FIFA 23 Realistic Career Mode Guide: Choose Club, Team Tactics, Transfers & More Tips

With this FIFA 23 Realistic Career Mode Guide, we tell you how to start and run a realistic career mode for your favorite club in the game mode!

Tips To Run Your FIFA 23 Career Mode Realistic

If you'll enjoy playing career mode in a realistic way but you might also be wanting to find some tips to keep it fun while also having some realism. We are going to be sharing 5 tips to keep the Career Mode a lot more fun. Realistic Career Modes make FIFA more fun and we want to share some of the tips that we've learned over the last few years.

1 - How To Choose the Right Club?

Most of the work when we plan out a realistic Career Mode is making the initial decision on what club to manage. If you take the time to Envision a few storylines for your save, you'll have a sense of direction later on when you have to make tough decisions. Real-time performances play a big influence on which clubs we manage, some things that you might want to look out for is if the team is over underperforming in League or Cup competitions as most leagues are on break right now with the World Cup going on, it's an ideal time to carry over real-time performances.

Essentially you want to simulate each match day until you get the corresponding results, you can use a site called transfermark to sort fixtures by date and that helps keep things organized. Going off that first point if a team is lacking in any particular area of the pitch either due to injury or just lack of spending in the summer transfer window that could Inspire the first few signings of your career mode.

Take Liverpool as an example, most fans feel that they need to strengthen their Midfield and add some more youth to the side, so your first few transfers could check off both of those criteria there. There are always rumors of changes in management and with that being one of the main new features in FIFA 23 to play as a real manager, it's a good feature to incorporate. We think if there's any storyline with a manager having ties to the club maybe having played for them previously or managed them previously then it's fair game to do a realistic Career Mode.

2 - How Long Should a Career Mode Last?

Squad player ratings and potential should have some influence over which teams you choose. It's important to ask yourself what sort of career mode you're looking for is it going to be a short, medium, or longer-term save. A general rule of thumb we like to use is if you're managing a top team from a high-profile League, don't plan on your save lasting more than three seasons. A mid-table team will probably have a four to five-season save with clubs fighting off relegation lasting five to six seasons. This is typically how long it takes for us to win the champions league and be top of the league. After we accomplish those feats, we tend to lose interest in saves even when we are fairly conservative and realistic with transfers.

 Another thing you should look at is if the club has any high-potential players, use SOFIFA to review player potential keep in mind though as Squad updates roll out, players are going to rise and fall in their overall rating of potential.

Whether the club has some players with the real face scan also plays a role in our decision, it always adds the immersion and if you're going to be with us say for a couple of seasons, it's definitely something you want to consider.

3 - Researching a Club's History

The game's always going to provide a brief description of a club but we like to do some further research, for example are there any specific accomplishments or Seasons that stand out, winning a certain trophy could be an overarching goal for your save. You also have to ask what the club's overall transfer policy is like, do Rivals exceed departures or vice versa. These are all the sort of questions you need to be asking to see if the career mode is going to align with your personal preferences. Contrary to popular belief, winning the Champions League doesn't need to be the end goal of a realistic save, if you take a team like Freiburg for example, they're very modest with their spending and typically let their top players leave to higher profile clubs. Due to this the defeat of winning the champions league is always going to be difficult especially if you rely on simulation, so a more realistic goal would be to win the club's first major trophy whether that comes from the Bundesliga League Cup or other European competitions.

There's an endless amount of research that you can do but we think this covers the main questions that we typically ask ourselves. If you're feeling overwhelmed with choices then we would recommend picking a league you have some interest in managing but maybe haven't explored in too greater detail from their randomly pick a team and work backwards, and you should be able to ask some of those questions and have a solid foundation to your realistic career mode.

 With the club chosen you now need to create your manager and if you don't have the option to choose a real manager then we recommend just using the in-game editor, there's a whole community of people that post lookalike tutorials so you can take some inspiration from that. Now the team you've chosen doesn't have a real Stadium, you should be able to recreate something close to it, the introduction of Stadium customization in FIFA 22 is an underrated feature, you can do a quick Google search to find the club stadium name and adjust the seat color the net meshing and some of those finer details. 

