Football Manager 26

A new tactical interface and improved match engine are title-worthy, but a frustrating UI, missing features, and numerous bugs drag Football Manager 26 into a relegation battle.

SI's gap year was well spent on a fantastic match engine update, but progress is still too slow between games.

After a two-year wait, Football Manager 26 upgrades every aspect of the football sim, but it may take some getting used to

As a Football Manager fan with a strange interest in seeing how certain bad games perform on other platforms, I confess I picked up FM26T more out of curiosity about how it would run on the Switch. As expected, I was terribly disappointed with the result. The updates "fixed" some things, but the result is still far from the level expected from the series.

The new Football Manager, now on a new engine, marks a key step for the series. It improves match presentation and visuals while keeping the core gameplay intact. Despite some technical issues and occasionally complex menus, it continues to offer the best football management simulation, focused on realism and long-term decision-making.

Despite its flaws, Football Manager 26 is a bold and fresh move, laying a foundation that, after some work from the developers, could easily become the new standard for the well-known franchise.

After two years, Football Manager 26 doesn't quite justify the wait. Tech upgrades help, but the clunky new interface and technical issues hold it back. The core remains deep and addictive, yet the overall experience feels rougher'even if I still ended up investing plenty of hours.

Sports Interactive clearly wanted to take a big leap forward with Football Manager 2026, but it seems they weren’t quite able to pull it off in practice. The game feels like a beta version that was released prematurely, and many of its potential strengths are overshadowed by shortcomings. For die-hard fans of the series who are used to community patches and patience, Football Manager 2026 may eventually become playable with community mods and patches. For newcomers or players expecting a polished and flawless experience, however, this year’s installment leaves mixed feelings and, rather than a revolution, delivers only the sense of a “great revolution on paper.” While the future of the series looks promising with the new engine, Football Manager 2026 is a lesson in how a revolution without precise implementation can actually be a step backward.

Some of the things Football Manager 26 implements are a step forward for the franchise, such as the shift to allow tactical tweaks for every moment of the match, and the match engine is also noticeably improved. However, FM26 does not feel like an upgrade on 2024’s edition and that is down to a combination of the removed features and UI decisions. Too much information is hidden away, and the gameplay loop becomes about going from one fixture to the next and ticking them off, as opposed to before, when it became impossible not to get sucked into the drama of the world. This franchise has a fantastically loyal fanbase and they are good at seeing the bigger picture. Nobody can question the work ethic of the team at Sports Interactive and they deserve the time and space to ensure FM26 can become the first step in another successful evolution for the series.

Football Manager 26 was supposed to be a major reboot: new technical foundation, revamped match engine, modernized interface. What I experience in practice is a game that hardly delivers on its promises and feels like a clear step backward in everyday use.