Football Manager is an absolute treasure trove of data and imagery that, on the face of it, is a bit of an assault on the senses. But if you’re anything like me, then the standard layout of the game can become bland and the blank faces or fake badges and kits are a bit annoying.
However, by adding custom graphics, you can make Football Manager 2022 look pretty and keep the game looking fresh. The process is relatively simple and you have a wide range of options for customising how your game looks, from the general interface to various in-game graphics. So I thought I’d compile the ultimate guide to making Football Manager look pretty.
Below, we’ve put together a series of steps to customise the look and feel of FM22. We’ll start with the basics for adding new graphics, provide ideas for imagery to brighten up your save game, then introduce an awesome new tool that will truly take your FM experience to the next level. There’s also links to some of the great resources in the FM community that make these customisations possible.
How graphics work in Football Manager
Before you start adding graphics to the game, especially if you want to add your own graphics, it’s important to understand how this process works. Every club and player in FM22 has a unique ID. For example, Liverpool’s club ID is 676 and Mohamed Salah’s player ID is 98028755. You can see these within the game by opening the ‘Preferences’ tab, selecting Interface and ticking ‘Show screen IDs in Title Bar to assist skinning.’
New graphics need to be added to a folder in the location where your FM22 files are saved. If you’re on Windows, that’ll be: Documents / Sports Interactive / Football Manager 2022. You need to create a ‘graphics’ folder here where all your new images can be installed.
Within each folder of new images will be a “config” file, which contains instructions that tag each image to the specific club or player ID. For example, the config file will instruct the game to display kits and logos for the specific Liverpool ID and the image to show when you open Salah’s player profile. More info on how to edit config files is below.
After adding new images into your documents, hit ‘Reload Skin’ in Preferences and the kits should magically appear! If that doesn’t work, try clearing the cache in Preferences, and reload the skin again.
1. Get the right team names
Football Manager is bound by copyright laws. For example, it doesn’t own the rights to use the real names of certain clubs and the Brazilian and Portuguese leagues. So my first port of call on any iteration of FM is to remove the fake names.
This is a relatively simple process, whereby you remove a few specific files from the FM database on your computer and add some new ones. Personally, I used the real name fix from FM Scout, which has clear instructions for how to install the updates. The likes of FM Blog, Passion4FM and SortItOut SI all have name fixes that will mean you never have to put up with Man UFC or Zebre again.
2. Install a new skin
The skin is the general interface of FM22, which controls how the game looks and feels. This includes the style in which player profiles, home screen, club info pages and more are presented in-game. While this may seem trivial, changing your in-game skin can be an absolute gamechanger.
Some clever people out there in the FM community have created a range of customised skins that offer you all sorts of different options. Personally, I’m a big fan of the Rensie skin, but you can find a wide range of options on various FM sites and the Steam Workshop.
3. Install club logos
With your interface looking delicious, it’s now time to add a little more colour and decoration to it. The first step is to remove the fake logos that FM22 comes loaded with. Doing this is a simple process of downloading club logos, creating a ‘logos’ folder in the ‘graphics’ folder and using a Zip application like WinZip or WinRar to install them to it.
You have several options for logos, including on FM Scout and Sort It Out SI, which have simple guides on how to install them.
4. Install club kits
The next step is to add kits that add even further colour to your save. Installing these is a similar process to the logos, just add a ‘kits’ folder to the ‘graphics’ folder. I currently use club kit images from FM Slovakia, which are all available to download here.
5. Install player faces
Those blank faces that appear in player profiles are pretty annoying, so why not fill them with some pretty real faces? The likes of FMScout, Sort It Out SI and more have a range of facepacks available to download and install.
You can also easily create your own packs consisting of the faces of specific players. For example, I don’t have a full facepack installed, instead, I have a folder of ‘Real Players’ in which I’ve added faces for players I’ve used, such as Matías Arezo and Conor Gallagher.
To do this for Conor Gallagher:
- Install an application like XML Notepad, which enables you to edit a config file. More info on this is available at FM Slovakia.
- Create a folder to keep the faces in within the ‘graphics’ folder
- Add an existing config file to it, then delete all but one of the records within it
- Go to your preferred search engine and search for ‘Conor Gallagher PNG’ – ideally select the cut-out image that has the white and grey squares in the background
- Right-click the image, select ‘Save Image As’ and call it whatever you want, such as ‘conor_gallagher’
- Open XML Notepad and select the little plus sign next to the existing record
- Change the ‘from’ option to ‘conor_gallagher’ or whatever you named the image file
- Change the ‘to’ option to ‘graphics/pictures/person/28108036/portrait’, which will instruct FM22 to display your image when you open Conor Gallagher’s profile within the game
- Save the config file, reload the skin in FM22 and you’ll see Conor’s pretty face smiling back at you
- This process can be repeated by right clicking the existing record and selecting ‘Duplicate.’
6. Install regen faces
The standard newgen/regen faces that are available in FM22 still aren’t the best. But you can bring your army of regen wonderkids to life with custom faces from the likes of Chilled Moose and Zealand’s realistic regens.
Personally, I prefer Chilled Moose’s images and downloaded her megapack and subsequent images to a USB stick a couple of years ago. I assign specific images to my favourite new youngsters, using the same process as above for Conor Gallagher.
7. Install stadium images
Custom skins like the Rensie skin have the option to display stadium images on the club info page, which makes it look absolutely fantastic. I use the FMT pack, which is available from FMInside.
8. Create your own club kits
All football fans look forward to their club launching its latest range of kits for the upcoming season. However, Football Manager doesn’t allow us to indulge in this fantasy so, even if you manage to make it through 50 years as a manager, you’ll still be stuck with the same kits you started the game with.
That was, until very recently. As the excellent Nymain has launched a superb new tool called Kitbasher, which allows you to create your own kits for any team in the world and plug them directly into Football Manager.
I’ve been using this tool for a few weeks now, which helped me fully understand how to go about customising the look and feel of the game. A full guide on how to install Kitbasher and start using the tool is on FMScout.
To see how all of that looks in practice, here’s the homepage of my current club Puebla FC, my current star man Alexander Ferrari, images of the Liverpool club info page and Mohamed Salah in 2026, and kits in the Odds club screen.
Football Manager Addict 
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