Is Football Manager 26 worth the wait?
After binning Football Manager 25 earlier this year, Sports Interactive’s latest entry in the Football Manager franchise, Football Manager 26, is finally in the hands of players everywhere. For many years, Football Manager has largely stuck to a tried and tested formula, which it cracked (in my totally objective opinion) upon reaching its heyday in the late 2000s to early 2010s.
However, this year is a little different. Sports Interactive has promised huge updates, as Football Manager 26 finally moves to the Unity engine for its match day experience, as well as a refreshed user interface with approved licences from major football leagues like the Premier League.
New cards, new look?
At first glance, Football Manager 26 looks very different the moment you’ve successfully created your manager and picked a club. The user interface has changed significantly: the traditional navigation sidebars are gone, and everything is now in cards and tiles.
It took me quite a while to get used to the interface though, especially with the amount of pop-ups appearing when you click on certain elements in the game, such as the reports you get from your staff members, or when you are talking to a prospective player’s agent.
However, my biggest issue with the interface is the amount of strange bugs I witnessed while playing the game. I have noticed a few bugs while using the new pop-ups, especially those which are prompted right at the start, to meet the squad.
In my case, I had my assistant manager introduce the squad to me through a series of (one-sided) conversation cards on a pop-up. The assistant manager would first introduce me to the team captains before progressing to the senior squad, and if I clicked on the senior squad card, it would bring me to the senior squad page.
A bug I had noticed at times with pop-ups in the game.
However, if I decided to return to the pop-up by pressing on the back button (which I have a habit of doing, after all these years of playing Football Manager), the game would sometimes return me to the team captains’ card, instead of the senior squad card, despite indicating that I had already progressed the conversation in the pop-up.
This is just one of the few recurring bugs I encountered while playing Football Manager 26. However, I have since encountered other bugs that caused the game to present incorrect information.
Team Instructions are not displaying correctly at times.
I thought these were initially just bugs in the beta version of the game I was playing before 4 November, but the bugs I have thus far encountered persisted even after I have updated the game with a post launch patch 26.0.4. This is particularly disappointing, because Football Manager is a game you primarily play in menus, and these bugs make the game quite frustrating to play, frankly.
Besides the bugs in the interface, Football Manager 26 is also now partnered with the likes of FIFA and major leagues like Premier League; gone are the days when we had to mod the game to add things like profile pictures or official club logos into the game.
You can, for example, click on Mohamed Salah’s profile on Football Manager 26, and view his smiling face right next to his stats. However, the licences seem to end there, because if you go to a match day and manage a Liverpool game, you will not be able to recognise him on the pitch as the player model on the pitch does not resemble him at all. It seems like Football Manager still has some long ways to go before it can achieve an EA FC level of player likeness.
Unity Engine elevates the match day experience… somewhat
Speaking of match day, Football Manager 26 now runs on the Unity engine for the game’s simulated matches. The wait for the switch to Unity has somewhat paid off, because the match day experience in Football Manager 26 is better now.
Players now move with much more fluid and natural motion, making it appear much more realistic when players dribble past opponents in the game. The stadiums and pitches also look a lot better (although they still look nothing like their real-life counterparts), adding up to decent quality of life improvements.
Having said that, the animations still have some quirks, such as having players hold the ball for too long. This is an unmistakably Football Manager-specific quirk that has been around for the longest time, and many Football Manager aficionados might be amused to see that the new game engine has still managed to retain such quirks.
The ball physics of Football Manager 26 also look a little strange to me at times, and despite the quality of life improvements, these in-game graphics do not look like they belong in 2025. The visual fidelity of Football Manager’s matches, however, were never the game’s selling point, and the new Unity engine switch still shows a remarkable difference from the previous games.
Best additions: Out of possession tactics and women's football
Outside of the multiple issues with the user interface and the switch to Unity engine, Football Manager 26 now also introduces out of possession tactics, and that is (finally) a huge win for the franchise.
The transition from attack to defence whenever a team loses the ball has always been a constant subject of research and modification in the football world, and Football Manager 26 finally addresses this heads-on with dedicated formations, as well as roles for every player on the team when they are out of possession.
This is much more in line with what people are watching in modern football, and it better reflects what actually happens on the pitch. You can also modify the team’s shape depending on how your opponents are attacking, and this is clearly a huge step up from previous iterations of Football Manager games.
Football Manager 26 now also has women's football in it! You can now become a manager of a woman’s team from across 14 playable leagues. This is a huge step forward for the Football Manager franchise as well as women's football, and Sports Interactive even took the effort to capture motion of female footballers, ensuring that the match day experience is more true to detail, and how women play football differently.
Should you play this game?
Despite the changes to the game, Football Manager 26 still distinctly feels like a Football Manager game. The core elements of the game largely feel the same, and some of the new additions to the game, like the new Unity engine, as well as the addition of out of possession tactics and women’s leagues do make Football Manager 26 a compelling prospect.
However, the current bugs in the user interface are a dealbreaker for a game that is so heavily reliant on its interface. It has been an overall frustrating experience playing this game, especially since fans have been waiting for the next iteration of Football Manager for two years.
Until Sports Interactive fixes most of the user interface bugs for the game, I view this game as an alpha Football Manager 27. It feels like Cities: Skylines 2 at launch, full of potential but in dire need of fixes. In other words, I would not recommend anyone play this game at full price, at least at the point of this review.
Football Manager 26 is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC for US$59.99. We received a copy of the game for this review.
