After the longest wait, Football Manager 26 is finally here… but is it any good?
That’s a question many people have already answered with an emphatic “no”. FM26 came out on 4 November to unprecedentedly negative reviews on Steam, with a 27% approval rating as I write this. Even the professional gaming critics who consistently heap praise on FM have been much more divided this time around.
So it was with some trepidation – and a little excitement – that I installed the FM26 demo to try out the new game for the first time. I’ve spent half a season managing Walsall in EFL League Two, while also dabbling around with Arsenal in the Women’s Super League.
Is FM26 a massive step forward that will bring the game to a wider audience? Is it a raging dumpster fire that risks the entire future of the Football Manager franchise? Or is the answer somewhere in between? Here are my thoughts…
NEW FEATURES
Let’s start with the obvious one. Football Manager is now running on the Unity game engine, which allows Sports Interactive to make a modern, smoother, nicer-looking game that can be updated more efficiently. In theory, at least.
SI have made a big point about “platform agnosticism”. Instead of developing separate games for PC, console and mobile, they are moving towards making a single game that can be playable with anything – a controller, a touchscreen, or even the good ol’ keyboard and mouse.
At first, I thought it was an admirable step towards modernising the game and making it accessible to more players. But as a staunch PC player, do I like the more mobile-friendly interface? And does it adhere to the three principles – Efficiency, Familiarity and Predictability – that SI talked about in their feature reveal blogs?
We’ll get to that in time.
One thing that has definitely improved is the graphics engine. No more shoddy gormless player models straight out of FIFA [Insert Random Year Here]. We’ve got new player animations, more realistic stadiums, and improved pitch textures… even if the trees in the background still look like dodgy 25-year-old bitmap images.
Realism gets another upgrade with the new Premier League licence – complete with official club logos, broadcast graphics, and a pre-match drone animation that’s guaranteed to give you motion sickness. All it’s missing is Peter Drury on commentary, garrulously comparing a Viktor Gyökeres tap-in to the fall of Constantinople for no reason.
Best of all, FM26 has brand new leagues! Egypt becomes only the second African nation to have an official playable league in Football Manager, and you can also now manage in Lithuania and the United Arab Emirates.
And after years of excitement and hype, women’s leagues are in the game for the very first time. There are 14 leagues across 11 nations, and an extensive database of around 40,000 players has been built up. SI have put in plenty of work to make an accurate simulation of women’s football, from the animations to the transfer system.
In another step towards inclusivity, certain players – such as the transgender Canada midfielder Quinn – use “they/them/their” pronouns in-game. Unfortunately, non-binary FMers can’t yet choose their own pronouns for their managers. I hope this is just an oversight from SI.
And lastly, international management WILL return for FM26… but not yet. After securing an official licence with FIFA, SI have promised that a new, revamped international football ‘module’ will be added as part of a free update in early 2026, ahead of the men’s World Cup next summer.
Hold on. Wasn’t there another big change to FM this year? Oh, yeah…
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT FM26
There has been a massive overhaul to tactics. You can now have separate formations and player roles for when your team is ‘In Possession’ or ‘Out of Possession’. It’s basically an updated version of the old WIB/WOB (With Ball/Without Ball) tactical screens that were in Championship Manager up until CM01/02.
At first, I was very sceptical about this change. If anything, I felt the process of developing a tactic needed to be streamlined, not made even more complicated. I also feared that the game would become even easier to exploit with unrealistic tactics.
But I can’t deny that it’s grown on me. It offers a lot more tactical flexibility, allowing you to move a Central Midfielder in possession to a Defensive Midfielder or a Wing Back out of it. Of course, you can still have the same basic shape in both phases – like I did at Walsall, where I largely stuck with the 3-5-2 wing-back system Mat Sadler has done wonders with in real-life.
As such, you might need to think a little more about your player’s attributes at both ends of the pitch. Beth Mead might be a skilful inside-forward for Arsenal in the WSL… but she’s not a natural wide midfielder, and she has low Positioning and Marking, so don’t expect her to track back when you’re defending.
There’s also a fantastic visualiser, which shows you where you might expect your players to be in certain phases of play – so you can see a 4-5-1 in defence evolve into a 3-4-3 in attack. The player positioning on the pitch diagram even changes as you set different tactical instructions.
The new FMPedia shows plenty of promise as a glossary and general user guide – easily explaining many aspects of FM and indeed of football itself. It can’t tell you why you lost 1-0 to the opposition’s only shot on target, but it’s a start.
