Review: Soccer Manager 2026

It’s the game everyone has been talking about in recent weeks… and, oh boy, hasn’t it been divisive?

An experienced team of British developers have been working on their latest football management simulation for years – and the reception has been quite mixed. Some people think the new graphics engine is a huge step forward. Others think the devs have completely sold out to the mobile market, and that they only want to grab your money instead of giving you the full managerial experience.

Well, folks. I’m sure you’ve been waiting to read my opinions on this… so here they are.

This is my review for Soccer Manager 2026.

BACKGROUND

Based in the north-west of England, Invincibles Studio (formerly Soccer Manager Ltd) have been working on football management games for about 20 years now. They started out making a multiplayer game – Soccer Manager Worlds, which has taken a backseat for the past decade as the developers have pivoted towards a single-player experience.

I was a beta tester for the early single-player Soccer Manager games in 2015, and I have been following the series’ progress since then. SM has had a series of radical visual overhauls, but in terms of improvements to the actual game, development has been painfully slow. As such, my previous reviews have not been very positive.

Soccer Manager 2019 was a janky mobile game ported to PC that kept begging you to buy microtransactions, while SM20 wasn’t much better. SM21 took a few positive steps forward, but then things nosedived to a new low with SM22. If your match engine shows play carrying on as normal after a goal has clearly been scored, your football simulator is not fit for purpose.

For the next couple of years, Invincibles stopped porting their mobile games to Steam and focussed solely on the handheld market. I played Soccer Manager 2023 on my iPad when it came out. It sucked.

SM surprisingly returned to Steam in October 2024, with Soccer Manager 2025 coming out to a fairly positive reaction. Interestingly, when the current 2025/2026 season began, Invincibles decided to just update the existing game to Soccer Manager 2026 instead of releasing a brand new product.

Though I am an older, more traditional gamer who remains very sceptical about the ‘live services’ model, I can understand why a free-to-play title would go down this route. You don’t need to pay a subscription to have temporary access to the game, and in-game purchases are optional, so I don’t feel as apprehensive about trying SM out again. It deserves another shot at least.

STARTING OUT

“Who wants to be a millionaire?” (I don’t.)

SM26 allows you to manage in over 90 leagues across 54 countries. A relatively new addition to the series is the option to ‘Create a Club’, and then build them up from the lowest playable league in your chosen nation.

A number of major clubs such as Manchester City, Bayern Munich and Bayer Leverkusen are fully-licenced. Most Premier League teams don’t have their official badges – only unlicenced imitations – but it’s no big deal. Licences are expensive.

Anyone who’s played a Soccer Manager game before will already be familiar with the basics. Setting up a save game is incredibly simple, and the user interface is clean and intuitive. They even still have that trusty sidebar, which is certainly more navigable than whatever Football Manager 26 has!

But, of course, because this is a freemium game, you will get those annoying pop-ups asking if you want to spend real-life money on in-game currency. The first pop-up I got after creating my custom club was asking me to select a starting budget. I could keep my wallet closed and start with a shoestring budget… or I could spend £4 to give myself an extra million quid.

You know… I think I’ll bide my time before I spend any money on this game. Let me see if it’s actually worth it first…

WHAT I LIKED

Meet my new-look Romford Town squad, featuring Shrewsbury legends Josh Emmanuel and Lee Angol… and Jordan Graham. Remember him?

So… what’s new? I like the reworked objectives, which give you rewards if you achieve certain goals. Hopefully, this means the board will no longer sack you if you can’t win Serie A with Cremonese in the first season (apologies to Jamie Vardy).

SM26 is also more generous with its in-game currency, which means you can improve your manager’s skills faster without needing to spend as much real-life money. Boosts can be used to heal your players’ injuries and improve their morale, and Gold can help you sign players while the transfer window is closed. That was particularly useful when my team was struggling for goals, and I found that Lee Angol was available.

I must say that the new match graphics engine looks good. The stadium designs are cool, and the player faces look realistically human (even if they’re a bit goofy). As for the match engine itself… eh, I’ll get to that soon.

