Football Manager 26 - technically the worst continuation of the series?
Development studio: Sports Interactive
Publisher: Sega
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/|S
Release date: November 4, 2025.
Platform on which the game was tested: PC and PlayStation 5
Starting price: €59.99
After our published first impressions of the new Football Manager 26 video game, it's time for the review!
PC version
Sports Interactive decided to take a break last year to peacefully transition to the Unity engine and elevate the series to "new heights." Given the switch to a new engine and the promised many new and beautiful things, the break was even well received by the loyal player community, who realistically expected a lot of good things from the new installment.
Was it promised and fulfilled? Yes and no.
The mountains trembled, and a mouse was born
At the very beginning of the career of the esteemed football expert, certain changes were introduced, which were advertised as "essential." Instead of a numerical representation of the manager's skill from 1 to 20, the skill is now in textual form. Additionally, the football history of the manager also affects the final judgment of current skills, so it is desirable that we were once a football sensation, loved worldwide. Unfortunately, all these skills have a very small, if nonexistent, impact on the game itself, more details below.
The appearance of the manager can be edited in a bit more detail than in the predecessor, but don't expect any excessive complexity.
Change what works, just for the sake of change
After many years, the main menu is no longer on the left side of the screen, but has been moved to the top "for clarity."
It's not really a big problem that the other sub-menus have been saved in their usual places. However, SI has for some unknown reason decided to move everything and almost hide access to some functions. Certain functions, which could be accessed in previous installments with two or three mouse clicks, now it's a success if you can even reach them at all. Despite all the effort and dedication, it took me about ten hours of gameplay to get used to where everything is and how to access certain screens that I frequently use.
Fortunately, a commendable new feature is Bookmarks, which allows predefined screens to be saved in the right corner for instant access. Unfortunately, not any screen can be saved, only certain ones, but the list is quite sufficient to bypass aimless wandering through screens to reach the goal via Bookmarks.
Tactical Progress
As promised, a significant shift has been made in tactics and in conveying the coach's vision and ideas onto the virtual pitch. Now, tactics are divided into when the ball is in possession and when it is not, with the addition of entirely new roles. This novelty requires a lot of experimentation, as using the wrong role "on paper" can create a completely unusable tactic on the field. Fortunately, a display of each player's positioning on the field has been added depending on their role in any part of the attack or defense, making it easy to determine whether the selected tactic is functioning 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 as we envisioned.
The 3D match presentation has advanced, with a multitude of new player animations. More than ever, players look realistic, fluid, and matches are truly interesting to watch. Their "intelligence" has also improved, making their reactions more realistic and convincing. Unfortunately, some old issues still persist, where a panicked clearance of the ball from the opponent's penalty area always ends up at their feet in almost perfect counterattacks, while on the other hand, this almost never happens to the player, as a panicked clearance almost always ends up with the opponent for the next attack. From a distance, everything looks really nice, but upon any zooming in, things get worse. Corners reveal blurred textures of the pitch and advertising boards, while the fans have no faces, just yellow heads.
Rob me legally
Another of the announced "big changes" is the introduction of the Transfer Room, which, on paper, should make the process of buying and selling players easier. The idea "on paper" is that a player you want to sell can be directly offered to various potentially interested clubs through the Transfer Room after being placed on the transfer list. 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.
Here we come to probably the biggest flaw of this series, which has been dragging on for over a decade – a huge disparity in 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 release clause, expect his club to ask for multiple times more, even up to 100 million euros. On the other hand, for your diligent player valued at 10 million euros, you might receive an offer of 1.9 million euros that you cannot negotiate. And that is if you are incredibly lucky that someone wants to buy him.
The prices of players are also artificially inflated, where average players are worth well over 100 million euros. The good ones, 200 million and up. When you add that clubs have a transfer budget of under 100 million euros, you can effectively buy one to two solid players per year or save for two or three seasons for one top player.
It is inexplicable that a partnership could not be made with, for example, TransferMarkt from which the actual current market values of players could be drawn. But when I see that for PC an In-Game editor has already been put on sale for €9, where clubs can "pump" finances, as well as the Transfer Budget on the PlayStation store, then such inflated player prices do not surprise me at all. SI still needs to earn extra money from somewhere.
Negotiating contracts with players is a special agony, where players often demand ridiculous amounts. Personally, I enjoy finding the children of famous footballers and buying them for the youth team of the club, and whoever becomes good goes to the first team. So I come across Robinho Junior, who has €56k a year at his home club. The transfer value is just a few million, the club agreed to a fair price and I am happy. But when it came to negotiations with the player, he coldly states that he wants €8m a year. So not double or five times the salary, but...more than 150 times the salary.
