It’s time to discuss the state of Football Manager 26 – and the series as a whole.
After a launch period that was nothing short of a PR disaster, and a full release that alienated much of its core audience, Sports Interactive’s long-running franchise is at its lowest ebb for over 20 years. The community has been firmly split on FM26 – with many players pointing their fingers at SI or SEGA for producing a pile of rubbish, and other players putting their fingers in their ears and insisting that everything is fine.
How did this happen? Can SI turn their fortunes around? And what does the future potentially hold for FM? Questions, questions, questions…
SITUATION REPORT
Okay, so we’ve had a month of playing Football Manager 26. Let’s try and put emotion and hyperbole to one side for a moment. Is the game really that bad?
I didn’t enjoy playing the FM26 demo, and navigating through the game wasn’t much fun. But let’s not pretend that Football Manager 2024 was a flawless masterpiece. It had its own interface issues, the match engine was very dated, and it felt like the game had barely evolved in 10 years.
Football Manager needed a refresh. Sports Interactive rebuilt the game on Unity, with a new “platform agnostic” UI that is more navigable for newer gamers (in theory at least). The graphics engine feels much slicker and more like a video game from this century… if you gloss over stuff like Cole Palmer phasing through Virgil van Dijk as if he’s Casper the freakin’ ghost.
Also, with Unity, there is so much more potential for modifying the game than there was on FM26. BassyBoy and Arthur Ray are working on a ‘mega stadium pack’ which adds real-life stadiums to FM26, including the Parc des Princes in Paris. The lighting is a bit off, and crowds still need some work… but right now, it’s a solid proof of concept. Given a few more months of development, the results could be mind-blowing.
Unity also allows SI to roll out more frequent patches and address players’ concerns quicker. After the game’s full release, they got into a habit of releasing a new patch every week (more or less). These patches are usually rolled out first to the ‘Steam Public Beta Track’, and then to the main game soon after.
Many bugs, glitches and gripes have already been fixed… but others still need to be addressed. One patch that fixed an issue with UEFA coefficients only ended up breaking them in a completely different way. Knock-on effects like that make me wonder how much testing SI do for their fixes.
So, the game is still not in a great state. Even several weeks after release, it feels less like a complete experience, and more like an alpha version of Football Manager 27 that we pay around £50 for the ‘privilege’ of testing.
Two-and-a-half years after the big “Future of Football Manager” announcement, the results are just not good enough. Many FMers have had enough of SI constantly promising them jam tomorrow. Longer-term players (including myself) are very concerned about the direction the game is going in, and are perhaps starting to feel that it might no longer be for them.
Do SI deserve criticism for the decisions they have taken with FM26? Or should publishers SEGA shoulder most of the blame for putting them in such an awkward position? I will try to answer those questions (and more) later… but first, it’s time to talk about the Football Manager community.
A DIVIDED COMMUNITY
The FM community is generally pretty tame and wholesome, certainly compared to other gaming cliques (I’m looking at you, EA Sports FC). Yet it’s hard to deny that the two-year farce surrounding FM25 and now FM26 has brought out the worst in certain sections of the player base.
Take the Steam reviews, for example. As of writing, 70% of all English-language reviews of FM26 are negative. I’m not going to call it ‘review-bombing’ – that would imply there’s a deliberate, organised and dishonest campaign to tank the game’s reputation, which there isn’t. But it does seem very harsh.
Constructive, well-reasoned criticisms are drowned out by hyperbolic, destructive feedback that basically amount to “this game is a stinking pile of garbage”. You really should watch Brasilian Fury’s video, where he reads out some of the worst reviews and gives them the ‘respect’ they deserve.
The Sports Interactive forums aren’t much better. There appears to be a clear divide – and perhaps even some tribalism – within the forums.
On one side, there are people who argue FM26 is a brilliant modernisation of the game, and who believe the ‘haters’ are either trying to sabotage SI or are just stupid. They will frequently shut down any criticism of FM, no matter if it’s justified.
On the other side, you have those who think it’s a complete write-off that should never have been released, and the developers are paying content creators to say nice things about it. The loudest posters who always complain about bugs are often also the quietest in terms of actually reporting bugs to SI.
“If your opinion doesn’t match mine, you are the enemy,” is the general feeling I get. The FM community has never been more divided or more toxic – on both sides of the divide.
I will admit I am part of the problem too. Hyperbole is literally the worst thing ever, but even I have resorted to it on the forums. The lack of a working collision engine leaves me “fuming”. Some of the design decisions made by SI are “baffling”. The fact FM26 no longer keeps playing records for players who become staff members is “inexcusable”.
