Best Teams To Be On Football Manager 2014

When starting a new game on Football Manager, one of the biggest questions can be one of the first: Which team should I be on Football Manager? You see the question all over forums, chats, everywhere. People never know who to manage. I myself was wondering this question. I always play out a few months or so with a mass of teams, until I find one I like. I was considering what teams could be good this year due to recent changes, and soon created this list of some of the best teams to manage on Football Manager 14.

1) SSC Napoli

• 2012/13 League Finish: 2nd (Serie A)
• Financial Stance: Rich - £185M Value (£68M Debt)
• Media Prediction: 2nd
• Key Players: Gonzalo Higuain, Marek Hamsik, Jose Manuel Reina
• New Signings: Gonzalo Higuain, Raul Albiol, Jose Callejon

Difficulty: With a strong squad, decent squad depth, a rather large piggy bank and so much potential, SSC Napoli are one of the easier teams to manage, if you want to have fun more than a challenge. You will have to challenge the likes of Juventus, Milan and Inter for the number one spot, so it may not easy throughout the year.

2) AS Monaco

• 2012/13 League Finish: 1st (Ligue 2) (Promoted)
• Financial Stance: Rich - £156M Value
• Media Prediction: 4th
• Key Players: Falcao, Joao Moutinho, Ricardo Carvalho
• New Signings: Falcao, Joao Moutinho, James Rodriguez

Difficulty: AS Monaco shouldn’t be too hard to manage. Competition in Ligue 1 is dying out, the likes of Olymipique Lyonnais and Olympique Marseille no longer of the stature they used to have. The talent of the side is already enough to challenge for the title, and if increased by the funding, Paris Saint-Germain may be the only team able to stop you!

3) Fulham FC

• 2012/13 League Finish: 12th (Premier League)
• Financial Stance: Secure - £69M Value
• Media Prediction: 8th
• Key Players: Adel Taarabt, Maarten Stekelenburg, Darren Bent
• New Signings: Adel Taarabt, Sascha Riether, Scott Parker

Difficulty: Fulham certainly won't be a walkover, but will need some management expertise if they are to progress anywhere. The current squad is likely to be enough to help you stay up, but if you want to achieve more, you may need to be a more experienced FMer, knowing a lot about the game and how to achieve more with teams.

4) Real Sociedad

• 2012/13 League Finish: 4th (Liga BBVA)
• Financial Stance: Secure - £68M Value (£35M Debt)
• Media Prediction: 16th
• Key Players: Carlos Vela, Esteban Granero, Antoine Griezmann
• New Signings: José Ángel, Haris Seferovi?, Esteban Granero

Difficulty: Real are expected by the media to finish near the bottom of the table, showing this certainly wouldn't be an easy challenge. The loss of Illarramendi may hurt the squad slightly, but if you know your way around the club, you should be able to do well, and experience so much fun at the same time.

5) Arsenal FC

• 2012/13 League Finish: 4th (Premier League)
• Financial Stance: Rich - £720M Value (£372M Debt)
• Media Prediction: 4th
• Key Players: Jack Wilshere, Santi Cazorla, Theo Walcott
• New Signings: Yaya Sanogo, Mesut Ozil, Mathieu Flamini

Difficulty: With Arsenal having failed to bring in top players so far this transfer window, the likes of Tottenham and Liverpool look more likely to finish above Arsenal in the league. The real challenge would be to get rid of the remaining dead weight at Arsenal and bring in the needed players to help match Arsenal's expectations. The battle for Champions League spots could become quite intense!

6) Atletico Madrid

• 2012/13 League Finish: 3rd (Liga BBVA)
• Financial Stance: Secure - £261M Value (£281M Debt)
• Media Prediction: 3rd
• Key Players: Diego Costa, David Villa, Thibaut Courtois
• New Signings: Toby Alderweireld, David Villa, Léo Baptistão

Difficulty: Atletico are a club with a strong side, and it's only getting stronger. However, the club are lacking in depth, and with funds still not brilliant, sales may be made to bring in more players, but for a cheaper price. If you want to be a wheeler-dealer, this is perfect. Of course, you then have the challenge of Barcelona and Real Madrid, but little else.

