Training Schedules
We have seven different FM23 Training Schedules to sort your training for the whole season. Covering all eventualities.
Pre-Season: We will cover in a separate post
Saturday Match & Sunday Match: When you only have one fixture in the week.
Tues & Sat/Wed & Sat Matches: For the busy weeks you have two fixtures.
Wed & Sat/Wed & Sun Matches: For the busy weeks you have two fixtures.
Thu & Sun Matches: Version 1 is when you play on Sunday the week before, V2 is for when your previous game is the Saturday.
Week Off: International breaks or weeks without games
FIND THE BEST PLAYERS IN FM23
FM23 Wonderkids
FM23 Championship Free Agents
FM23 Cheap Wonderkids
When To Use Each FM23 Training Schedules
Check out our pre-season guide to help prepare best for the new season. There should be five weeks for the preseason, there is a schedule for each week. In week one, you only play one game, on the Saturday.
Then week’s two, three and four, the schedule is to play two games (Wednesday and Saturday), then the Week five schedule is for one game. Usually the start of the campaign.
Each week builds up the fitness, gearing towards being 100% for the new season. It is also very heavy in letting your team become familiar with your tactics and bed in new signings.
Note: Players may complain of too much quickness training, do not worry this will not last long and gets results.
Main Training — How To Structure The Month
Rather than change up the focus of each week, success has been found running these schedules every week for a whole campaign. They cover pretty much everything from Attack & Defence, and remember, even in defensive training drills, the attacker are still working out and vice versa.
Set-pieces are involved in every week, delivery is also worked when Attacking Corners. We use Attacking Direct, Attacking and Chance Conversion, because they focus on Happiness too.
The only one I would suggest you could change to fit your team’s style is Overall. Pick what you feel is appropriate. Don’t always change though.
FM23 Training Schedules: Two Match Weeks
This is quite easy to schedule, if you reach Europe, or are playing in the English lower leagues, you’ll find the games stack up, so we’ve provided schedules for when your team will be playing, be it Tuesday/Saturday or Wednesday/Sunday etc. The focus of these is to keep the team fresh, but work on tactics, teamwork and development.
One thing you will want to keep an eye on. When you play on a Sunday, you will want to manually add a ‘Match Review’ on the Monday. There is no way to do this automatically.
Big Match Training Schedule
If you have a cup final, or a game which could go to penalties, keep the training schedules all the same, but make sure, in one of the slot before the final, or the second leg of a knockout game, to include a penalties session. Just to give your team an extra edge ahead of the big game.
You should now download every schedule mentioned above from the ‘download’ image below and be careful to follow the instructions, it can be fiddly. Once downloaded and imported into your game you can assign each schedule on the calendar to look something like this:
Troubleshooting
Too much or not enough quickness/strength training
This should not be an issue once the season kicks off but can crop up in weeks 3-5 of pre-season. Do not panic, this will be resolved with the full season schedules.
Do note however, some schedules lack physical training due to a high amount of matches, if players want more quickness or strength training chances are its a short term issue and can be corrected by adding one ‘physical’ training card to the following week.
Player unit not getting enough attention
This should not happen if you follow the guide above but below is a quick fix.
Training units are selected based on the roles you set within individual training. You have three training units; Goalkeeping, Defensive and Attacking. If numerous players complain about a lack of attention chances are they all belong to the same training unit. If they’re from the Defensive unit schedule more ‘Defence’ training, if from the ‘Attacking’ unit schedule more ‘attack’ training.
General Complaints about Training
There are various complaints about training which can actually have nothing to do with your schedules. Always check your coaching assignments workload and make sure no single category is showing a high workload. When coaches are overworked training in said category and therefore unit suffers, simply set more coaches responsible for the category in question and hey presto!
FM23 Training Schedules Download
How To Install
Use the download button above then extract the file using WinRAR for Windows or Archiver for Mac and extract to the file location below:
\Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2023\schedules
Mac users put file in this folder: Users/YOUR Mac USERNAME/Public/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2023/schedules. To access your files on Mac open ‘Finder’, click ‘Go’ from the menubar, press and hold the ‘alt’ key to show ‘library’ in your menu, while still holding ‘alt’ click it, then go to ‘Application Support’ > ‘Sports Interactive’ > ‘Football Manager 2023
Load each individual schedule into Football Manager 2023
Training > Schedules > Select Schedules Dropdown > Custom Schedules > Import Schedule > Find schedules folder & load one by one > Once Opened Click Save — This needs repeating for every schedule
Pull each appropriate FM23 training schedule into your calender
Training > Calendar > Drop downs per each week (Use the guide above for which schedules to use when)
Every year we test countless tactics and review the very best. For FM23 these systems will be ranked and listed within our tactics index linked below.
That concludes our guide to training in Football Manager 2023, if there are any questions jump in the comments below but please make sure you have followed the instructions carefully before typing.
For more insight into training on FM 2023, check out RDF Tactics, Bust the Net and Fox in the Box’s videos.