Data is just numbers. But when data are connected together in a relationship, that’s information. It’s something I remember a lecturer imparted to the class about the power of databases. But from that information, if you will, I inferred another finding: multiple links of information can tell a story.
So it comes to no surprise to me that the Football Manager series, oftentimes enamouredly regarded as just a spreadsheet software, is a potent storytelling platform. How else can you explain the appeal of this 20-year-old institution of a gaming franchise that has many of its fans lose countless hours looking at a bunch of number simulating football games?
And let’s not scoff at how much of an institution Football Manager is. If the automotive industry has Gran Turismo, Football Manager is for the football industry. That giant dataset they have on players have informed real football teams of who’s the next big wunderkid, and at least one person with Football Manager experience ended up as the backroom staff for football team themselves.
While Football Manager is a proper football management sim, I personally don’t view it as such. I don’t follow the sport, wasn’t good enough to kick balls either. But my fascination for the series is from the point of view of a gamer who played a lot of strategy games and RPGs to see that this spreadsheet game is a potent story generator.
With Football Manager 2026, Sports Interactive has made efforts to make the your world of football, from the eyes of your created football manager, much more alive. It comes with massive fundamental changes to the game, including a whole new game engine and UI design, that was so big that it had for the first time in 20 years skipped an annual release. And I get it. Even Football Manager 2026, which should be dropping soon at the time of this writing, will be dropping in hot. It’s not perfect. Bugs galore. But the big, fundamental changes this year’s title is making is all worth the rough edges it will have for now which surely will be sorted in the coming months.
To preface this: my experience with Football Manager is a sporadic one. I played hours and hours of Football Manager 2015 and in the early 2010s dabbled with one of the Football Manager Touch games. I also played the latest iteration of the game prior to FM2026, Football Manager 2024 albeit on a console. I’m not what you call a FM fan, but this specific set of experience I had with the series should give you an interestingly different datapoint for your FM knowledge base.
A Much Better Presentation
The first thing you would do in a more modern FM game is to create your manager. From the start you can see the graphical updates. The 3D model of the managers you create, man or woman, looks more convincingly a person. That also greatly benefits players who have saves that goes for in-game years, where real-life players retire and replaced with newgens.
These newgens don’t look like a botched Photoshop job of a mugshot anymore, investing in the 3D models was worth it, even if they’re not up to the level of model from EA Sports FC. Older FM games don’t have quite the fidelity but here you can make acceptable looking people (with some choices to not make them abide to beauty standards) with adjustable morphs for various part of the face. I’m playing on a lower-end PC so the visuals I’m seeing isn’t as crisp as the gameplay trailers have shown, but it’s nice that existing machines that can run FM should still take on FM 2026, albeit with less eye candy.
But what really strikes me about the Manager creation aspect is how much of an RPG feel it has. Sure, previous games asked for your background and origin before becoming a manager, but it goes beyond that in FM2026. Pick what sort of coaching license you have at the start. Pick your specialisation which determines what training regimen you’re good at coaching. You can pick at most three at the cost of not being moderately good across the board, jack-of-all-trades style, or only pick one to really specialise on that specific training. You can even pick a personality to determine your mental stats and how you deal with people: be authoritative or inspiring? Those are traits you can start off with and more can be gained throughout your career. I feel like I’m building my character for an RPG, and you know what? Lovely stuff.
Even the way you interact with people has changed. Instead of the usual five different choices with a selection of tone, the dialogue choices you have with the press, footballers, even agents representing said footballers have more nuance. It’s not a scale of positive to negative at all times. So when a journalist ask about the immediate impact of your newly-signed player, the option that would otherwise seen as “negative” is marked as easing expectations. The way you express interest on a player by talking to their agent lets you be bullish if they are withholding information, or be chummy and show genuine interest as part of the courtsmanship that comes part and parcel of getting signatures on contracts. It’s also nice that these conversations are now laid out vertically, as some of them are supposed to be phone text conversations.
Somehow, Disco Elysium’s paradigm shift in text box display found itself here.
Don’t blame me for looking at the Football Manager series as an RPG, FM26 makes it even more obvious. And it’s not like FM is an outlier, the Crusader Kings series can be seen as an RPG despite it being designed primarily as a strategy game, like FM is nowadays.
Football Manager 26 Has Controller Support (But It’s Not Good Yet)
Another interesting change I noticed with this year’s FM is the ability to use a controller. FM has been available for consoles for some time and now the full-fledged PC version of FM has gamepad support right off the bat.
If you’re coming from FM Console, it’s an interesting experience, mostly because of the UI change, which means how you navigate around the menus have also changed. No more having to operate specific sliders with the right stick or d-pad only and have some hyperlinks (in particular in news pieces) unclickable, it also feature a cursor. Not quite a Destiny cursor, it’s a bit lumbering, the cursor is a pointer and there’s no way to fine-tune the sensitivity or dead-zones. So if you’re playing on say a handheld PC that has built-in desktop controls using the embedded controller, that is a much better way to navigate the menus using a controller. I argue the cursor on FM24 Console has a better feel to it.
(On a side note: the notification for controller support and layout in FM26 only appears once, during the initial setup. Once booted in, you’ll never see it again, similar to… FM24 Console. I’ve played that game for 50 hours and I only discovered that FM24 Console actually does have the ability to switch to a cursor control because I have to look it up online to see if this is new to FM26! It wasn’t! And I powered through FM24 Console on a drifting stick of a controller calling it a struggle is not enough to demonstrate the anguish I had whenever a menu can only be interacted with the stick. The controller layout prompt never appears again, but unlike when I played FM24 Console last time, I did see that it says you can enable a cursor by pressing down the left stick. Is this a game critic suffering through a skill issue or an objectively bad user experience? You tell me.)
