Football Manager 27 has now officially been released… and you know what that means!
Yep, it’s time for me to review the latest title in Sports Interactive’s long-running series. After an incredible winning streak, SI have recently hit a rough patch – with the farcical non-release of Football Manager 25, and then the scathing response to Football Manager 26 (including from this very blog).
So, what of FM27? Does the new game represent a welcome return to form, or are there still major issues that prevent the series reaching its 5-star potential?
[DISCLAIMER: This review is based on my experiences playing for over 25 hours on the FM27 Launch Preview, which was free to play between 29 October and 3 November.]
NEW FEATURES
One very big – and very important – change on FM27 is that ‘Tactical Familiarity’ has been replaced by a new system called ‘Tactical Effectiveness’. This is divided into four areas, and it greatly affects how your players perform.
Tactical Understanding analyses how complex your tactic is, and how well your players can follow its instructions. If you keep your tactic simple, players will learn faster, but rival teams may “figure it out” sooner. Complex tactics will take longer to understand, but can also be more effective for longer.
There are eight tactical elements, which your team will learn over time through training and match exposure. You can choose to focus on specific areas (e.g. Build Up, Chance Creation) with the trade-off that their familiarity with other areas (e.g. Pressing, Passing Style) might suffer. Mustermann summed it up pretty well when he compared this system to playing “Whac-A-Mole”.
Player Ability – and your players’ role suitability – also plays a big part in whether your team can deliver the results you expect of them. If you take over an ageing part-time team such as Harborough Town in the National League North and then instruct them to play high-tempo tiki-taka, it’s probably not going to end well.
Player Buy-In dictates a player’s willingness to carry out their manager’s instructions. They will be more willing if they support your management and get along well with you, and if your manager’s tendencies line up with your chosen tactic. You won’t be taken seriously if you enter the dressing room claiming to be the next Pep Guardiola, only to turn into a long-ball merchant like Sam Allardyce.
Lastly, Next Match Info will tell you how much your squad knows about your next opponents. You will need good data analysts to give you the best available data.
This all adds an extra layer of difficulty to Football Manager, which I really like. If you want to succeed on FM27, you shouldn’t underestimate how important it is to get your Tactical Familiarity up to at least a decent level. Don’t panic if you don’t get results immediately – tinkering with a couple of instructions could work, but a mid-season tactical overhaul may only make things worse.
Now let’s talk about the 3D match engine. Your manager characters are now more customisable – you can give them more skin tones, more clothes, and even hats!
You can also create a manager who uses a wheelchair… and yes, this is actually a thing. The late Klas Ingesson coached the Swedish club Elfsborg from a wheelchair shortly before his tragic death from cancer in 2014. Also, it should go without saying how important representation is to certain sections of the FM community.
In terms of the matches themselves, the crowd models have been improved. They now wear club shirts and appropriate season apparel, and they’re not all washed out. This is great and all – but they could all look like the faceless townsfolk from Untitled Goose Game for all I care, if it meant the actual action on the pitch could be made more realistic.
Lighting, shadow, weather and stadia architecture have all been enhanced – to a point. For all the pristine Premier League pitches, you also get some part-time cabbage-patch surfaces that look like they were textured in 1998. Certain dynamic camera angles – particularly on replays – look good at first glance, until they suddenly swing around and give you motion sickness.
Players have been given more muscular models, and they now have hair physics – with certain hairstyles moving as they dribble and sprint. As for newgen faces, they are certainly more varied… but whether they’re still good enough for a £50 video game made this decade is perhaps a discussion for another time.
A lot of criticism around FM26 is that it made you feel isolated from the wider world. Sports Interactive have taken steps to improve “immersion” by bringing back some much-loved features to help improve this.
The old Leagues In Focus screen is back, allowing you to quickly see the latest standings in various leagues. Competition pages have also been made more navigable, which means no more navigating through a maze of pop-ups to find the league’s top scorer.
