Development studio: Sports Interactive
Publisher: Prank
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/|S
Release date: November 4, 2025.
The platform on which the game was tested: PC and PlayStation 5
Starting price: 59.99 euros
After our published first impression new Football Manager 26 video game, it's time for a review!
PC version
Sports Interactive decided to take a break last year, so that they could peacefully make the transition to the Unity engine and take the series to "new heights". Considering the transition to a new engine and the promised many new and beautiful things, the break was even well received by the loyal community of players, who realistically expected a lot of beautiful things from the new sequel.
Was it promised and fulfilled? Yes and no.
The hills shook, a mouse was born
At the very beginning of the respected football expert's career, certain changes were introduced, which were advertised as "important". Instead of a numerical display skills of managers, from 1 to 20, is now skill textual form. Also, the football history of the manager also affects the final judgment of the current ones skills so it is desirable that we were once a soccer sensation, loved all over the world. Unfortunately, all of you skills they have a very small, almost non-existent impact on the game itself, detailed below.
The very appearance of the manager can be arranged in a little more detail than in its predecessor, but do not expect any excessive complexity.
Change what works, for the sake of change
After many years, the main menu is no longer on the left side of the screen, but "for the sake of transparency" moved to the top.
It's not a big problem if they stayed sub-menus preserved in their already established places. But SI, for some reason, known only to them, decided to move everything and almost hide access to some functions. Certain functions, which in the previous sequels were reached through two or three clicks of the mouse, are now a success if they are reached at all. Despite all the effort and dedication, it took me about ten hours of playing to get used to where things are and how to get to certain screens that I often use.
Fortunately, it is a commendable novelty Bookmarks, which allows predefined screens to be saved in the right corner for instant access. Unfortunately, it is not possible to save any screen, but only a specific one, but the list is quite enough to go through Bookmarks bypass aimless wandering around the screens to get to the goal.
Tactical progress
As promised, a big shift has been made in tactics and transferring the coach's vision and ideas to the virtual turf. Now the tactics are divided when the ball is in possession and when it is not with the addition of completely new roles. The novelty also requires a lot of experimentation, because with the wrong role "on paper" can make a completely unusable tactic on the field. Fortunately, a display of the positioning of each player on the field has been added depending on his role in any part of the attack or defense, and it is easy to determine whether the chosen one works or not. On the field, it looks convincing and all the flaws or advantages of the chosen tactic can be quickly noticed. Now virtual players can finally play exactly the way we imagined it.
The display of the 3D match has improved, with many new player animations. More than ever, the players look realistic, fluid, and the matches are really interesting to watch. They also "mind" have progressed and their reactions are more realistic and convincing. Unfortunately, some old problems still persist, where the panicked kicking of the ball from the penalty area of the opposing players always ends up at their feet in almost perfect counters, while on the other hand it almost never happens to the player, the panicked ball almost always ends up at the opponent for the next attack. From a distance everything looks really nice, but when you zoom in, things get worse. Corners reveal blurred textures of turf and billboards, while fans they don't even have a face, just a yellow head.
Rob me legally
Another of the announced "big changes" is the introduction of the Transfer Room, which, on paper, should make it easier to buy and sell players. Namely, "on paper" is the idea that the player you want to sell after being placed on the transfer list, you can directly offer it to various potentially interested clubs through the Transfer Room. On paper. In reality, no one will send an offer for the player, and if they do, it will be significantly lower than his value.
This is where we come to probably the biggest flaw of this series, which has been going on for over a decade - a huge disparity in the offers. If you want to buy a player whose transfer value is between, say, 36 and 59 million euros, and the player does not have a buyout clause, expect that his club will ask for many times more, even up to 100 million euros. On the other hand, for your caring player with a value of 10 million euros, you will sometimes receive an offer of 1.9 million euros, which you cannot negotiate. And if you're lucky as hell someone wants to buy it.
The prices of the players themselves are also artificially inflated, where average players are worth well over 100 million euros. The good ones, 200 million upwards. When you add to that that the clubs have a budget of less than 100 million euros for transfers, you can effectively buy one to two solid players per year or save two or three seasons for one top player.
It is inexplicable that a partnership with, say, TransferMarkt could not be made, where would the real current market values of the players come from. But when I look at the fact that the In-Game editor has already been put on sale for €9 for PC, where clubs can be "pumped" with finances, as well as the Transfer Budget on the PlayStation store, then I am not at all surprised by such inflated player prices. SI still needs to earn extra money from somewhere.