What makes me happiest is renewing contracts with my own players. I ask the player if he would agree to a lower salary and I get a positive response. The player has €5m a year and I calculate that with a new contract if I reduce it to €4.5m I'm in luck. However, that same player who agreed to a pay cut now demands €13m without hesitation. Who's crazy here? Any bargaining leads to an instant breakdown of negotiations, the player is extremely angry with me, and if he previously asked for a new contract, this breakdown results in him publicly demanding to be put on the transfer list. The "Outstanding" authority from the beginning of the story doesn't help here, because players simply do not listen.
The icing on the cake is the absurdity with new contracts. I buy a player in the summer, only for him to demand a new contract around New Year, because he believes he deserves it. And of course, he asks for several times his current salary.
Here, any refusal or negotiation does not help, and a firm authoritative hand leads to a real revolt in the locker room where players literally conspire against the manager. The revolt arises over the most trivial reasons, sometimes having nothing to do with common sense. Here, SI made a huge oversight, where they both allow players too much and they respond scripted regardless of the actual situation in the club. Honestly, I miss the option "Educate your players by Alex Ferguson style with a slap".
Conclusion...
The pre-order beta version was a technical mess, but by the release, many things were improved through patches and in the coming weeks and months, some things will be sorted out. What SI doesn't do, the modding community will take into their own hands. Although this year's Manager is basically a polished recycling of its predecessor with only two real quality changes – tactics and match presentation – I would say it's worth buying and playing, because after all, it's Football Manager. It could have been better, it could have. It should have been better, it should have. SI had a full two years to elevate the series to a new level, but all they did was wrap the game in new packaging, put on a new logo, and said EVOLUTION. I say "same pasta different packaging".
Mini review of the PlayStation 5 version
Unlike the PC version provided by the publisher, I bought the PlayStation 5 version because my brother and I are console gamers and prefer to manage comfortably seated in a chair. Unfortunately, I had no idea that I threw £50 into the wind on a criminally unfinished product. As understandable as skipping a year to make a quality transition to the Unity engine and iron out issues is, I find it incomprehensible how anyone at SI could release this mess for sale.
To start with, the font is so small that even people with healthy eyes will strain to read what it says. The screen with the player list is practically unreadable from a meter and a half away from the TV screen, even with the enlarged font. Increasing the font, however, leads to a complete visual breakdown of the menu, which does not scale with the larger font, but instead, the larger font tries to fit where it simply doesn't belong. Listing such situations would unfortunately take too much time.
The controls for navigating the menus with the left analog stick are extremely poor and unintuitive, and many times the analog stick just glitches and instead of going right, it goes up. And it is impossible to select the desired option. Pressing L3 to activate "mouse mode" is no better, as it requires perfect precision. Any, even the slightest deviation from the perfect center of the menu results in the cursor going somewhere else and you unsuccessfully trying to catch where you want to go. Extremely frustrating and it kills any desire to play.
But the icing on the cake is the match itself. The lighting is strange, and parts of the field look like the sun is right above the stadium. The shadows around the players are some kind of blurry spots reminiscent of early PlayStation 2 games. I played on the PlayStation 5 Pro and throughout the entire match, there was constant severe stuttering and the FPS likely dropped to single digits. How unwatchable it was is evidenced by the fact that after the match, my head started to hurt and my eyes were watering. I really don't understand how they could allow such an unfinished game to be released for sale.
On the day of writing this review, about 24 hours after its release, the game on the PlayStation store holds a rating of 1.87, with 65% of the lowest ratings out of a total of 572 reviews. That says enough about the state of the game on PlayStation. A quick look at the Xbox Store shows two out of five stars based on 58 reviews.
On PC, modders will fix many things and bring the game to an acceptable state, but on PlayStation, we are dependent on the publisher's mercy. For now, the game should be avoided at all costs until the publisher sprinkles ashes on themselves, corrects all the shortcomings, bugs, and issues, and lowers the price as an apology. Or wait for it to be included in the PlayStation Plus subscription.
Unfortunately, publishers have taken too much liberty to allow such things, and it needs to be said "enough is enough" and simply not buy the game. Unfortunately.
Rating: 2.5/5 for the PC version, or 0.5/5 for the PlayStation 5 version
A copy of the PC version of the game for review purposes was provided by distributor Colby and publisher Sega
