Football Manager 26 gives the impression of a youngster being given their first senior debut for a big club, stepping into the public eye looking to take the reins from the old guard. It is a new chapter for Sports Interactive’s long running series with a leap to a new game engine and a shift in how it is presented to players. After quite a few hours playing through Football Manager 26, it is a game that shows some promise, but needs a lot of long term updates and changes before it is ready to be considered a successful switch.
The caveat is that currently Football Manager 26 is considered to be in beta ahead of its official 4th November release, with Sports Interactive releasing regular fixes and updates through this window. That said, Football Manager 26 is clearly a very different experience to the Football Manager games that came before.
A new user interface comes with different tiles and cards you can click on to get more information, there’s a change in the matchday presentation, removal of touchline shouts, removal of gestures for team talks and press conferences, and a delayed release for international management to line up with next year’s World Cup. A positive addition is the long-awaited introduction of women’s leagues as well as new nation leagues that expand the database.
The user interface takes getting used to with a change to menus and the amount of data that is presented to you, split across tabs like the top level Portal, Recruitment, Matchday, Squad, and Club. Within each tab various tiles present information like league position, performance, finances or whatever else you want to look up. While it does look modern, it will take a while to get used to and retrain the muscle memory after so many years of the Football Manager UI being relatively stable. While there is a lot of information, it can be quite overwhelming to find what you need quickly and needing to keep clicking to dig deeper.
Information could be much clearly presented too. News stories are not shown in detail when you open a message in the portal, instead needing to click on it to see the full details. It was much clearer in Football Manager 24. When it comes to the matchday experience player fitness levels are much harder to read. Where FM24 had big and bold player tiles easily showing the information, the same information is more compact in FM26, and it is not as easy on the eye. This goes for spotting injuries during matches and player skill levels as well. At one point a player was injured who needed subbing off, but it was not clear looking at the tactics screen who I was needing to hook off the pitch.
The change extends to the general tactics screen. Sports Interactive wants players to get a lot more detail when it comes to sorting tactics and there is a depth of information. With tactics you now don’t just select a playstyle, a couple of formations to train, set instructions, and slot your players in. Now, formations are split into in possession and out of possession, so you can set two different tactical approaches to deal with different opponents. It is a good idea to really develop your team and reflects more of how modern teams approach different game states, but there are issues in just moving players and positions around. Swapping players either lags or sometimes does not happen as intended, and trying to adjust positions is not as smooth as in previous instalments.
What is clear right now is that Football Manager 26, in this current stage at least, is the first step of a new era. Much like the start of any new era that comes with a challenge of rebuilding and meeting expectations. Football Manager 26 can get better, but with what I have played so far I do not think this is going to be the entry that will hit the potential of what the switch to the new engine and implementation of new features can bring. In my view, it may take one or two more years for the rebuild to really meet its potential.