That’s it for major changes, but the core experience remains pretty decent. Processing is pretty smooth, selecting your team and tactics is quite straightforward, and you can still progress through the game very quickly.

I found the overall experience (at least outside of matches) to be more satisfying than on SM22, when Sevilla’s squad revolted against my novice manager for an entire season. To be fair, that might be because I started in the lower leagues this time, which is perhaps how the developers want you to play the game. Unfortunately, things went off the rails as soon as we actually started playing football…

WHAT I DIDN’T

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Even by Soccer Manager’s basement-level standards, the SM26 match engine is bad. It’s not even “I’m gonna make some fun YouTube compilation videos out of this” bad. It’s just BAAAAAD.

I could spend the rest of this article just writing about everything that’s wrong with the ME. Instead, here’s a bullet-point list of the ‘greatest hits’.

Players constantly fall over in a slapstick fashion whenever they get tackled. It’s like every player in the National League is either Charlie Chaplin or Dick Van Dyke.
Defenders have no sense of positional awareness and often leave strikers with wide open spaces to dribble into.
Goalkeepers are allowed to run from their goal lines to save penalties. They can also teleport to save shots that look like certain goals.
The text commentary often contradicts what happens on the pitch. A goalkeeper punting the ball long to the striker is described as a “slide rule pass”.
Players don’t line up in the proper positions at kick-offs. Right-backs start off in the left-back position, and vice versa.
Finishing is terrible. I played four pre-season friendlies against teams at different levels, and every single one ended in a 0-0 draw. I also saw several matches where a team (either my team or the opposition) registered 20+ shots without scoring a single goal.
There is STILL no offside rule.

The assistant manager’s ‘advice’ is practically useless. The AI-generated Jason Tindall lookalike could be telling you that your attackers are outplaying the opposition defence, even if you’ve registered one single shot on target in the first 30 minutes.

Even outside of matches, there are loads of annoying little bugs that this former SM beta tester cannot believe have slipped through. Stuff like the league stats pages always showing the Premier League by default, rather than the league your team is playing in – or that setting the league table view to show only home or away records doesn’t work.

WE MUST TALK ABOUT…

I keep moaning about match engines for far too long in these reviews, so I’m gonna change the subject for once. Let’s talk about transfers instead.

Transfer logic is still a little wonky. Newcastle sold Bruno Guimarães to Tottenham and then bought essentially a whole new midfield, while Giorgi Mamardashvili randomly went to Monaco just weeks after signing for Liverpool. I also had several Premier League teams try to sign my useless reserve players on loan.

The process of signing and selling players has effectively turned into an auction. When several clubs bid for one of your players, you can try to up the asking price, but this never works. The highest bidder will refuse to budge from their original offer, and everyone else will drop out, making that whole feature pointless.

Being on the other side of the auction isn’t much fun either. Let’s say you’ve found the player of your dreams, and he’s available for £100,000. Well, I’m afraid you’re competing with about six other clubs for his signature, and you’ll probably need to pay another 100 grand just to win the auction.

At least things improve when it comes to negotiating contracts. The player will give you his demands, and if your initial offer is close enough, you will have a second chance to win him over. After that, it’s basically “take it or leave it”.

SUMMARY

We are being seriously overrun in midfield.

It’s been close to four years since I last played Soccer Manager on Steam, and I’m afraid to say this doesn’t feel like four years’ worth of improvements. It’s still essentially a PC port of a mediocre mobile game… though Invincibles Studio are at least more honest about their intentions than Sports Interactive.

But as much as I trashed the match engine, Soccer Manager 2026 isn’t actually that broken. Indeed, I found it pretty fun to play in short bursts. I probably wouldn’t spend much money on SM26 (if any), but as a free-to-play game, it’s worthy of a trial at least.

FULLER FM RATING: 2* – National League.

If you’ve played Soccer Manager 2026, you can let me your thoughts by leaving a comment below. You can also find me on Threads and Bluesky.

There will be more reviews to come on Fuller FM soon. Until next time, thanks for reading.