Football Manager 2017 (and Football Manager Touch 2017) has made some changes to how the manager picture works, with one of the new features being the ability to turn a photo into a facegen image used by the regens in the game, unfortunately it seems the adding of this feature removed the ability for you to assign a image to your manager via a config file like you do with players, SI for some reason also removed the option to add a manager picture from the preferences menu.

Thankfully it is actually possible to add back the manger picture option to the preferences menu which allows you to assign an image to your manager like in the past, and this is a fairly simple change that just involves copying over one of the xml files from Football Manager 2016.

The first thing you need to do is extract the contents of the panels.fmf file from Football Manager 2016, if you don't know how to do this then follow the instructions in this guide: FM17 Skinning Guide Part 1 - How to Extract Default Files & Understanding File Structure

Once you have extracted the contents of the panels.fmf file you need to locate the 'manager profile panel preferences' xml file.

Next you need to copy this xml file into the panels\human folder for the skin you are using, or if you are using the default skins (or want the box to appear in each skin) you can just create a panels folder inside your User Data Location and inside the panels folder create a human folder and place the xml file in there. If done correctly it should look something like either of these two images:


Once you have done that load up FM17 and go to the Preferences -> Interface screen and in the bottom right corner under the Manager Screen section should now be a new Choose Picture option as the below image:


If this option isn't visible first make sure you have selected the skin you add the above file to and you have turned off the skin cache and confirmed the changes and then gone back to the Preferences Screen. (You can turn the skin cache back on once the option has appeared).

Now to select an image you just need to press the Choose Picture option, this should then bring up a popup box where you just need to navigate to the folder that has the image you want to use, select the image and click confirm. Then confirm out of the preferences menu and your chosen image should now be shown for your manager.

As an example I have assigned the FM2017 logo to be my Manager photo in the below screenshot:


Then once you save the game that image is tied to your manager, to change the image you just need to go back into the preferences menu, however there doesn't seem to be anyway to actually remove the image to get the default facegen image back.

Also note that I haven't fully tested this so it might flag up some errors somewhere, however people have been using it since Christmas so the chances of any problems seem slim. Credit also goes to bluestillidie00 for the idea of where to look for this information.

Finally if you don't have FM16 or don't want to go through the fuss of extracting the files yourself you can just download the below file.I have uploaded the file at the below link. To install it you just need to extract the zip file and place the panels folder either inside the folder for your skin or in your User Data Location.

To install it you just need to extract the downloaded zip file and place the panels folder either inside the folder for your skin or in your User Data Location, so you should have something that looks like either of the first two screenshots above, you then just need to follow the above instructions to add your actual image.

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