Cup draws have also made a very welcome return – and although they’re still ‘hosted’ by the usual washed-up ex-footballers, they are considerably more silent than on FM24. Likewise, you can now get the full ‘Deadline Day’ experience again… but there are still no end-of-season reviews. That sucks.
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT FM27
The most obvious positive about FM27 is that the user interface – and indeed, the general user experience – is much more pleasant than FM26’s unpolished clickfest. However, much like Manchester City’s list of honours, this praise comes with several asterisks.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic that we can set up training schedules much more easily, and on a much prettier interface. I love that portal messages now actually include the relevant details in the messages themselves, instead of requiring you to open a pop-up to read a news article or see who’s in the NXGN 50. There are fewer pop-ups in general, with core features such as training and finances now getting their own independent pages that are easier to find.
I will also add is that this is one of the most stable FMs I have experienced. Even during my somewhat limited time with the Launch Preview, I did not have a single crash. Your mileage may vary, of course.
But there’s one new feature that I really like, and that’s the tactical tweaks. These allow you to make quick but significant changes to your gameplan – automatically changing certain instructions without you needing to do it yourself. For example, “Play With Urgency” will tell your players to hit early crosses, take more shots from distance, and increase the tempo.
Telling your team to “Shut Up Shop” to protect a lead is now much easier than before. Likewise, you can “Throw The Kitchen Sink” if you’re chasing a late goal, and even send the goalkeeper up for set-pieces if you’re desperate for some Alisson-esque heroics.
These tweaks can be turned on or off at any time. You can also select multiple tweaks at once, though some tweaks – like “Exploit The Width” and “Go Narrower” – will obviously cancel each other out.
I also get plenty of joy out of the reworked shouts, which have been reworked and reduced to just six options. Mind you, it is a little tricky to distinguish between “Up Your Game” and “Dig Deeper”. I think the former is the new “Demand More”, and the latter is the new “Encourage”, but I’m not 100% sure.
Your assistant manager will also give you feedback on what impact your shouts have had on your players. This is fine in theory, though most of the time, they only say, “There was not a significant change in the team’s body language since receiving your communication.” Cheers, David.
WHAT I DON’T LIKE ABOUT FM27
Most of my annoyances with FM27 are just holdovers from FM26 and even earlier versions. There’s a real lack of care and attention to detail when it comes to such screens as Opposition Instructions. The overall layout is much nicer now, but when your opponents make substitutions, it still keeps the starting 11 players at the top of the list. You still have to scroll down to give instructions on how to handle the players who have come on.
Likewise, if you want to do some ‘moneyball’ and search for potential signings based on their match statistics… tough luck. The filter for “Expected Goals per Shot” can only be changed in increments of 10 – not 0.10; the whole number 10. It should be obvious why you won’t find anybody who averages 10 expected goals per shot, unless Cristiano Ronaldo has taken his stat-padding to the Shropshire Under-9s County League.
Everybody do the Set Piece Shuffle!
Many screens are still plagued by those dreaded scroll bars and ellipses, which pop up when a container is just a few millimetres too small to display all its text properly. I can use the scroll wheel on my mouse to make a screen ‘jiggle’ like jelly on a plate… which is great for my immature autistic sense of humour, but not great if you’re trying to review a serious sports simulation.
Navigating the World menu to find a particular competition is still a pain in the backside. We’re lucky to even have that after the painful early days of FM26… but spend a few minutes going through the drop-down menus, and you too will be yearning for FM24 again.
I’m also frustrated to see that media interactions are still as rubbish as ever. You’ll still be asked the same old questions about players on loan at second-division clubs, or other clubs putting their reserves up for sale. I still worry that a journalist will disturb me in the shower just to ask me whether I was pleased to see Ermedin Demirovic score for Bosnia & Herzegovina.
Maybe SI have lined up a major media overhaul for Football Manager 28. We can only hope.
THE MATCH ENGINE
But who cares about the stupid press? How does the match engine actually play? Well, let’s see… [Brings out notepad]
There’s still no collision detection. Players are still taking long shots too frequently. Goalkeeper save animations still don’t correlate with the subsequent direction of the ball. Honestly, I could copy and paste everything I wrote about the FM26 match engine right here…
…but I won’t. Because in some ways, this ME is WORSE than it ever was on FM26.
