It’s exceedingly rare for an annual sports game to skip an entire year, but that’s exactly what developer Sports Interactive did when it canceled Football Manager 25. With so many changes–including switching game engines to Unity–and numerous delays, the game simply wasn’t up to standard in time. Couple this unforeseen gap year with the promise of a brand-new foundation built on an improved match engine and a completely overhauled interface, and Football Manager 26 quickly became the most highly anticipated game in the long-running series. Unfortunately, the end result is a cliched game of two halves. While the match engine is as impressive as advertised, the UI debuts with significant teething problems. Throw in some missing features and a multitude of frustrating bugs, and FM 26 would be disappointing even if expectations weren’t so high.
It’s not all bad news, though. As I mentioned, one of the game’s two halves plays some excellent football, starting with a tactical revamp that significantly alters how you set up your team on match day. It’s a long-overdue shake-up, as even back in 2016, when I reviewed Football Manager 2017, I bemoaned how rigid the series’ tactics had become. “The tactical side of Football Manager would benefit from giving you more control over how your team functions, especially during specific phases of play–perhaps letting you fluidly shift from one formation to another depending on whether your team has the ball or not,” I said. It might’ve taken nine years, but this exact scenario is the basis for FM 26’s tactical overhaul.
There’s now a clear delineation between when your team has possession and when it doesn’t. If you’re so inclined, you can set up to attack in a particular formation and then fluidly switch to another when defending, giving you more granular control over your team’s structure. As manager of Arsenal Women–FM 26 adds 14 women’s leagues for the first time–I mainly used a 4-2-3-1 formation in possession, then transitioned to a 4-4-2 shape when I didn’t have the ball. As the defending team, this allowed my two forward players to lead the press while the rest of the team sat in two banks of four, providing a solid base that could also spring a counterattack whenever I won the ball back. When this happened, the three midfielders gave me more control in the middle of the pitch, and this also allowed players like Olivia Smith and Frida Maanum to play in their more natural positions behind the striker.
Player roles have also been reworked, simultaneously providing you with more options when defining how your team plays and offering a clearer distinction of how each role functions. Wide forwards and inside forwards, for example, are both primarily goal threats, but as the names suggest, the spaces they occupy are slightly different. Wide forwards stick closer to the touchline during the build-up phase, maintaining width on the flank until eventually drifting centrally once the ball reaches the final third. Inside forwards, meanwhile, move towards the center much earlier, allowing an overlapping fullback to charge into the space they’ve vacated on the wing.
Alongside these and other new roles, including channel midfielder, playmaking wingback, and box-to-box playmaker, FM 26 also makes it easier to parse how each role works. There’s a brief description and a couple of bullet points summarizing the key aspects of the role, along with a 2D animation that provides an example of the player’s positioning and likely passing combinations with teammates. Without attack, support, and defend duties, as well as other nebulous facets of the previous tactical interface, it’s intuitive and much more rewarding to create a tactic and see your vision realized on the pitch.
The new 3D match engine is a vital component of this, adding deeper fidelity with improved lighting and visuals, along with a variety of new player animations to ensure that each one moves with the fluidity of their real-life counterparts. Obviously, it’s far from matching the technical prowess of something like EA Sports FC, but FM 26’s match engine looks much more like real football than the series ever has before. Some awkward shooting animations occasionally pop up, and wingers feel slightly overpowered due to the ease with which they regularly skim past fullbacks, but these are the only blemishes I’ve noticed in dozens of hours of play.
Matches are significantly more enjoyable to watch, whether you’re seeing a player drop a shoulder to create a yard of space in midfield, celebrating a striker scoring a thunderous header from a pinpoint cross, or applauding a defender making a last-ditch tackle on the edge of the box. The differences between players are noticeable–extending beyond their attributes–you’re able to observe how well your team holds its shape, and it’s evident how a fresh-legged substitute can outpace tired opponents.
