If you are one of those who make excuses for Sports Interactive. Please leave this article. But before you leave, I just want to say that I like this game and I am a huge fan of this franchise. However, in this review, I will mostly focus on the problems of this game. So it may seem that I am not fair to the game. On the contrary, that couldn't be further from the truth. The fact is I love this game more than you do because of what I am about to do. You will get a complete honest review from a Football Manager fan who has spent over 100 hours on FM26 and over 15,000 hours in the last 10 years on this franchise.
Football Manager 24 was a good game, not excellent but good.. it had its problems but it also made some steps forward and became the "ultimate" football manager in the last 20 years.
So I would like Sports Interactive to explain to me....what happened....WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?!
Football Manager 26 is full of bugs, no polish, tons of features missing. Multiplayer that is barely functional. The UI is the worst ever. And the whole game is one huge beta test. A game we waited two years for because you thought you could transfer the entire code from FM24 to Unity in two weeks when one online review told you it was impossible and that it would take at least 6 months to do it. Only to then cancel FM25 and tell us all "wait for FM26"
So what is my brutally honest opinion about FM26? I LOVE IT!....but I hate every minute in its current state!
But....let's start the review properly
First...the good things.
Football Manager 26 has by far the best graphics in the franchise. The stadiums look great and sometimes it's really nice to watch them in smaller stadiums. The tactics are much simpler and for someone like me who has always had problems with solid tactics, this game has rejuvenated me. It took me some time to understand, but with the new dynamic mode, I easily figured out what was wrong and fixed it, and I got a tactic with which I crush everything in front of me in Norway in my save where I have already put in 29 hours.
There is also women's football, which is commendable as a bunch of leagues covering almost the entire women's football has finally been added. It should also be noted that women have a completely different match engine and transfer market from the main game.
The Match Engine is much more advanced in some aspects and the only reason I have put in over 130 hours to date.
The transfer room is a very fun concept and helps a lot when buying backups and selling older players.
Unfortunately, this is where the positive things end....
Let's start with the biggest problem of Football Manager 26: the UI. In the past, the UI wasn't anything special, but we could create skins that would cover most of the problems. But generally, the UI has been almost identical for 20 years. Now, for FM26, SI decided to retire it and present us with one of the worst, if not the worst, UIs in history.
What used to require one click in FM24 now requires 4 clicks, not to mention the disgusting pink and purple colors and the multitude of crashes that happen during random clicks.... but we'll get to the bugs. For now, let's stick to UI/UX.
The game has completely lost its charm and that magical feeling when you take over a club that was once the king of Europe and is now in the third division. There are no more trophy displays. No more easy access to statistics, no more simple and easy UI/UX that can be learned in half an hour for a new player; now it takes 20+ hours to learn where everything is! Not to mention the multitude of QoL improvements that have simply been removed from the game for no reason.
Navigation through the UI is a complete disaster; sometimes you feel like you have to click something 3 to 4 times to go to the next screen, but no, it's not your computer's fault; Sports Interactive has DELIBERATELY put lag in the UI so you wouldn't see how long it takes for some elements to load on weaker computers. The problem is that this lag also affects those of us who have computers that can run everything alive and dead. The UI has been so unbearable that it has created an entire community of people who decided to fix this game FOR FREE. With patches that provide 250% (no joke) faster UI that is actually usable.
It must be said... it is obvious that Sports Interactive wants to go with the money that is on consoles because the UI on consoles and PC is identical. Of course, the PC version is still much more advanced, but the question is for how long? And an even better question is, if the game is clearly built to be a transitional path to consoles, why is Football Manager 26 Console in such a bad state? Players have reported a ton of bugs, and in some cases, the game is unplayable.
Bugs....
The game is in barely playable condition. If you don't save every 5 - 10 minutes, expect to lose progress every now and then. You saved your training and set it up for the whole year? Better save, there’s a 50% chance the game will crash, and you will lose almost 20 minutes it took you to set it up for the whole year. While playing, don’t accidentally open set pieces or opposition instructions, or else the game will crash in the middle of the match. Pray you don’t go to penalties because there’s a chance the game will freeze completely, and you won’t be able to do anything except Alt - F4, which means lost progress and a lot of lost nerves.
A few times, the game froze in the middle of a match, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t move forward; it just stood there waiting for me to either restart the game or ALT-F4.
Want to change the appearance of your manager? Crash.
Want to make yourself a bit chubby? With the first continue, you’ll hit Ozempic and suddenly lose twenty pounds.
All in all, this game has so many problems that won’t be resolved quickly. And Sports Interactive has decided that the patch released on 31.11 will be the complete game and that the next patches will only come through the beta channel... which is, to put it mildly, sad and unfortunate. This game has a ton of potential and could have a very bright future. And the reason for that?
Mods.
For the first time in its history, Football Manager is on the Unity engine, which means there are a lot of modders who not only create interesting and fun mods but also fix the game and the bugs that SI has made. At the heart of this movement to modify the game is BassyBoy, a person without whom I am sure we wouldn’t have received any modifications for months. But he has taken it upon himself to fix most things and make this game what it deserves to be. From stadiums that will be imported from the PES franchise to FPS cameras during which you can move your coach along the sidelines, mods are what will ultimately save FM26.
In a week or so, we will conduct an interview with BassyBoy, so you can expect that on the portal soon.
But for now. FM26 is that young player you get in the youth intake. 2.5 stars current ability with 5 stars potential.