For settings, our somewhat controversial take is to play with negotiation strictness set to loose while it may seem counterintuitive to a realistic career mode. If you have the discipline to set your own restrictions it's going to give you a lot more options that wouldn't be available if you had negotiations set to strict. 

4 - Reviewing Team and Tactics

The first step is to review your team in tactics. 90% of the time we'll use the formation, you load up with and create a second team sheet depending on what tactics the club uses. We're again going to use the trusty transfermark site to look at some of the breakdowns of tactics that have been used in recent fixtures depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the team. You should be able to identify one or two positions that you want to improve in the upcoming transfer window. With that said, take a look at your squad roles and see which players might be untouchable from your starting 11. You can also see a breakdown of real statistics see which players are making the most appearances for the club and also featuring in the majority of minutes.

5 - How To Make Realistic Transfers

Now transfers make or break a realistic career mode, if you're too quick with things it's going to lead to your save being boring, if you're too slow and you do risk the possibility of underperforming and getting sacked by the board. As a result, it's important to plan out signings and maybe even think a few seasons into the future. We'll usually start by reviewing the club's recent transfer history to get an idea of a few things one how much they're spending to the leagues and nationalities that incoming player Rivals have typically been from. And three what types of players are being sold and what is a typical transfer balance look like. For a first point, it's pretty common to see clubs spending more on transfers in recent years just with the way that the market is gone, but a good way to approach setting a transfer budget is to take an average of the last five seasons and try not to exceed that amount especially in the first season when in essence the summer arrivals have already been made to the squad.

We'll also usually try not to exceed three or four trainers in any given year, because if you go over that amount the saves just going to get too easy and again you're going to lose interest in your save. When you have a list of common leagues and nationalities for a club you can narrow down your search for potential transfer signings, some clubs are going to have additional restrictions like Fielding a certain amount of players from a specific nationality or perhaps including Youth Academy players in your squad. It's completely up to you how realistic you want your save to be, so we suggest doing the research and deciding from there. 

Something else that's important to consider is how well your Club is able to retain Talent, you're bound to have some high potential players and it's completely normal to let them leave over the course of time. You can use past Wonderkids at a club as a guiding principal so go ahead and see how long they were part of the team how many seasons they spend at the club, and maybe once they start reaching the point that they're really up there in terms of goal contribution or have exceeded the overall rating of the rest of players in your team it may be time to let them leave. With those questions in mind, we can use some of the search criteria to find players that fit into the squad. As you start to identify Talent try to ask yourself if you can rationalize the transfer, for example would it be a step up in terms of club or League competition for that player, are there any other options at the Players Club that might be leading to a lack of play time? This is especially the case when you get a few seasons into your save so it may open the door to transfers that might not initially be realistic.

6 - Don't Make This Mistake

Do yourself a favor and try not to go all out in just signing Wonder Kids. Everybody has a few go-to signings but we try to challenge and not repeat transfers too much across career mode saves, what we actually do is keep an excel sheet of the different saves we have in the signings that we've made it's also fun to look back on over the course of the year but all in all it keeps things a lot more organized. When you're assigning squad numbers look at a player's Squad number history to see if any of those previous numbers are open in your your team with the start of a new season, it's completely fine to reorganize Squad numbers giving higher profile players priority. There are a few instances where clubs have retired shirt numbers, so check and make sure there's no overlap there. 

As you get further into your career mode different storylines will present itself, we almost always start the season by searching for high rated free agents or players with high potential. You can narrow down the search by looking for players from the Club's Nation or the most common foreign nationalities for the club, just make sure the free agent signing isn't too high rated by taking your squad average overall rating and signing a player that maybe doesn't exceed one or two more than the player's overall rating in your squad.

It's not uncommon for former players to return back to a team after a spell elsewhere we saw it in the most recent transfer window for Paul Pogba at Juventus, it's especially common for older players to end their career where they got their start. We always keep track of a club's best Youth Academy products so that if it's ever realistic for us to sign them and return them back to the club, it can make for a great storyline.

Look at a club's network of top Youth Academy players and that should inspire you to establish some scouting networks, your initial Scout should almost always stay in the club's home nation, but as you progress further on you can assign more Scouts by looking at the club's top four nationalities: a manager's nationality or playing slash managerial history abroad. There's also nothing wrong with just scouting some of your favorite Nations so have some fun here.