It genuinely pains me to say this, especially given that my career is built around it, but Football Manager is in trouble. I’ve spent time digging into the numbers, and they’re not pretty. Sports Interactive have been proactive and, to their credit, they’re clearly trying to turn things around with frequent patches for Football Manager 26, but the hard data is only moving in one direction.
I’m personally still enjoying FM26, and I know plenty of others are too, but enjoyment doesn’t change the reality. The numbers don’t lie, and right now they’re painting a bleak picture. Let’s take a proper look at why the game we all love is in such a worrying state.
Player numbers
FM26 actually launched strongly in early November 2025, hitting a Steam peak of around 85,000 concurrent players, broadly in line with FM24’s release. The hype was real. It had been two years since a brand-new Football Manager, optimism was high, and every official post from SI was doing serious numbers. The buzz felt like the old days. The problem is what happened next.
FM26’s player base has dropped off far faster than any modern Football Manager title. Within roughly a month of release, concurrent players had fallen to around 51,000, the lowest figure at this stage for any FM from 2016 through to 2024. Every single one of those games retained more players one month post-launch than FM26.
That’s what makes this especially concerning. FM26 is actively breaking the usual Football Manager lifecycle trend, rather than just underperforming. Nearly 10% of the player base has disappeared week-on-week since launch. By comparison, FM24 (and even the since-cancelled FM25) lost roughly 20% of players across its entire first six months. That is an enormous difference. And however you slice the data, it looks bad.
Struggles in content
That drop-off doesn’t just affect players, it hits the people who rely on the game to make a living.
Engagement across content platforms is clearly down. Twitch numbers are a good example. FM26 actually started with a higher initial peak than FM24, but retention has been the real issue. Where FM24 settled into a stable post-launch rhythm, FM26 has seen a much steeper decline. By December, average viewers, total streams, and hours watched had all fallen sharply.
YouTube tells a similar story. Omega Luke, one of the biggest Football Manager creators on the platform, recently revealed that it now takes him around 36 hours to reach the same view counts he used to hit in just 12. Over on Reddit, fans noticed that another major FM YouTuber’s beta save for FM26 pulled in half the views of their FM24 beta series.
Just from my personal experience, I can tell that engagement and views are done. I’m getting a lot less reach on X than I did at the start with the game and there’s a marked reduction in people talking about the game on X, Reddit, Facebook etc. It’s such a shame to see the community so deflated.
This was meant to be the most hyped Football Manager in years. A diamond in the rough, not a molotov through a window. In theory, views should be up across the board. Instead, they’re noticeably down, and it’s no surprise that a lot of creators sound fed up.
Why is this happening?
We all know the answer by now, but it’s worth putting numbers on it.
FM26’s reception has been brutal. As of mid-December, only around 28% of the 24,000+ user reviews on Steam are positive, leaving the game firmly in “Mostly Negative” territory. Previous FM titles usually landed in “Mostly Positive”, even when they had plenty to criticise.
Even with the patches and improvements SI have rolled out since launch, first impressions matter. A huge number of players bounced off FM26 early, and once people move on to other games, they rarely come back. What sticks in their memory isn’t the fixes, it’s how the game felt at release.
Conclusion
At this stage, fewer people are playing FM26 than any recent Football Manager, content creators are seeing weaker engagement across platforms, and overall community sentiment is undeniably poor. It might be too early to declare Football Manager “dead”, but the trends from the past month are deeply worrying.
FM26’s declining player counts and reduced community involvement suggest the franchise has taken a serious hit. Unless Sports Interactive can rebuild trust, either through major, game-changing updates to FM26 or a significantly improved FM27, this could mark the beginning of a real long-term decline for the series.
There is always hope. Every Football Manager game gets the January boost, a post-Christmas surge in player count after the game’s first big sale. However, considering the sheer amount of vitriol pointed towards FM26, will this game follow suit?
