Lower League Manager Skins by Tyburn - FM21

One of the fundamentals of the LLaMa/LLM ethos is avoiding the use of the player/staff search function and promoting the use of scouts to find players and the job centre to find staff.

This fantastic skin from Tyburn does just that.

Simply put it removes these buttons from the game. Established LLaMa's won't use them anyway but for the new budding LLaMa the temptation is removed

It is based on the standard skin that comes with the game

Installation Instructions

1. Place the download in the following folder - \Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2021\skins

2. Load the game and navigate to Preferences in the main menu

3. Type Skin into the search bar at the top

4. Select the skin from the drop-down menu

5. Shut down the game and restart the computer

This skin, much like the basic LLM skin removes the player and staff search buttons but also does a whole lot more!

As the name suggests It has absolutely no attributes or stars for maximum difficulty and arguably maximum realism. You will need the utmost trust in your scouts and will have to rely on your own eyes when dealing with players.

You'll find yourself taking a lot of notes from coach reports and it's a steep learning curve but very rewarding if you stick with it.

Tyburn explains his motivation to create the skin here:

"I had gotten lazy in using the star system throughout the game. Only ever signing prospects with solid 4 star potential with a blacked out 5th. Continually altering my tactics based purely on what star rating any given player had in a chosen role and position. Abusing the player search functions. I wanted rid of them.

I’ve found this way of playing the game totally liberating. It’s made me look at screens I’ve only ever glanced over, in much more detail. Scouts are now vital and reports need to be read. Even past employment history has become more interesting and important, especially for staff, as adverts (or manual searching) will be the only way to recruit. The goal has been to remove absolutes and introduce vagueness for a more realistic, challenging experience. Personally I can’t see myself ever going back to playing with attributes and stars again. The skin works particularly well with a LLM style of play. I hope you enjoy. "

This skin is not for the faint of heart and may be a step too far in the eyes of some but it is highly recommended by us here at the9llamas as it forces you to immerse yourself in the game more than ever before leading to a far more rewarding overall experience

WHAT IT DOES:

• Removes ALL traces of the star system. No current ability stars, no potential ability stars, no reputation stars, no staff stars in training

• Removes ALL traces of any text referencing current and potential ability and all relevant panels have been tweaked to make it look like the system was never there, including the removal of most hints (see notes below)

• Removes the numerical attributes and replaces them with icons that change colour based on the thresholds you set and a player’s progression using the latest base version of “Non-Numeric Attributes”

• Removes numbered opinions from scout reports

• Removes the player search and staff search functions

• Adds text descriptions of reputation where possible to replace the stars

• Adds stadium pictures and player faces to multiple screens

• Adds various other graphical enhancements to the "base" skin

The link below takes you to Tyburns thread on the SiGames forum where you can download the skin and ask him questions.