However, I will always draw the line when it comes to abusing staff members at SI – and especially the studio director.
Miles Jacobson has never been the cuddliest, most approachable game developer… but he is human. Last year, at around the time FM25 was delayed, he withdrew from all social media except LinkedIn after being sent death threats and horrific anti-Semitic abuse (Miles’ late mum was Jewish).
Many posters on the Football Manager sub-Reddit – r/footballmanagergames – seem to have very disturbed parasocial relationships with Jacobson. They see him as a tyrannical dictator who intentionally makes terrible games to annoy the player base, and that his crimes against entertainment deserve nothing short of a public execution. That’s before I even touch on all the racism, homophobia, sexism and ableism you can find over there.
I have not visited r/footballmanagergames since the FM26 beta came out, and with good reason. If I reposted some of the Redditors’ comments on my blog, I could probably expect to receive an email from Jacobson’s lawyer, if not a home visit from the police.
If you’re one of those people posting these messages, please step back and think. Your words can have a devastating impact on the target’s mental health, and the consequences can be tragic.
Criticise FM all you like, folks, but please don’t get personal. Play the ball, not the opponent.
PROBLEMS AT SI
That doesn’t mean I’m going to shill for Jacobson like he’s my best mate. For one thing, I’ve never met him or even communicated with him online.
As well as being the studio director, Jacobson is also SI’s chief spokesperson. SI’s inability or perhaps even unwillingness to give that job to a PR specialist baffles me, especially after reading the various interviews he gave in the run-up to FM26’s release.
Take this quote from GQ, where Jacobson talks about the trade-offs that came with building a new UI for FM26, knowing that certain players might not like it:
“People who aren’t uber hardcore are coming into the studio and loving it. The uber hardcore are struggling to find where things are. We won’t bring everyone with us.”
To some people, that last sentence is just a throwaway remark. To others, it gives the impression SI are ambivalent about the longer-term, hardcore players who might struggle with the new interface. However you look at it, it’s definitely a clumsy line.
To be fair, this isn’t just a Miles thing. SI originally changed the Space Bar’s functionality, so that it would continue the game instead of going through unread messages in your Portal first. After much complaining, they brought the old functionality back as an option in Preferences, but they called it a ‘Legacy’ mode.
This has the same energy as would-be European Super League clubs describing their local supporters as “legacy fans” – as opposed to “future fans” from higher-spending markets in Asia, America, etc. It’s like they’re begrudgingly saying, “Urgh, guess we still have to cater to the stubborn old guard as well.”
Anyway… why did SI move to Unity? Why did they announce the move to Unity years ahead of time?
When the decision was made to switch game engines, surely SI should have anticipated what that would entail. FM was originally written in the C++ programming language, but Unity uses C# (C Sharp). Rebuilding all that original code in Unity would be like me – a typical uncivilised Brit who only speaks and reads English – trying to assemble a desk using a manual that’s written in Korean.
Jacobson says that all (or nearly all) SI developers have now been trained in Unity. That’s all well and good, but it seems they still needed outside help just to get the game finished, given that the UI was apparently co-developed with The Knights of U – a Poland-based company who previously worked on Disco Elysium. That might explain why the interface is so disjointed and inconsistent.
Also, how long have they been working on FM26 – as in, building it from the ground up?
Depending on who you ask, it’s somewhere between two years (when they finished FM24) and five years (when they launched Project Dragonfly). If it’s at the lower end of the scale, that’s obviously not enough time to make such an immense sports simulation game. If it’s at the higher end and this is the result… then good lord, something has gone horribly wrong at SI.
But is it entirely SI’s fault? I wouldn’t be so sure.
DAMN YOU, SONIC!
People wonder why SI released FM26 in the state it was in. Frankly, it feels like SEGA gave them no choice.
Delaying or (in FM25’s case) cancelling an annual sports video game for one year would be a big financial blow for both developer and publisher. Doing it again for a second year would be untenable. At that point, SEGA would likely lose their patience with SI and perhaps lay off staff members, if not dissolve the studio completely.
It’s not unheard of for a major publisher to ‘sack’ the developers of a struggling video game and move development to another studio. Paradox Interactive have done that with a couple of their city-building games in recent years. Surviving Mars changed studios in 2021 (though the original developers have since returned with a ‘Relaunched’ version), and the infamously buggy Cities: Skylines 2 will move from Colossal Order to Iceflake next year.