There’s been a big upgrade to the Search bar, allowing you to search for more than just people, teams and competitions. If you’re struggling to find a screen or a news item, or you want FMPedia to explain something, type in a keyword (e.g. Training) and it’ll probably find it for you.
The Search bar logic still isn’t great, though. Guess what the first result is when I type “France” into the Search bar? That’s right…
WHAT I DON’T LIKE ABOUT FM26
As much as the match engine looks better than FM24’s, it doesn’t play better. Indeed, I’m still seeing loads of the same old annoyances from recent FMs.
There is still no collision detection, which means goalkeepers still dive through their own posts, while forwards ghost through defenders like they’re Carlos Fierro on FM12. Players still often refuse to receive simple passes and just let the opposition nick the ball instead.
Most infuriating, though, is how passive defenders are – especially out wide, where wing-backs and wingers consistently tear them to pieces. It’s as if defenders always prioritise staying in their set positions instead of trying to regain possession, even when the player on the ball is LITERALLY IN FRONT OF THEM! Yes, Aden Flint, I am talking to YOU!
On the attacking side of things, I’ve seen a lot of players hit hopeless long-range shots from almost unscorable positions, or firing into the side netting from ridiculously wide angles. Then again, if they were more competent against such inept defences, most matches would end in ice hockey scorelines, so perhaps this is SI’s ham-fisted way of keeping scores realistic.
In terms of the match experience, I often feel less like a manager and more like a spectator. The Opposition Instructions tab is hidden away in a button on the Tactics window that is so small that I often miss it completely. But one feature that is genuinely missing – and that I genuinely miss – is touchline shouts.
Yes, shouts never quite worked as intended, and most FMers just kept spamming “Encourage” and “Demand More”. But whenever I saw that a player was nervous or angry during a match on FM24, I liked to use an individual shout like “No Pressure” or “Calm Down” to settle them down. When this happens on FM26, I feel powerless to do anything – like I’ve been sent to the stands.
I also didn’t realise how much I would miss FM’s chalkboard. There’s so little data available to you in matches that it’s become much harder to analyse your tactics and figure out why your team is playing well (or otherwise).
The post-match animation sequences annoy me a lot more than they should. How often in real-life do you see the losing manager throw their arms down and have a tantrum at the final whistle?
Switching to Unity felt like a golden opportunity for SI to strip out (or at least slimline) all the bloat in Football Manager, so it’s depressing to see that so much of that has survived.
In-match sounds are still triggered by text commentary – as they have been since Championship Manager – rather than by events in the match engine. This perhaps explains why crowd reactions are so soulless and unrealistic, and why referees blow their whistles more often than an overexcited 5-year-old kid.
Press conferences are still too long and full of garbage out-of-context questions like, “Do you agree with Gillingham sacking Gareth Ainsworth?” or “Are you impressed by your fifth-choice striker’s performances on loan at Rochdale?” Feck off.
And as refreshing as it is to see women’s football in FM26, I’m alarmed by the lack of attention to detail. When I started a save with Arsenal in the WSL, there were nine journalists at my first press conference – and only one of them was a woman. Most women’s matches seem to be refereed by men as well.
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS UI?
Without doubt the thing I hate most about FM26 is the user interface. I can understand why they’ve gone with a tile-based system that’s easier for console gamers… but for veteran PC players like myself, the experience of trying to find everything in the game is disorienting.
Miles Jacobson – the studio director at SI – said it would take players around 10-20 hours to break down old muscle memory and adapt to the new interface. It took me 10 hours just to tolerate it.
I could write an entire article that simply lists every single thing that is wrong with FM26’s UI. Instead, I will try to keep it as brief as possible by outlining my general, overarching concerns.
The first is that pretty much every screen in the game needs several extra clicks to find and/or use them. To use but one example, setting up training feels like psychological torture.
You need to open this whopping huge colourless pop-up, pick a category from a drop-down menu, select the training session you want, then close the pop-up… and that only lets you change ONE training session for ONE day. Then you have to do that twice more to set up a full day’s training schedule. By the end of the week, you’ll be clicking more than the average chipmunk.
The logic used for displaying certain tiles is baffling. Many tiles are either too big, too small or completely irrelevant – and the outcome is inevitably that parts of the screen are wasted.
Do we really need to have TWO tiles on the Portal Overview screen that show our upcoming fixtures? When we get a news message in the Portal, do we really need to click on the tile just to read the article? And when you do open the pop-up, why do those pointless social media reactions have to take up more screen space than the actual news article itself?!