It’s impressive how the tactical interface and match engine coalesce to show the impact of your decisions. After selling Lia Wälti over the summer, Arsenal Women don’t really have a natural defensive midfielder–or at least not someone I would start over Kim Little and Mariona Caldentey. So I improvised. The two bullet points for the inside wing-back role are “holds position” and “moves inside to DM.” With Little and Caldentey having more attack-minded roles in midfield, I assigned left back Kate McCabe the inside wing-back role, seeing her move into a defensive midfield position when the team has possession of the ball. Her high attributes for passing and technical ability make her a perfect fit, and allow the team to build up from the back and create passing combinations in midfield without forcing the other midfielders to drop back. I loved seeing this come to fruition in the match engine, translating the 2D animation and my own ideas into something tangible.
Unfortunately, FM 26’s redesigned UI falters outside of the tactical interface. There’s an unmistakable period of adjustment for long-time players that explains some of the early growing pains, as you’re forced to relearn old habits and figure out where certain things have been moved. But after more than 30 hours, it’s obvious that much of the overhaul is unnecessarily finicky and unintuitive. It’s visually pleasing at first glance, especially if you’re playing in a fully licensed league, but it doesn’t take long for the cracks to show. Much of the UI has been rebuilt around pop-up windows that condense the information you need to see. Things like league tables and statistics, including top scorer and highest-rated player, are buried several screens deep. Information that used to be one click away now requires several. Oftentimes, it’s not even clear what you need to click to open one of the pop-ups.
If you want to assign penalty takers, you’re shown a list of players that strangely omits their attributes, forcing you to go through and painstakingly click on each player one by one to open up a new window and find the information you need. In previous games, the same screen allowed you to sort through players based on their most relevant attributes, such as finishing, composure, and penalty-taking ability. Elsewhere, coaches will often give you training advice but fail to provide any information about the individual training they want you to assign to a player, making the whole thing pointless. Training, on the whole, is markedly worse, too, with no drag-and-drop functionality, meaning each segment needs to be opened individually. It’s baffling how many quality-of-life features are absent.
Other missing features include staff comparisons, the ability to save lineups, cup draws, and the “Where are they now?” feature, which is essentially erasing history. Touchline shouts are gone, too, removing the ability to influence player morale during matches. This gives games a passive feel if you’re not constantly tinkering with your tactics. There’s also no longer an option to arrange a team meeting when your players are low on morale, and you can’t customize which stats are displayed during a match–the paltry ones included only show up during breaks. Advanced stats are also missing post-match, with pass and heat maps removed. I always enjoyed seeing a graph of all the passes my creative midfielder made in particularly dominant performances, but these analytical tools also helped to make informed decisions.
You can’t even see player attributes during a match, which makes substitutions a guessing game when you’re not overly familiar with every single one of your players. I know I want to sub on a tough-tackling midfielder to hold this lead, I just don’t know who’s best suited. And if you want to see those same attributes before picking a team to manage, that’s gone too.
Additionally, several legacy issues persist from previous games in the series. Players still get mad when you praise their recent form, while potential signees will sometimes demand disproportionate wages from you, only to sign for a lower-reputation team offering lower wages and less playing time. Player morale is also frustratingly fragile. At one point, my left back was approached by a Saudi Arabian team offering ludicrous wages. When I tried to convince him to stay, he demanded a transfer because the salary package was too substantial to turn down. After accepting a sizable offer, seven unhappy players came to speak with me, upset that I would let one of our better players leave. I was given 14 options to respond, and none of them involved the player demanding to leave. I either had to accept the blame or promise to replace him with a player they hopefully deemed good enough. It felt like an unavoidable conflict when I could’ve just been given the option to tell the truth.
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Worse still is the amount of bugs present in FM 26. Sports Interactive has done a good job releasing frequent hotfixes during the game’s early release period, but new issues seem to crop up every time others are fixed. Some are minor but still indicative of broader problems, such as overlapping text or missing scroll bars. Others, such as a multitude of different crashes and saves disappearing or failing to load, are more problematic.
Football Manager 26’s overhauled UI simply feels like change for the sake of change. Its functionality is worse, several key features are missing, and bugs only exacerbate the issues. After a two-year wait, it’s an unfortunate outcome, giving the impression that the delay wasn’t long enough. There’s definite potential here with the new tactical interface and match engine, and if you could combine these aspects with the previous UI, you’d have one of the best games in the series. Instead, the revamped UI’s problems and inherent frustrations are too big to ignore. Such a vast undertaking is commendable, especially for an annual sports game, but its missteps are many and mostly lead to disappointment.
