If you don’t want to know the scores, look away now. Football Manager 26 has got off to an appalling start with Steam reviewers. Only one in four players have a positive view of the game at the time of writing.
Is the game so bad that it deserves a place in Steam’s ten worst games of all time? Emphatically, no. But despite the progress made with Football Manager 26, some appalling design decisions and miscommunications have soured the experience, especially for PC/Mac players.
Here’s an honest appraisal of what’s gone right and wrong with Football Manager 26.
Football Manager 26: The Good News
The chief change promised for Football Manager 26 (and indeed the cancelled Football Manager 25) was a switch to a new game engine, powered by Unity. That is the source of all that’s gone right and wrong for the game.
On the plus side, the new match graphics are a serious upgrade. Player animations look much more realistic, there’s a greater variety in body movements, players don’t seem to glide across the pitch as if on rails anymore. Coupled with smarter presentation of pre- and post-match sequences, it looks smart.
Critics lament a lack of detail in player faces or people in the crowd, but they (almost literally) lose sight of the fact that this game is designed to run on ten-year-old laptops. The more detail, the higher the performance bar. The game has to make compromises or leave a huge chunk of its player base behind.
Talking of performance and despite the huge graphical improvements, the game certainly runs more smoothly on my test hardware (an M1 MacBook Pro) than its predecessor ever did. Almost no dropped frames or slowdown during matches, and my laptop battery lasts for about a third longer than it did when playing Football Manager 2024.
Tactically, the game has moved up a gear with the introduction of different formations/instructions for when the team is in possession and out of possession. It’s incredibly pleasing to see your tactical instructions enacted in front of your eyes on the pitch, such as a left back moving into midfield when you’ve got the ball, but dropping back into position when the opponent is charging forward. Working out how to fill gaps on the pitch is a delight, helped by graphical representations that show you exactly where your players should be when the ball is in a particular area. It makes tactics design interesting for the first time for someone who barely bothered with it before.
Let’s also not gloss over the enormous amount of work it’s taken to introduce women’s football seamlessly into the game for the first time. Women’s football is different to the men’s game and Sports Interactive has captured this perfectly, with unique animations for female players that makes women’s matches look authentic, not just like male footballers with female bodies.
The ease with which you can transition between men’s and women’s clubs if you want to, or almost forget that the men’s/women’s game even exists in the game if you want to focus on just one, is brilliantly handled. Not least because it gives the knuckle-draggers who thought women’s football would ruin the game nothing to complain about.
Football Manager 26: What’s Gone Wrong?
There’s no escaping the fact that the game’s new interface is at best a work-in-progress, at worst a buggy mish-mash.
Some of the design decisions are infuriating. Pointless pop-up menus, vast expanses of wasted space on some screens, data crammed so tightly you can’t even read half of it in others.
To give you one very small example of truly terrible UI design, take press conferences. You’re given a list of five stock responses to choose from in a vertical panel that has yards of empty space underneath those five options, yet to enact additional options such as refusing to answer the question or storming out of the press conference, you have to click on another menu hidden right at the bottom of the screen.
It makes no logical sense, and the new UI is littered with little changes like this that actively get in the way and slow the game down. It feels like much of the old UI was hurriedly lifted and shifted to the new engine without the level of polish required to make it work properly.
There’s also no escaping that the new UI works much more elegantly on console with a controller than it does on PC/Mac. In my pre-launch interview with Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson, he insisted the game hadn’t been designed for console first, but it certainly gives that impression. For example with carousel panels that are far easier to manipulate with triggers on a controller than with mouse and keyboard. Sports Interactive imploring PC players to try playing with a controller is telling.
This is also the buggiest release of a Football Manager I’ve ever seen in 30 years of playing this game (and its Championship Manager predecessor). I stated in my preview of the alpha version that it was very buggy, so buggy that I was surprised they were even willing to show it to journalists in that state. It has improved markedly since, but it’s still bedeviled by bugs. Presentation glitches, buttons not working as they should, menus that just get stuck.
Sports Interactive compounded this problem by not getting a huge bug fix out in time for launch day, but a day or two later. So many of those day-one players saw bugs and wrote damning reviews before many of those issues were fixed. It all smacks of a game that just hasn’t had enough time to work out the kinks, despite the cancellation of last year’s game.
Is Football Manager 26 Worth Buying?
A common criticism of Sports Interactive is that they’ve had two years to work on this game – double the normal gap between releases – and they’ve delivered a buggy mess. That’s desperately unfair.
First, two years isn’t long at all in modern games development. There were 12 years between the release of Europa Universalis IV and this week’s Europa Universalis V; Grand Theft Auto VI has just been pushed back another six months, which means it will be 13 years between its release and Grand Theft Auto V. While the comparison has flaws, two years is still not a very long time for such a big switch, even if Sports Interactive has been working on it in the background for even longer.
It’s also wildly unfair to claim the game is unplayable. I’m 30 hours deep into my save and I’m enjoying it, despite the UI flaws and the ongoing bugs. Content creators such as Kevin Chapman are midway through multi-season saves and still weaving the same stories that Football Manager has always delivered. Even some of the harshest critics on the Steam reviews have racked up 60, 70, even 100 or more hours of gameplay. It’s quite something to apparently hate a game that strongly and yet keep playing it.
Football Manager 26 is long way from perfect. In fact, it feels a long way from finished. And I can absolutely see why players who are being sold a supposedly finished product are biting back against that. But we’ve already seen significant improvements since the start of the beta, and it’s head-and-shoulders better than the alpha I first tested; there’s every reason to believe it’s going to keep improving like one of the game’s 17-year-old wonderkids.
Indeed, to borrow another of the game’s metrics, I’d give Football Manager 26 a current ability of 3 stars, but a potential ability of 4.5. My only question is whether it can hit those heights within this game’s lifecycle, or we’ll need to wait for Football Manager 27 or even 28 to see it reach that full potential.