Sports Interactive’s decision to not release a Football Manager game in 2024, opting for an extra year of development in order to deliver a fully revamped Football Manager 26, was something that frustrated me as a fan (nay, a truly addict), but also something that made me curious as to what the developer would do with its seminal sports management franchise. They were promising a new generation of Football Manager, a next step, a total revamp. And it’s finally out. This is one of the most divisive reviews I’ve written in a while, because I truly don’t think Football Manager 26 was worth the wait, and I’m disappointed with the end result. But as I’m writing this review, I’m still playing it, have already clocked 30 hours in it, and I’m sure I’ll clock another thousand in the future.

What’s more, it barely looks any better than previous Football Manager games.

Previous iterations of Football Manager weren’t very innovative in terms of their user interfaces or gameplay, but that had never been an issue for the fanbase. The thing is, Football Manager is not meant to be the most visually appealing game; it’s meant to be tactics-heavy, data-driven, something that non-fans look at and question the sanity of those who spend literal hundreds of hours into a savefile, creating borderline parasocial relationships with players and clubs. The match day visuals, the apparent reason for the year-long delay, were just meant to be a visual representation of the match, with most of us more worried about the tactics and the stats than the polygons running after a ball onscreen.

We had other major concerns, such as bugs, a handful of quality of life inclusions for those who were just looking for instant match results, and a way to make each savefile less heavy and faster to process, even when it featured, like, a literal three hundred thousand players in it. To Sports Interactive’s absolute credit, two of these issues have been solved. I don’t know if the migration from a proprietary engine to Unity was the solution, but Football Manager 26 is a lot faster to process. I started a savefile with, no joke, 550 thousand players and 182 simultaneous leagues, and the game has never been smoother and faster to process. It’s not even making my computer scream in agony, and I can even multitask while playing it. I mean, I am literally writing this review whilst running the game on the background.

This reminds me of a Power BI dashboard, and that’s not a good thing.

Add in the fact that you can now simulate instant results with ease, and even choosing the kind of approach your team should play through the simulation (play for a win, settle for a draw, overwhelm the adversary), and Football Manager 26 becomes, without a doubt, the most straightforward and practical game in the franchise. Had nothing else been changed, this would have been the best in the series, bar none. But the issue is that Sports Interactive decided to change a lot of elements that weren’t in need of a fix.

The main culprit: a total overhaul on the user interface. That felt sinful. I don’t know who convinced Sports Interactive that a complete UI makeover was necessary, but their brand new take on it just doesn’t work. It’s clunky, confusing, looking like what an intern in a company is able to do with Microsoft Power BI. Instead of spreadsheets and lists, most of Football Manager 26‘s menus and screens are presented in the form of dashboards. That, by itself, wouldn’t have been an issue, but the placement of many of the game’s actions have been shoved, or better yet, hidden into sub-sections inside these dashboards. They are also icon-heavy, as if they were meant to act like buttons/icons, and there’s a reason for that.

Football Manager 26 retains the UEFA license, meaning that all UEFA competitions feature official graphics and music.

There’s a reason for that: Sports Interactive wanted to make this game as console-friendly as possible. These icon-friendly menus work for a controller, as they were part of a FIFA menu screen – they are easily hoverable and highlightable. The issue is obvious: Football Manager doesn’t work with big icons. This game is all about menus, data, loads of lines of information… it’s a spreadsheet simulator, as the haters like to call it. I’m all for making the franchise more accessible to a wider audience, but not at the cost of alienating its loyal PC fanbase.

To make matters worse, the brand new graphical overhaul during a match simulation… just isn’t impressive. Sure, it looks better than previous Football Manager iterations, but whilst those former games used to look like, I dunno, PS1-era titles, Football Manager 26‘s matchday simulations look like a FIFA game circa 2002. I’m far from impressed. FIFA Manager 08, a game I used to play religiously back in the day, looked a lot more impressive in comparison, as it actually shared the same graphical engine from its mainstream counterpart. Not to mention the sheer amount of visual glitches I was able to witness, a good chunk of them being players simply not having skin textures applied to them – everyone ended up looking like grey plastic dolls onscreen.

This game is the true definition of love / hate.

What hurts the most is that, at its core, it’s still Football Manager, it’s still addictive as hell, and it’s still one of the most engrossing sports games out in the market. But in an attempt to modernize the franchise, in an attempt to take a few steps forward, Sports Interactive look half a dozen steps backwards. The new user interface is confusing, the matchday commands have been dumbed down (you can’t even shout motivating instructions mid-match), and the visual enhancements just weren’t worth the year-long wait. Again, you can still have a lot of fun with (I sure am), but I expected more from this new chapter in the franchise’s history.

Football Manager 26 is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S/X, PC, Switch and mobile.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.