The game is riddled with text overflow issues – illustrated by the ellipses (…) that show up when the game can’t display all the text properly. Financial graphs and data hub charts are practically unreadable, partly because the X and Y axes are not clearly labelled.
Indeed, there are loads of cool or useful features that are absent from FM26, such as live cup draws and the Deadline Day interface. Many hardcore players like to export player attributes and statistics from the game into an XML file or an Excel spreadsheet, but that’s not possible anymore. Personally, I’m disappointed you can’t view a team’s previous results in cup competitions, which makes my Team Competition Histories mod useless.
It’s also become a lot harder (or at least more cumbersome) to find competition data and statistics. The new World menu doesn’t even include international tournaments, meaning you must use the Search bar if you want to see the 2026 World Cup results. (And there’s a 50:50 chance you’ll end up clicking the Women’s World Cup instead of the men’s tournament.)
Overall, it feels like this FM26 was designed by half a dozen different teams – none of whom are communicating with anyone else. It’s not efficient, familiar or even predictable. It’s just a jumbled and incoherent mess that doesn’t work for anyone; it alienates the older PC traditionalists and confuses the younger console-based audience.
SUMMARY
So this is what five years of working on Unity have amounted to. Sports Interactive obviously had lots of problems porting the game over to a new engine, seeing as they had to cancel Football Manager 25.
But even the most pessimistic FMer could not have imagined the state the new-look game is in right now. It doesn’t feel or play like a finished £50 game. I would even hesitate to call it a beta, as I’ve encountered so many basic bugs that surely would have been ironed out at the alpha stage of development.
Even once all those bugs do get addressed, though, I still can’t figure out who this game is for. It can’t be for the hardcore long-term player, seeing as FM26 does it best to isolate you from the wider game world.
Perhaps it’s for younger people with “lower attention spans” – the TikTok generation, if you will? Or someone who just wants to win the Quadruple in one season and then move on to another game?
SI’s analytics told them that FM24 had around 20 million players – most of whom were on console or mobile. We don’t know how long those players played the game for on average – but whether it’s 5 hours or 500, they still make money for SI. An interview Jacobson gave recently makes it clear that SI are targetting those players, and to hell with the long-term PC gamers.
SI have already applied this logic to justify removing certain features used by less than 5% of players (e.g. Draft Mode, international management, exporting data). This is what happens when a company focuses too much on analytics and money-grabbing – and neglects the core audience that it has built up over 30+ years.
This isn’t Reddit or a Radio 5 Live phone-in, so I won’t demand that certain people lose their jobs. I also won’t criticise the developers, who will undoubtedly have been under huge pressure from SEGA following the cancellation of FM25. Delaying or cancelling the game was not an option this time – they had to release something, otherwise it’s game over for Sports Interactive and for Football Manager.
The long-term future of SI and FM is a discussion for another time. When it comes to FM26… what are my overall thoughts?
I’ve been playing this series since 1999, with Championship Manager 3. One reason why I’ve stuck with the franchise for so long is its capacity to tell a rich and dynamic footballing story – one in which you are but an ordinary character in a huge universe, and not the central figure that it revolves around.
I don’t get that feeling with FM26, which gives me claustrophobia by making it unnecessarily harder to explore the wider game world. Its tactical overhaul is a welcome step forward, but I feel much less in control of my team. And as pretty as the graphics engine looks, it is undermined by an ugly and clunky user interface.
Aside from those match graphics, FM26 is not the major upgrade on FM24 that many of us were looking for. But as frustrating as it is to play and navigate through, to call it the 7th-worst reviewed game on Steam – even if it was strictly true – feels incredibly harsh. This isn’t a terrible game; it’s just… not very good. Not right now, anyway.
I have little doubt that FM26 will improve, especially as Unity allows SI to roll out more frequent patches. Frankly, it has to. I simply cannot recommend the game in its current state, and I would suggest either going back to FM24 or playing something else instead.
This has been a long old review, so thanks for sticking with it until the end. Feel free to share your thoughts about FM26 by dropping a comment below – or you can find me on Threads and BlueSky.
If you’re as disillusioned with FM26 as I am, I’ll be back soon with a list of alternative games you can play to get your football management fix. I’m also planning to write up another post – maybe in two or three weeks’ time – to discuss where Football Manager and Sports Interactive go from here.
Until then, here’s an FM26 player-referee hydra to lighten the mood…
Fuller FM 