Football Manager 26 is the first entry in a new generation of Sports Interactive’s long-running management series, and it’s dropped like a lead balloon. Coming after the shocking cancellation of last year’s FM25, this new entry has fallen flat despite an additional extra year of development.
Alongside missing features from previous years, FM26 has launched with a buggy, slow and confusing new UI and a lot of the same issues as previous games. While the game looks nicer and has its own unique features, the game is simply not up to the level of quality that fans expect.
Early critic reviews have already painted the game as the worst of the mainline entries in the long-running series. While those reviews have rested at a rather average or middling score, players are significantly unhappier with the final product.
Via tracking website Steam 250, Football Manager 26 has hit almost rock-bottom with the game becoming the 7th lowest-rated games on Steam at the time of writing. Resting between Mobile Suit Gundam Battle Operation 2 and 6-year-old MMO Identity, the new management game has dropped to a historic low for the franchise.
On Steam, just 23% of the game’s 7,708 reviews are positive with the game earning a “Mostly Negative” rating on the marketplace when every language review is accounted for. While there are a few happy players, the majority of fans have blasted the game for an almost-unusable user interface. Obviously, as a management game, the UI is the majority of the game.
“Football Manager 2026 feels exactly like what I imagined FM25 would’ve looked like before it got cancelled,” one player said on Steam. “Half-finished and missing the evolution you’d expect after skipping a year.”
One player with over 160 hours of playtime since the game’s advanced access beta launched last month explained that the game does have some good improvements over the last game in the series with the brand-new tactical system and a speedy new engine. However, just like everyone else, the player harshly criticised the UI, saying “FM26 may have the worst UX downgrade in modern gaming history.”
While the PC version of Football Manager 26 has been heavily criticised, this version of the game is still leagues above its console counterpart. At the time of writing, the Xbox and PlayStation versions of the management simulator are significantly worse with fans reporting busted controls and horrific performance despite the PC version running on decade-old hardware.
Hopefully, future patches will fix a lot of issues and glitches with Football Manager 26. However, with fans butting heads with the game’s new UI, it doesn’t seem like any of the game’s major issues can be fixed within this entry.
