Sega and Sports Interactive have confirmed that Football Manager 27, the annual football management sim title, is releasing later this year, and it’s kicking off straight away with a feature deep dive.
The first topic in this series of deep dives is the improvements coming to the user interface. Football Manager 26 sees the series recieving a major UI change that was interesting in concept but was a little botched in practice that took some updates before it played well on mouse and on gamepad.
The game interface is now adaptable and scalable to various screen shapes, including ultrawide support.
One of the more interesting changes to FM26’s new UI layout is having nested pop-up menus. Some of the choices to be pop-up menus meant searching for go-to screens take too many clicks/presses, like having the tactical screen buried under the Match Day tab. Tactics is now back on the main tab, as it should. So is Training, now back on the main tab.
FM27 will feature what’s dubbed the control panel, buttons below the main and sub tabs, where you can perform key choices straight from that screen without having to navigate elsewhere. Less clicks/button presses. This includes responsibility delegation, budget adjustments, advice from staff and more.
Messages in the inbox will now show the thing it’s notifying within the same menu. Instead of having to go to the messages to see that there is a scout report, then click, then see the menu with the scout report, said scout report is now presented right in the inbox, with prompts to take any action available in the same menu.
Some game screens, like the Portal, will allow players to change what information the tiles are displaying, to fit the player’s own preferences. It’s a drop-down menu that can replace another information with the same size.
Bookmarks now come with text descriptions rather than just icons, and they sit at the sub menu tab.
It’s rather interesting that the next Football Manager game was announced two days ago with no reveal trailer or anything, just straight to the business of what’s being improved with this year’s iteration.
But presenting UI changes that, on paper, sounds like much-needed improvements does make sense for Football Manager 27. The game is all about the UI. They don’t call it a “spreadsheet game” for nothing. So these UI improvements designed for efficiency matters. As the video states it clearly: “less clicks, more gameplay.”
Football Manager 27 will be releasing later this year. No platforms are confirmed just yet.