Football Manager 2021: Skins Installation Guide

This is a step-by-step guide that will cover how to install skins for Football Manager 2021.

Football Manager 2021

Introduction

Welcome to the latest version of the Football Manager Skins Installation Guide.

This guide will show you how to install skins correctly into Football Manager.

In addition the instructions unless stated are generally the same regardless of whether you are using the Steam, Epic or Gamepass version of the game, are gaming on Windows, Mac or Linux or purchased a disk or digital copy of the game.

Please note you are advised as always to run a virus scan on any file downloaded from the internet. Sports Interactive or SEGA have no control over third party content and as such third party downloads are used at your own risk.

It is also advisable to read any instructions on the download page for the content you are installing (or found in the readme that comes with the download) as they may contain any extra instructions that are specific to that file. This is especially important for multi-part mega-packs that may need to be extracted in a certain order.

How To Install Skins

This part of the guide will cover how to install skins, first note that skins will only work on the version of the game they are designed for (so FM21 skins will only work with FM21 and not FM20) and Touch and Full Mode skins aren’t compatible so if you are using the Touch version you will only be able to use Touch skins.

After you have downloaded a file it will generally come in one of three formats: zip, rar or 7z file.

Zip files should be automatically supported by your OS and may show up as compressed folders, Rar and 7z files may require you to download some software to extract the files, the below software is reccommended:

Windows: 7-Zip[www.7-zip.org] (Choose the most recent .exe)

MacOS: The Unarchiver[wakaba.c3.cx]

Linux: If you are using Linux hopefully you know how to download and locate programs for Linux already.

7-Zip is installed using the .exe you download, following the instructions on-screen. To install The Unarchiver simply double click on the .zip file you download from their website then drag the program it extracts (called ‘The Unarchiver’) into your apps folder.

Once installed, create a new folder somewhere you can keep track of (on your desktop for instance) and place your downloaded graphics zip, rar or 7z in it. Now we extract:

Windows: Right click on your zip, rar or 7z. Choose 7-Zip from the menu, then select ‘Extract Here’.

MacOS X: Right click (or ctrl + click) on your zip, rar or 7z. Choose ‘open with’ then select ‘The Unarchiver’.
Your file should extract and most probably create a folder in the same directory.

If you extracted an fmf file (or just straight downloaded one) this isn’t a problem, these are just files that have been packed using the FM Resource Tool, and as an end user there is no need for you to mess around extracting these files, just think of these as the same as the folder you’d get from extracting the files.

Locating Your User Data Location

Once you have downloaded and extracted your files, you now need to move them over to your User Data Location so they can be read by the game.

First make sure you have run the game at least once (just getting to the start menu and exiting is fine) so the game can create the required folders for you.

By default your User Data Location is located within the Documents\Sports Interactive\ folder. Inside this folder will then be a Football Manager folder for each version of FM you have run on that computer.

You just need to open the Football Manager folder that corresponds to the version you are using.

FM TOUCH USERS: You’ll need the Touch folder by default.

GAMEPASS/MICROSOFT STORE USERS: If you are using this version of the game then your User Data Location is in a slightly different folder, you’ll need to open the Football Manager folder for the year of the game you are using and inside this folder you’ll notice a Gamepass folder and this is the folder you need.

After you have opened the correct Football Manager folder you should see a list of folders and what you need to do is locate the folder called skins, if this folder doesn’t exist then just create a new folder and call it skins.

Now open up your skins folder and place the files you extracted inside it.

If it is an fmf file you have downloaded then just place this file directly inside the skins folder.

If you have a folder after extracting the files then you need to make sure you are copying over the correct folder because if the skin files are nested inside another folder they will not work.

So you need to open the folders you extracted until you find a folder that is laid out like this with the skin_config file present;

You then want to grab the parent folder to this folder and copy this into your skins folder, if done correctly it should look like this:

Displaying Skin In Game

To select the skin in game you will need to load the game, and go into the Preferences Menu, then in the middle you should have a section called Interface and in that is an option called Skin with a drop-down menu under it.

If you select the drop-down menu it should list all of the skins you have installed, if the skin you want is listed then just select it and press the Confirm button to load it.

If the skin you want isn’t showing.

Then you can either select the Advanced option on the left and on the top right drop down select Interface, then scroll down the Skin section and untick Use caching to decrease loading times and tick Reload skin when confirming changes in Preferences.

Or in the search bar at the top type in Skin and in the listed results untick Use caching to decrease loading times and tick Reload skin when confirming changes in Preferences.

Then click Confirm at the bottom, this should then take you out of the Preferences menu and if you re-enter, it should have refreshed the list of skins and your skin should now be in the list.

Once the skin is loaded you can turn the skin cache back on and untick the Always Reload button.

Apart from this guide, if you want us to cover any other guide related to the game “Football Manager 2021” do let us know in the comment section. We’re happy to do that for our readers.

Written by: michaeltmurrayuk

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