You can’t rule out a repeat of the Championship Manager split from 2003. Shortly after the CM4 fiasco, SI parted company with original publishers Eidos and went to SEGA, who published their rebranded Football Manager series. Meanwhile, Eidos kept the Championship Manager name but created a new game with a new studio, who struggled to compete with FM for the next five years before conceding defeat.
Maybe SEGA will instead keep the faith, but just take a more hands-on role in how SI is run? Perhaps their Japanese overlords might want a change of leadership. As previously mentioned, some people in the community would be glad to see Miles Jacobson go (perhaps too glad), but they should be careful what they wish for…
Miles has worked at Sports Interactive for 30 years, and has been studio director for at least 20. He’s now 54 years old, and has been open about his health issues and his need to sort out a succession plan for the company.
As proud as he undoubtedly is of his life’s work, he won’t – and can’t – keep doing it forever. So what happens when he goes?
Jacobson has frequently insisted that FM will never have paid downloadable content on his watch (aside from the in-game editor). This isn’t strictly true.
The console and mobile versions each have ‘microtransactions’, which allow players to buy a golden generation youth intake or extra transfer funds. This is standard fare for mobile games, and I don’t mind it. They’re entirely optional, in that you don’t need to buy them to make progress. If you want to spend a few extra quid to rise through the leagues faster, you do you.
Issues arise when developers or publishers start putting key features or game modes behind paywalls, or make it so that you essentially have to pay to win. This cynical cash-grabbing has already happened with some other football games, who make you pay extra to play in additional leagues, or even to have an enjoyable experience at a big-league club.
Who’s to say that a new SEGA-approved studio director wouldn’t go down this route? Get ready for Football Manager 29, where you pay £50 for the base game, another £10 for competent goalkeepers, and an extra £20 if you want to manage in the Premier League without all your players hating your guts…
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?
…and that’s if there even is a Football Manager 29. It feels inevitable that Sports Interactive will one day abandon the annual release schedule – and instead release a single game called Football Manager, which would likely include regular updates, a roadmap (LOL), and season database DLC.
Imagine that FM moves to a subscription model, where you must pay (for example) £6.99 per month to access the game, and an extra fee for updated squads and leagues. If you only play FM for a few months a year, that’ll work out pretty well for you – but frequent year-round players will be much more out of pocket.
The ‘games as a service’ model is designed to fleece players out of their hard-earned money. It also discourages developers from actually finishing their games – instead leaving them free to fob off customers with empty promises that features will be added or improved “later”.
I also hate the thought of ‘live services’, which pressure players into logging in frequently to avoid missing out on exclusive time-limited content. I’ve already seen this with my favourite game of all-time – Age of Empires II, which has become an unwieldy mess with about 197 different civilizations, and seasonal events that give you the chance to earn pointless skins and icons.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love playing AoE2. But sometimes I just want to play the Joan of Arc campaign or destroy the Byzantine empire like it’s still 1999, alright?
I’ve said before that FM becoming a ‘game as a service’ would kill my interest in the franchise. Maybe I’m becoming an old man yelling at a cloud, but it just doesn’t sit right with me.
But there’s enough doom and gloom in the FM community as is. I want to end this article on a more optimistic note. After all, FM26 isn’t that bad – honest!
FM26 might not be the instant success we were hoping for, but it is the foundation for the future of Football Manager. It can attract a younger and more diverse audience. There’s greater potential for modding. The possibilities are truly endless.
And even after 30 years, it’s apparent that SI still care about their customers. The recent announcement that shouts were returning to FM26 shows that they do take feedback on board. I just wish they communicated with us in a more honest and more natural way, instead of talking in business mumbo-jumbo that looks like ChatGPT – or obsessively using statistics and analytics to justify every single decision they make.
Think of it this way. FM24 was a 3* current ability workhorse who always did a decent job for you… but they were in their mid-30s, their legs had gone, and they really needed to retire before they became completely senile.
By contrast, FM26 is a hot prospect fresh out of your youth intake, with 1.5* current ability and 5* potential. Their technicals are still very raw, their personality is ‘Balanced’ (i.e. ‘A bit rubbish’), and they can be a bit volatile – but with some training and mentoring, they just might become your next big superstar.
That time does feel a long way off, mind.
That was a lengthy post, I won’t lie. I hope it’s somewhat coherent and that I haven’t rambled on for too long.
Feel free to share your thoughts on the future of Football Manager below, but please keep them as constructive, civil and respectful as possible. You can also find me on Threads and Bluesky.
Fuller FM 