Football Manager 26: A Broken Promise in the Dugout
I’ve been managing virtual clubs since the days when you could fit the entire game on a floppy disk. Back then, if the game crashed, it was because your 386 couldn’t handle the sheer thrill of a 4-4-2. Now, in 2025, we have Unity engines, motion-captured animations, and official Premier League badges. And a game that crashes if you sneeze near the keyboard.
Let’s start with the good, because I’m not a complete misery. The new In and Out of Possession tactics are genuinely excellent. For the first time in years, you can set up a low block that actually works, and the dynamic visualiser showing how your team shifts shape is a godsend for tactical nerds like me. The Transfer Room addition—broadcasting your recruitment needs and seeing rivals’ requirements—is smart, practical, and saves hours of manual scouting. And yes, the gegenpress has finally been nerfed. No more watching your League Two side relentlessly press Manchester City into submission. These are real, meaningful improvements.
But here’s the thing: a good tactic system cannot save a game that feels like it was assembled in a rush by people who had never played the previous 25 versions.
The UI is an abomination. I have worked in IT for over a decade, and I genuinely cannot believe this interface got past a QA team. The decision to display messages from newest to oldest is baffling—I’ve read better UX design on a bar napkin. Every screen is a fight. Want to recruit six scouts? Good luck scrolling through a microscopic scrollbar. Want to adjust a loan player’s monthly contribution? The entire page shifts when you try to use your mouse wheel, sending you to a different section. The training screens waste half the monitor with empty space, showing less information than FM24 did on a 1024x768 CRT. It’s as if the design team decided to make the game “console-friendly” by removing all the data density that made PC Football Manager a spreadsheet-lover’s paradise. Newsflash: this is a PC game. If the UI is too complex for a controller, don’t force it onto a keyboard and mouse.
And the bugs. Oh, the bugs. The launch was a catastrophe—crashes every few minutes, UI freezes, buttons that simply stop working. Months later, after multiple patches, it still crashes. I’ve had a mid-match freeze where the scoreboard didn’t update, player fatigue didn’t change, and I was left staring at a frozen screen wondering if my striker had just scored or taken a nap. I’ve had tactics swap players into wrong positions mid-game, resulting in alerts that a world-class midfielder isn’t suited to a role he’s perfectly capable of. I’ve had saved lineups place players in bizarre positions. This is not a £60 product. This is a beta they decided to sell at full price.
The match engine is another sore point. After two years of development, I expected something revolutionary. Instead, we got a slightly zoomed-in version of the FM24 engine with a few new animations. Defenders still stand and watch attackers waltz past them. Goalkeepers still perform inexplicable decisions—like diving sideways for a lobbed shot they could have caught. Passing back and forth in midfield for thirty seconds before a forward decides to boot the ball into row Z. The physics are identical to the previous titles. You can still buy tall, strong players and dominate. The promised “fresh motion capture” and “volumetric animations” are barely noticeable. It’s a pretty coat of paint on a house with rotten foundations.
International management was hyped as a major feature, given the World Cup year. It launched as an afterthought—nothing more than the ability to manage national teams without any new depth. No World Cup draw, no qualifying dynamics, no broadcast package until a later patch that still feels half-baked. It’s emblematic of the entire game: a promise of substance, delivered as a thin veneer of licensing and logos.
Some players have defended the game, saying it’s not as bad as the reviews suggest. A few have even praised the new UI for being clean, though those are almost exclusively newcomers who never experienced FM24’s efficient, data-rich layout. Veterans are unified: this is a step backwards. FM24 was the most complete and refined version of the series. FM26 is a mess that sacrifices depth for a console-targeted interface, and in doing so, alienates the core audience that built this franchise.
Performance is actually better—the game runs smoothly on my aging PC, which is a small mercy. But that doesn’t excuse the crashes. And while the tactical improvements and Transfer Room are genuinely great, they are not enough to carry a game that feels physically painful to navigate. Every click is a chore. Every screen is a puzzle. Every match is a reminder that the simulation still has fundamental flaws.
I wanted to love FM26. I waited for patches. I gave it dozens of hours, hoping the underlying game would shine through. It didn’t. This is a game that should have been delayed another year, or released as an early access title. Instead, it’s a full-priced disappointment that has eroded trust in a developer I’ve followed for decades.
If you’re desperate for a football management fix, go buy FM24 while it’s still available. It’s a complete, stable, and brilliant game. FM26 is a warning—a cautionary tale of a studio losing its way, chasing cross-platform appeal at the expense of its soul. I hope FM27 learns from this disaster, but I won’t be pre-ordering. Fool me once, etc.
For now, this is a game that belongs in the reserves, not the first team.