Pregovaranje oko ugovora with igračthere is je posebna patnja, gdje nerijewho gameči traže nebulozne iznose. Osobno me veseli pronalaziti djecu poznatih footballaša i kupovati ih za omladinski uzrast kluba, pa who postane dobar idu u prvu momčad. I tako naiđem na Robinha Juniora, koji u matičnom klubu there is €56k godišnje. Transfer vrijednost svega par morjuna, klub pristao na fer cijenu i ja sretan. No kad je došlo do pregovora with igračem, he mrtvo 'ladno ispali da wants €8m godišnje. Dakle ne duplo alreadyu or petput alreadyu plaću, nego...više from 150 puta alreadyu plaću.
I was most pleased with the renewal of contracts with our own players. I ask the player if he would agree to a lower salary and I get an affirmative answer. The player has €5m a year and I count with a new contract if I reduce it to €4.5m alone on the horse. However, the same player who agreed to a salary cut is now asking for €13m without mercy. Who is crazy here? Any haggling leads to an instant break in negotiations, the player is extremely angry with me, and if he previously asked for a new contract, this break in negotiations results in him publicly asking to be put on the transfer list. The "Excellentauthority from the beginning of the story, because the players simply don't listen.
The icing on the cake, however, is the nebula with new contracts. I buy a player in the summer, so that he will ask for a new contract around the New Year, because he thinks he deserves it. And of course he asks for several times more money.
No amount of refusal or negotiation helps, and a firm authoritative hand leads to a real riot in the dressing room where the players literally conspire against the manager. An uproar arises over the most banal reasons, and sometimes they have nothing to do with common sense. This is where SI made a huge mistake, where em players are allowed too much, em they respond scriptedly regardless of the real situation in the club. I honestly miss the option "Educate your players by Alex Fergusson style with slap".
Conclusion...
The pre-order beta version was technically broken, but by the time it was released, many things had been fixed through patches, and in the coming weeks and months some things will be put in order. What SI does not do, the mod community will take into its own hands. Although this year's Manager is essentially a street-level recycling of its predecessor with only two real quality changes – tactics and match presentation – I'd say it's worth buying and playing, because it's Football Manager after all. If it could have been better, it could have been. If it should have been better, it should have been. SI had two full years to raise the series to a new level, but all they did was pack the game in a new cover, put a new logo and say EVOLUTION. I say "same thing, different package".
Mini review of the PlayStation 5 versione
Unlike the PC version that was provided by the publisher, I bought the PlayStation 5 version, because my brother and I are console fans and we prefer to manage comfortably in an armchair. Unfortunately, I had no idea that I had thrown £50 down the drain, on a criminally unfinished product. As much as it is understandable to skip a year in order to make a quality transition to the Unity engine and iron out the problems, it is so unclear to me how anyone in SI could put this slob on sale.
To begin with, the font is so small that even people with healthy eyes will strain to read what it says. The screen with the list of players is practically unreadable at a distance of one and a half meters from the TV screen, even with the enlarged font. Increasing the font, on the other hand, leads to a complete visual breakdown of the menus, which are not scaled with a larger font, but a larger font is tried to be squeezed in where it simply does not fit. Listing such situations would take too much time unfortunately.
The controls for moving through the menus with the left analog are extremely bad and unintuitive, and many times it happens that the analog simply fails and goes up instead of right. And it is impossible to choose the desired option. Pressing L3 to activate the “mouse mode" is not luck, because it requires perfect precision. Every, even the smallest, right from the perfect middle of the menu results in the cursor going somewhere and you unsuccessfully trying to catch where you want to go. Extremely frustrating and kills all will to play.
But the icing on the cake is the match. The lighting is strange, and parts of the field look like the sun is directly above the stadium. The shadows around the player are sort of blurry blobs in the style of early PlayStation 2 games. I was playing on a PlayStation 5 Pro and during the whole game there was constant strong jerking and the FPS probably dropped to single digits. How unwatchable it was says that after the game my head started to hurt and my eyes watered. I really don't understand how they could allow such an unfinished game to be released.
As of the writing of this review, some 24 hours after release, the game holds a rating of 1.87 on the PlayStation Store, with 65% of the lowest rating out of 572 total reviews. That speaks volumes for the state of the game on PlayStation. A quick look at the Xbox Store says two out of five stars on 58 reviews.
On PC, modders will solve many things and bring the game to an OK state, but on PlayStation we are dependent on the grace of the publisher. For now, the game should be avoided as much as possible, until the publisher covers himself with ashes, corrects all omissions, bugs and problems and lowers the price as a sign of apology. Or wait for it to come out as part of a PlayStation Plus subscription.
Unfortunately, publishers have taken too much pride in allowing such things to happen, so you should say "enough is enough" and simply not buy the game. Unfortunately.
Evaluation: 2.5/5 PC version, or 0.5/5 PlayStation 5 version
A copy of the PC version of the game was provided by distributor Colby for review purposes and publisher Sega