The controller controls are not reliable at the moment, however, mostly because the UI is still a hot mess in terms of robustness. In other words, the UI doesn’t behave as intended a lot of times, making it cumbersome to use certain features. Still laden with bugs, essentially. I can’t judge the new controller control scheme fairly until it can behave as intended.
Sleek New UI, But It’s Hiding Too Much Stuff
Speaking of the UI, FM26 redesigned the interface in a major way. Your muscle memory will undoubtedly be annoyed that some of the menus are buried or gone.
My most used menu is the Assistant Manager’s squad report, a way to see an overview of the First Team squad and quickly assess what positions are lacking players or the right players. That’s now rolled into what’s called the Squad Planner within the new Recruitment tab. It makes sense that it’s placed here, since it’s more used in tandem with scouting players, instead of the Squad tab. But it sure is a learning curve, this is a whole new tool that doesn’t quite replicate the one it removed, and is designed for a different use case. So it’s something managers old and new have to figure out how best it can be.
The UI design is interesting as it tries to declutter the oh-so-many aspects of club management. Some major menus, like training, is now a pop-up instead of a full tab. I presume most players automate this feature, it’s too much busywork anyway for the casual player who only needs to tweak a little bit of them. FM26 makes it more upfront that you can, and should, delegate a bunch of the work to your staff. There’s plenty of emails where it reminds you at the bottom if you wish to delegate the task or handle them yourself in future instances. And it is nice that the game isn’t judgemental if you’re not a workhorse that runs the club by micromanaging every single aspect. Just pick what you want to focus on, and let the staff handle the rest.
Yet I can’t stop feeling like some features have been shafted or de-emphasied thanks to the new UI. As mentioned before, setting up training is now a few layers of clicks deep. The data analysis, one of the coolest new additions to Football Manager in the recent years in my opinion, might as well as not exists if I wasn’t looking for it. Sure, there are bookmarks you can put, but the icons for them are so tiny, and why are they icons when the tabs never used them as such?
I also don’t like that the tactics menu, the bread-and-butter of FM, feels so awkward to use. Not all the drag-and-drops I used to do are working. Way too many ways of inserting a player into a position but each of them flawed in some way. Stuff like opposition tactics and team tactics are buried too deep for my liking.
Instead of having custom bookmarks, I would actually prefer to customise the tabs themselves. If a manager wants a quicker access to the training and tactics menu without having to go to Squad, First Team, then click on the card with the formation layout, let them. As big, clickable texts in the main navigation menu instead of a small bookmark on some corner of the screen you rarely look at.
I still can’t make my mind about the new out-of-position roles. They make sense to have since it’s been applied in real football, but the added complexity just burdens the struggles of getting around with the new UI.
Match Day Is Much Better, But Buggy
The improvements to the match day experience really brings new life to FM. I’m not just talking about the graphics either. For one, when you set the match to the default settings of only showing highlights, the game doesn’t just freeze while the commentator ticker quickly sums up what happens leaving you in the dark until the next highlight reel appear, which can or cannot be a jumpscare as the opposition is heading to your side of the pitch.
With FM26, you see the 2D rendition of the game even during sped-up lull moments as the ball ebbs and flows from one site to another, so you can still get a glimpse of what’s happening between highlights. And when the highlights are shown and rendered you can see how much has changed. The animation, in particular, looks more modern and less like a 3D game running on low settings from the 2000s. And there’s a lot more going on, too. I’ve seen an instance where two players collide and hurt, with the match still going until it’s stopped after a goalkeeper is injured. Medics rushed on the pitch, and there was dead air where the match stops waiting for the substitute goalkeeper to be in position while the previously two injured players receive treatment on the side. Yes, it does feel less snappy, the matches. But seeing that these can happen and are rendered more realistically than before is amazing to see.
However, the sound design still needs work. Is it me or does the sound of balls being kicked feel like it’s straight out of the indoor recording studio? There’s an odd echo and reverb to ball sounds that do not reflect how balls being kicked outdoors should sound like. Oh, and just like the UI, the graphics engine can also be buggy. I’ve seen some horrific visual glitches, men running without arms, models stretched awkwardly, and the odd fade-to-black after each Continue button press during match day. There’s a reason the Advanced Access version is still marked as a beta, with watermarks all over the screenshots I captured.
Closing Thoughts
My playtime isn’t enough to really give a comprehensive opinion, or a review, of Football Manager 26. These games are time sinks. And as such, I haven’t been able to test most of the new features including women football.
Though on that topic, I will say that despite having databases for the women’s leagues in the save, any news from that side of the game has really entered my in-game inbox. So you still need to opt in and subscribe to be in the know should your manager looks for a different opportunity than managing the men’s team.
It’s a shame that on launch, Football Manager 2026 is still filled with bugs needed fixing, some of which Sports Interactive are well aware of and currently being fixed. But that’s the risk of starting a video game from scratch, and there’s a reason why annual games don’t innovate as much.
But I do feel like the setbacks here are worth it in the long run.
I don’t mean to encourage you to buy a buggy game, I would rather you wait for the next sale if you can live without playing FM 26 right now. But what I’m saying is that once the game is in a good state, FM 26 is a fantastic title that have made the correct changes to its foundations. It’s just not quite ready yet.
Like the playtime I have with my current 15-hour save, Football Manager 26, based on this Advanced Access build marked as a “beta” version, is lacking match practice.
Played on PC. Impressions based on Advanced Access of the title, marked as a beta build. Review code provided by the publisher.