Even when managing in the Bundesliga, player logic when making decisions feels more like Sunday League. It is infuriating when a player simply stands still to receive a pass instead of actively moving towards the ball – even when an opponent is rushing towards them, ready to make an easy interception. This indecisiveness is also a problem in the penalty area, where an attacker will often hesitate instead of passing or taking a shot – or, even worse, they pass the ball backwards to a defender.
Ball physics don’t make sense either. A player might appear to make a header in a specific direction… but the ball goes up perfectly vertical into the air, and then comes straight back down before the same player neatly collects it and starts dribbling. Even a prime Ronaldinho could only pull that off if he was literally playing on a different planet.
Tackles and fouls don’t feel natural, and there appears to be too many yellow cards. I’d say that around 70% of bookings are given for completely pointless pushes or shoves, rather than actual ‘footballing’ fouls such as trips and mistimed tackles. Whenever I saw a goalkeeper punt the ball long, I was always expecting a defender to push an opponent to the turf on the halfway line.
But worst of all is the passive defending. Even with all pressing instructions taken to the max, defenders don’t press their opponents urgently enough or actively look to win the ball back. On a similar note, I found that low byline crosses to the near post were overly reliable at creating goals, because defenders are too busy admiring the scenery to position themselves to deal with the threat.
It pains me to write this, but the match engine on Football Manager 27 hardly resembles football at times. It feels like SI have spent too much time making the graphics engine look a little better, and not enough time actually making the matches themselves play out more realistically.
Granted, many of these issues can and will be fixed over time with patches. I just pray that SI don’t overcorrect (as they usually do when it comes to the ME) and, say, make gegenpressing overpowered yet again.
SUMMARY
Football Manager 27 is a better game than Football Manager 26. Even if only in the sense that being kicked in the groin is better than having your kneecaps smashed repeatedly with cricket bats.
I doubt many people will disagree that the interface has been improved, and that there is a much greater sense of immersion within the game world. SI have clearly taken our concerns on board and have undone most of the damaged wreaked by FM25’s disastrous development cycle, and the desperate decision to outsource FM26’s UI to an external studio that had no prior experience with sports simulation games.
Yet there is still a long way to go. Many screens remain poorly optimised, and the neat little ‘quality of life’ details that we loved about previous FMs just aren’t there.
Even worse, the whole game is seriously compromised by a dodgy match engine which makes elite athletes look like they have never kicked a football before. It is baffling how the most ‘sophisticated’ sports engine in the world of gaming has players ignoring simple passes or forgetting how to tackle, and ball physics that defy the laws of gravity. SI really can and should do much better than this.
So is FM27 worth buying right now? If you liked FM26 and are happy to buy again, sure. If you enjoyed FM24 but bounced off FM26, it’s probably a good time to upgrade.
But what if you have been underwhelmed by recent FMs and have been waiting for the series to become great again? Sadly, I don’t think this is going to win you over yet.
The consensus seems to be that FM27 is the game FM25 should have been before its cancellation. This technically puts the game two years behind schedule, and seeing that it still can’t get some fundamental UI/UX basics right, that makes me seriously worried about the future direction of the franchise.
How many more years will it be before we even have a new game that is as feature complete as FM24? How many more years until we have a match engine that produces a realistic simulation of football? Or press conferences that are actually meaningful and contextual? Or a smart transfer AI, for that matter?
That’s not to say FM27 is a complete write-off. I will probably still purchase the game at some point, just so I can finally start the Arsenal Women save I’ve been planning for the past two years. Unfortunately, this is still several patches away from being an enjoyable long-term experience.
Football Manager 27 is now available on Steam, the Epic Games Store and Xbox Game Pass.
If you have any thoughts on FM27, or indeed any thoughts about this review, feel free to drop a comment below. You can also find me on Threads and Bluesky.
