Let’s be real for a second. There is nothing more soul-crushing in Football Manager than finally scouting a 5-star wonderkid from the depths of the Brazilian second division, clicking on his profile, and seeing that blank, grey silhouette staring back at you. It kills the vibe instantly. You’ve spent three hours setting up your scouting assignments, but your star signing looks like a witness protection program reject. Honestly, if you aren't using an fm 24 face pack, you’re playing a half-finished game.
The licensing in FM has always been a bit of a mess. Because of legal red tape, Sports Interactive can’t include the real faces for every player in the world. You get the big ones, sure, but the moment you step outside the top-tier licensed leagues, the immersion breaks. That’s where the community comes in. People spend thousands of hours cutting out tiny player heads just so we can feel like real managers. It's kinda crazy when you think about it, but the game is just better when you can see who you’re shouting at from the touchline.
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The Big Two: Choosing Your Style
When you start looking for an fm 24 face pack, you’re going to run into two main "brands." It’s basically the Pepsi vs. Coke of the FM world.
First up is the Sortitoutsi Cut Out Megapack. This is the gold standard for most players. These are "cut-out" faces, meaning there’s no background. They fit perfectly into the default FM skin because they look exactly like the ones already in the game. We’re talking over 400,000 faces in some versions. It's massive. The sheer scale is ridiculous. If a guy has played professional football in a league you’ve actually heard of, he’s probably in there.
Then you’ve got DF11. These are different. Instead of a cut-out head, you get a large, portrait-style card. It’s got a consistent border and looks very "collectible." If you use a custom skin—something like Zealand’s skin or the Sas24 skin—DF11 faces can look absolutely stunning because those skins are built to show off the larger artwork.
Which one should you pick? It’s purely vibes, man. If you want the game to look "official" and seamless, go with Sortitoutsi. If you want a more stylized, premium feel and you have the screen real estate, DF11 is the way to go. Just don’t try to mix them. It looks messy, and the config files will fight each other like two strikers who both have the "shoots from distance" trait.
Why Your PC Might Struggle with 15GB of Faces
Before you go hitting that download button, check your hard drive. A full-size fm 24 face pack is not a small file. We are talking 10GB to 15GB of tiny PNG images.
If you’re playing on a laptop with a small SSD, this can actually slow things down. Not necessarily the match engine, but the player profile loading times. Every time you click a player, the game has to find that specific image in a folder containing hundreds of thousands of files.
- Pro Tip: If your game starts lagging after installing a pack, it might be time to look for a "Lite" version or just stick to the specific leagues you actually manage in.
- The Torrent Option: Always, and I mean always, use the torrent link if the site offers it. Downloading 15GB through a browser is a recipe for a "Download Failed" message at 99%.
Honestly, most of the "bugs" people report with face packs are just because they didn't have enough space or their extraction tool (like 7-Zip or WinRAR) hit an error halfway through.
The Installation Nightmare (That Isn't Actually That Bad)
Setting this up for the first time feels like you're trying to hack into NASA, but it’s basically just moving a folder. Most people mess up the file path.
On Windows, you’re looking for: Documents/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2024/graphics. If the "graphics" folder isn't there, just make it. Don't overthink the naming. Just "graphics" works fine.
On Mac, it's a bit more annoying because Apple likes to hide the Library folder. You have to go to Users/[YourName]/Library/Application Support/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2024/graphics.
Once the files are in there, you have to tell the game to look for them. This is the part everyone forgets. Go into your game preferences, search for "Interface," and do two things:
- Untick "Use caching to decrease page loading times."
- Tick "Reload skin when confirming changes in Preferences."
Hit confirm. The game will hang for a minute while it reloads everything. If it worked, you’ll see faces. If it didn't, you probably put the folder inside another folder (folderception is the #1 cause of FM modding failure).
Dealing with the Newgen "Uncanny Valley"
Real player faces are great, but what about the regens? Five years into a save, half the world is made up of those weird AI-generated Newgens that look like they were made of damp clay.
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The NewGAN-Manager is the solution here. It uses a separate pack of AI-generated "real" faces and maps them to your Newgens. It's a bit of a process to set up—you have to generate a text file of your players' IDs—but the result is a game where every single player looks like a real human being.
I’ll be honest, once you see a 16-year-old wonderkid with a realistic face, you can never go back to the default "potato heads." It completely changes how attached you get to your players.
The Licensing Legal Dance
You might wonder why we have to do all this. Why doesn't SI just pay for the faces?
Well, licenses like the Bundesliga or the Premier League are incredibly expensive and often exclusive. EA Sports (now FC 24/25) pays a fortune for exclusivity. This means SI can't legally put those faces in the game without getting sued into oblivion. By allowing the community to create "graphics packs," SI stays in the clear legally while we get the game we actually want.
It’s a bit of a "don't ask, don't tell" situation between the developers and the modding community.
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Actionable Steps to Get Started Right Now
If you're ready to fix your game, here is the exact order of operations:
- Pick your style: Go to Sortitoutsi for the "natural" look or DF11 for the "portrait" look.
- Clear some space: Ensure you have at least 20GB free for the download and the extraction.
- Download the Torrent: It's faster and less likely to corrupt.
- Extract to the Graphics folder: Use 7-Zip (it's free and better than the Windows default).
- Refresh your skin: Turn off the cache and reload the skin in the FM settings.
- Verify: Check a team like Manchester United or Real Madrid to see if the faces appear.
Once you’ve got your fm 24 face pack running, the next logical step is grabbing a logo pack and a kit pack to finish the "realism" trifecta. The game just feels different when the visual polish matches the depth of the simulation.