7) FC Schalke 04

• 2012/13 League Finish: 4th (Bundesliga)
• Financial Stance: Rich - £173M Value (£146M Debt)
• Media Prediction: 3rd
• Key Players: Benedikt Höwedes, Julian Draxler, Jefferson Farfán
• New Signings: Kevin-Prince Boateng, Leon Goretzka, Felipe Santana

Difficulty: After finishing fourth and someway off the top three in the Bundesliga last season, Schalke made sure to bring in some very talented players to help them break in to the elite group of German teams. Despite having an extremely strong defence and a very creative midfield, their season may come down to an injury-prone Huntelaar and an inexperienced Pukki to deliver the goods up front. Schalke have a very talented side and with one or two intelligent signings, they could challenge for honours and have a very exciting season!

8) Eintracht Braunschweig

• 2012/13 League Finish: 2nd (Bundesliga 2, promoted)
• Financial Stance: Secure - £16M Value
• Media Prediction: 18th
• Key Players: Simeon Jackson, Dennis Kruppke, Deniz Do?an
• New Signings: Simeon Jackson, Karim Bellarabi, Marco Caligiuri, Omar Elabdellaoui

Difficulty: After a recent promotion with little finance, staying up could become a big issue for Eintracht Braunschweig. The new signings in Jackson and Bellarabi should help a lot, but reinforcements may be needed for survival, something that could be hard to get. Inexperienced players may struggle in the big league, so survival will be a big enough challenge for a few years.

9) Dinamo Bucharest

• 2012/13 League Finish: 6th (Liga 1 - Romania)
• Financial Stance: Secure - £16M Value
• Media Prediction: 18th
• Key Players: Srdjan Luchin, Cosmin Matei, Alexandru Curtean
• New Signings: Collins Fai, Jovan Kostovski, Joel Thomas

Difficulty: After finishing in 6th place out of 18 teams the club finds themselves in very big problems. They've recently released least 15 players from the team and brought even more as replacements. The owners of the club have changed, witha new club policy, to build a strong squad based on young players with low salaries. The club goal for first season is to finish in the top four, but others may just want survival due to the crisis.

10) Brighton & Hove Albion

• 2012/13 League Finish: 4th (Championship)
• Financial Stance: Secure - £35M Value (£129M Debt)
• Media Prediction: 5th
• Key Players: Craig Mackail-Smith, Liam Bridcutt, Tomasz Kuszczak
• New Signings: Matthew Upson, Stephan Ward, Kemy Agustien

Difficulty: As one of the better sides of the Championship, it shouldn't be too hard to get them up to the top flight. Nevertheless, staying there is the bigger challenge, as they have a number of fairly old players, many who would lack Premier League experience and ability. That means once up the challenge isn't over, and they need to stay at the top too.



So there we have it. 10 of the best teams you can manage on Football Manager 2014. If you have any suggestions please comment below, and tell us how you get on if you use any of these teams!

Great stuff, will defo give a chance to one of these teams anytime.

In my opinion, Tottenham also will be a good team to manage.

A team you should consider inspecting is Independiente

In FM14, Independiente offers a lot of things many challenge-seeking players want: A fallen giant (That has just relegated for the first time in their history), an exotic league system (Unless you're from South America), an old-on-average squad that can hold on an year but not more, a financial situation that is nowhere near impressive and the pressure of getting promoted AND challenging for the league next year

Before the January patch of FM13 Independiente offered an overwhelmingly difficult (If not outright impossible) Saviour Cometh challenge. Now it offers something different, not as difficult but very exciting

I prefer Dortmund. A team with not a very high transfer budget, but they've already got some good players. But on of their main problems are that they have such a small team. You don't get to do very much rotation of the team as they don't really have very many good players except for those who already will be playing. So they get tired alot and in the start of the first season Piszczek is injuried for like 6 months.

