Sports Interactive’s Football Manager 26 has not gone down well with the core fanbase. Since release, the game’s critic reviews have already declared the game the worst mainline entry in the series, and fans have turned the game into one of the worst-rated titles in Steam history.
Since launch, Sports Interactive has confirmed plans to improve the game with frequent patches that will address key bugs and smooth out the new UI. In fact, the game’s upcoming patch promises to fix over 200 issues with the game.
Despite all of the game’s faults, player counts are still high, and it turns out that Football Manager 26 is the series’ best launch in history from a sales perspective. Via The Game Business, Sports Interactive’s latest has seen the series’ largest European launch, topping sales charts.
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In fact, the management simulator has delivered “the biggest first week of sales since the charts began in 2017”. Even more impressively, the series is managing to top the charts while the game is available to play via Xbox Game Pass for a minor subscription cost on both PC and Xbox consoles.
Football Manager 26 has taken the number one spot for European video game revenue, topping Battlefield 6 for the week of release. For comparison, EA’s Battlefield 6 is the biggest video game launch worldwide since 2022’s Modern Warfare 2.
Following last year’s cancellation of Football Manager 25, Sports Interactive needed to release this latest entry in the series. With the studio’s business model designed around frequent annual releases of its mainline series, the major miss of last year’s game was a huge hit for the game development studio.
Nevertheless, there is still work to do with Football Manager 26 still in a rather rough state. While some fans will need to adjust to some of the game’s larger changes—especially as SI boss Miles Jacobson believes the new game to be a “diamond” in the rough—there are also major issues that the studio needs to fix.
For more FM coverage, read about the biggest glow-ups from FM24 to FM26, the players that have seen the largest improvements between the two games.
