Football Manager 26 gives the impression of a youngster being given their first senior debut for a big club, stepping into the public eye looking to take the reins from the old guard. It is a new chapter for Sports Interactive’s long running series with a leap to a new game engine and a shift in how it is presented to players. Football Manager 26 is a game that shows some promise, but needs a lot of long term updates and changes before it is ready to be considered a successful switch.
While the central idea hasn’t shifted, Football Manager 26 is a ground-up rebuild of this venerable series, and with Sports Interactive looking to overhaul so many aspects of the game, is is a very different experience to the last game. A new user interface comes with different tiles and cards you can click on to get more information, there’s a change in the matchday presentation, removal of touchline shouts, removal of gestures for team talks and press conferences, and a delayed release for international management to line up with next year’s World Cup. A positive addition is the long-awaited introduction of women’s leagues as well as new nation leagues that expand the database.
The user interface takes getting used to with a change to menus and the amount of data that is presented to you, split across tabs like the top level Portal, Recruitment, Matchday, Squad, and Club. Within each tab various tiles present information like league position, performance, finances or whatever else you want to look up. While it does look modern, it takes a while to get used to and retrain the muscle memory after so many years of the Football Manager UI being relatively stable.
While there is a lot more detail in the game, it comes at the cost of the user interface not being as smooth to navigate, with various options requiring further clicking and digging to find, be it adjusting budgets or staffing. Everything feels much more condensed compared to Football Manager 24, to this game’s detriment. On the one hand you have things like new stories not being shown in detail when opening them in the Portal, requiring an additional click, but at the same time text size and player information is smaller making it harder to read.
Changing staff attributes from numbers to words also makes it a bit more difficult to determine who will be a good fit for the team. How big is the gap between ‘reasonable’ and ‘competent’ in a staff rating? Numbers allowed for a quick glance to pick out the best details. Similarly, the matchday experience gets trickier to manage as player fitness levels are more difficult to read as the big and bold player tiles of FM24 have been made more compact. Even spotting injuries in a match is harder to spot – at one point a player was injured who needed subbing off, but it was not clear looking at the tactics screen who I was needing to hook off the pitch.
I also miss touchline shouts in matches. Sure, they were far from perfect, but you feel more detached from the matchday experience, no longer able to impact the game outside of making subs and tweaking tactics.
The changes extend to the general tactics screen. Sports Interactive wants players to get a lot more detail when it comes to sorting tactics and there is a depth of information. With tactics you now don’t just select a playstyle, a couple of formations to train, set instructions, and slot your players in. Now, formations are split into in possession and out of possession, so you can set two different tactical approaches to deal with different opponents. It is a good idea to really develop your team and reflects more of how modern teams approach different game states, but there are issues in just moving players and positions around. In fact, the game as a whole feels like it’s working more slowly, even on the lowest of settings. Swapping players is a laborious task and there are delays jumping between screens, instead of the snappiness of previous titles. I have never installed mods for a Football Manager game before, but I’m considering it for Football Manager 26 if they promise improved usability.
The main issue though is that I am not as engaged with this entry as I have been with previous ones. I have spent thousands of hours in Football Manager, and for many of those games when I have not been playing I have been ruminating on possible transfers, staffing changes, and tactics to implement. Here, I do not have that same kind of passion. What is football without passion?