I think there is a team really good to manage go look at SPORTING CP from Portugal a team of really young players and a young team full of players that can become stars and in SPORTING B alot of them ..Is on of the 3 Biggest clubs from Portugal and has one of the biggest young facilities and produced players like Cristiano Ronaldo, Nani , Veloso, Moutinho , Rui Patricio, Figo.... Has a low budget because of the financial problems and dont win tiles for a long time because of the bad manage of the club..But this year as a new President and alot of young players with oportunity on the Team

Best Regards

Ricardo from Portugal

Definitely Napoli,Arsenal and Athletico Madrid ,I would include Tottenham and Dortmund as well along with AS Roma ,Southampton, Lyon, Valencia .

At the end of the day I think it boils down to who you're really passionate about and support , what goals you have as a manager and what you want to achieve ,there are certainly clubs out there whose goals will tie with yours as a manager and it would be a good choice to choose 1 that matches yours ...some managers want to achieve promotion to the top league its what excites them ,others want to win the champions league ,some want to avoid relegation ,others qualify for Europe ,all just depends ,guess best is to mess around for a few games with different teams and than settle with 1 that makes you happy .

Surprised that you haven't included Manchester United ,after Ferguson leaving and the lack of signings along with a poor start to the league ,as a united supporter one would naturally be inclined to do better than Moyes ....

Eintracht Braunschweig really is good fun, loving my current save

2013-11-08 19:46#142489 cena : Definitely Napoli,Arsenal and Athletico Madrid ,I would include Tottenham and Dortmund as well along with AS Roma ,Southampton, Lyon, Valencia .

At the end of the day I think it boils down to who you're really passionate about and support , what goals you have as a manager and what you want to achieve ,there are certainly clubs out there whose goals will tie with yours as a manager and it would be a good choice to choose 1 that matches yours ...some managers want to achieve promotion to the top league its what excites them ,others want to win the champions league ,some want to avoid relegation ,others qualify for Europe ,all just depends ,guess best is to mess around for a few games with different teams and than settle with 1 that makes you happy .

Surprised that you haven't included Manchester United ,after Ferguson leaving and the lack of signings along with a poor start to the league ,as a united supporter one would naturally be inclined to do better than Moyes ....

I didn't include United as I'ma proper fan. The true fans wouldn't want to battle it out against Moyes as such, who in theory hasn't done badly. He is receiving negativity as he is not achieving what Fergie did the previous season, something which is unfair to do. Moyes completed the two transfer aims, keep Rooney and buy a Central Midfielder, and with Moyes seeming to get better results regularly now, United fans understand the situation regarding Moyes.

Kane, you forgot to mention that Carlos Vela has a buy back clause with Arsenal for a ridiculous fee of 4 million euros. I managed to sell him to Chelsea for 40 million right before Arsenal would snatch him. I was very surprised with the sum of money I recieved for Vela, considering he was only valued at 16.5 million.

i agree with Haken, you need to do something very quick with vela because of that clause!

we need to do a list like this, but with Mexican teams :p

I currently have a lot of fun with my QPR savegame, they went down in 12/13 and now are playing Championship with a huge wage bill. Most of the strongholders are out on loan. Getting promoted back to the premier wasn't that easy, but I succeeded. The second season you start off with an even bigger wage bill, which i chose to cut down by cheap-selling a lot of rotation and back-up players that get above average wages (Wright-Phillips, Johnson, Zamora). In all, a very interesting club to manage. Once the books are positive, you can ask the board for allmost everything.

Being a Football manager player for some time now i always try to test myself when i get the new edition of fm so this time i went WEST BROM. They've got a good structure and no debt, not much money to spend but a good lot of players through Mulumbu/Yacob etc which could easy raise your funds if need be.

I think Valencia would be the biggest challenge on the game given that they sold there best striker in Soldado, Tino Costa, Fernando Gago and Aly Cissokho on loan to Liverpool plus they are in financial meltdown in La Liga

Might start one with Braunschweig ... Cheers!