Football Manager 26 is the start of a brand-new era for Sports Interactive’s historic management series, and it seems to be off to a rough start. After the cancellation of FM25—which the team is still sorry about—Sports Interactive really needs this next entry to land. Unfortunately, it may be another mixed bag.

While we have yet to get our hands on FM26 ourselves—we’ll be waiting until the early access period for that—many outlets have. Of course, the build available to early players isn’t completely finished, but it shows the good, the bad, and the ugly for SI’s long-awaited new game.

So, just as usual, we’ll go through everything worth noting about the feedback from games journalists and content creators about the upcoming game, and make sure you know everything about the game before you pre-order.

The Graphics and UI

Football Manager 26 is the first entry in a new line of FM games now powered by the Unity Game Engine. This means newer, more up-to-date visuals and an overhauled UI that, while snazzy, should still run on decade-old PCs and Macs as well as console and mobile.

Across every preview, the praises are clear: the new visuals are a clear update. From a massively overhauled character creator with tonnes of new options to a 3D match engine that looks as realistic as we’ve ever seen from FM, the actual look of the game is a considerably step up.

However, the UI has drawn a lot of criticism, despite how nice it looks. As the start of a new era of FM, there is clearly a lot of improvements that will need to be made as time goes on. Unlike prior games, Sports Interactive hasn’t patched feature on top of feature here, it’s been built from the ground up, and a lot is missing including many of the hotkeys you’re used to.

Via Eurogamer, the new UI is annoyingly built around Windows-like tiles which will open parts of the UI into flashier, bigger screens. Essentially, everything is a pop up with the original page in the background and it can make navigation a huge pain when you’re trying to find your way back to something that’s been hidden with new gubbins.

There’s also a new bookmarks feature that will allow you to quickly access deeply nested screens in just a single click. While it will certainly be annoying—and very hard to get used to—that screens are now jumbled around, you will be able to mark your favourites to jump back to.

One curious omission from the preview period is what ReGen faces will look like in FM26. As every player knows, ReGens look abysmal in FM, and they’ve even managed to regress as the years have gone on. While it’s understandable why SI would leave these out of the preview period, it’s still a sore spot that needs to be addressed.

A Huge Change in Stats and Tactics

For as long as we can remember, Football Manager stats have been the same with numbers defining specifically how good a particular player is at a particular activity. That’s still the case with induvidual players still having the standard 1-20 for their stats. However, those stats are no longer the same for you.

Instead of a specific number, Football Manager 26 now rates your stats on the following scale: average, good, very good, outstanding, etc. Sports Interactive has explained that this is to offer a more role-playing style experience for your manager, but it just adds more obtuseness to a game that already has existing obtuseness with mechanics like hidden attributes.

Sports Interactive has also significantly changed how tactics work in the management series. Radio Times explains that tactics are now “split between in possession and out of possession, letting you field different formations and player roles depending on whether you have the ball or not”, which is a welcome change. However, player roles have also been renamed which will take a lot of getting used to. The new tactics setup has been described as a “revelation” with the game’s entire feel changing based on splitting these two systems.

Women’s Football

One of the biggest features coming to FM26 is the addition of Women’s Football, a first-time for the series. Via Shortlist, the feature is actually remarkably well implemented with Sports Interactive’s Tina Keech creating the “largest women’s football database in the world” to power the management sim.

On launch, the game will support Women’s Football in FM26 will support teams in Europe, the US, Japan, and Australia. While new databases likely won’t be added to Football Manager 26 in future updates, SI is already looking to add South America, Africa and more.

While it doesn’t replace the now-missing international management we’re all going to be missing, Women’s Football is said to be properly implemented into the management game, and that’s great to see.

Someone call an exterminator, it’s buggy

While the build that preview critics were able to play was an earlier version of the game, about a month old compared to publication time, the game was very buggy. Multiple outlets have reported some horrendous bugs which should hopefully be fixed by the time the game actually launches later this year.

Speaking to Forbes, Sports Interactive studio boss Miles Jacobson explained that there were almost 450 big bugs left to fix during the preview period. As anyone who has played any Football Manager game in the past, quite a few will likely be present on release day.

Conclusion

Really, the reception to FM26 has been very mixed, but a lot of that does seem to come from the fact that the game is so drastically different. We’ve never had an FM game like Football Manager 26, and a lot of these changes may not necessarily be worse but need time to be looked at properly. 

There are also still details we’re waiting to find out about. Alongside the aforementioned lack of ReGen details, we also have no idea what new leagues will be added to the game, if any are. Additionally, there’s just no amount of time available during a preview to get into the real details of what makes a really good FM game. 

Change is scary, and Football Manager 26 changes a lot, but we won’t know if any of these changes are actually worth it until the game releases next year.