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Football Manager 26 manages to meaningfully iterate on its predecessors but falls short of a true footballing revolution. Although the addition of women’s football, increased tactical depth, and a heightened level of graphical fidelity make for very welcome additions, a new, clunky UI design and a feeling of inertia prevent the latest entry in the beloved football management series from getting to the proverbial Premier League.
Series fans, myself included, have been without the management series for a year and were hoping that this gap meant that Sports Interactive (SI) would have something exciting to show for the time off. Certainly, the publicity ahead of this year’s game suggested that something special was coming, but the time I’ve spent with the game indicates something of a mixed bag.
Women’s Football’s debut is here
It’s excellent to see the arrival of women’s football in earnest. For those unfamiliar with the formula, Football Manager allows you to manage clubs of renowned players across a campaign of different tournaments. It’s a granular, simulationist experience with an emphasis on detail and long-term strategy. For the first time in the series’ history, however, players can now manage female players and clubs. It’s a welcome (if overdue) step forward.
However, this new world is far smaller than the men’s game. In England, you have the Women’s Super League (WSL) and the Women’s Super League 2 (WSL2) and nothing else.
No nation featuring playable women’s teams has more than two leagues, and many have only one. Many players enjoy managing top-flight teams, but for somebody like me who takes pleasure in building up low-level teams to climb the mountain, there is little on offer here.
Women’s football looks different on the pitch, as SI has utilized bespoke motion capture animations to account for the different look of female athletes moving. The result is a fluid-looking and noticeably different picture of football.
Bottom line: it’s football, with new players, leagues, and competition. There’s a very strong level of coverage in player photographs, and the statistics database appears comprehensive. It’s a welcome addition, if limited in its execution.
UI irritates more than illuminates
Take a look at this half-time team-talk.
Every one of these responses will be familiar to a Football Manager player. These are, by and large, the same phrases we have been given year after year. The UI has changed, and it’s changed for the worse. No longer are these comments categorized into tone, but now a wall of text.
The new UI is flashy, giving the game a markedly different look compared to its predecessors, but under the surface, it is the same basic game. These tweaks tend to bring about small interruptions in game flow – it’s irritating stuff.
In moving to the Unity engine, SI has taken the opportunity to introduce what they call the ‘tiles and cards’ system. Broadly, sub-menus with specific information are now held on cards on a core screen. Additional detail appears as a pop-up when the card is clicked.
In some cases, this is smooth and immersive, but at times it was a little hard to get used to. Take contract information, for example. I had expected this, as a core part of club management, to have its own screen. Instead, it opens in a pop-up. As contracts are directly accessible from the navigation bar, the only difference this made for me is a slightly smaller window to read my team’s contracts on, which felt off.
The decision of what information gets its own screen seems arbitrary. Training, an essential part of management, is a pop-up. Internationals, which may not be a factor at all, get their own screen. It’s counterintuitive.
It may well be that this is just something that I will get used to over time, and in the scheme of things, it isn’t a huge issue. What is an issue is where the UI is simply worse or doesn’t work.
Early in my first attempt at a career, I looked away from the screen during a match. When I turned back, one of my players had been injured and needed to be substituted. Did the substitution screen tell me who was injured in any way? No, it did not.
There was no way for me to read back the game log; I had to make the substitution through trial and error. There are tooltips in some places where they are unnecessary, and missing elsewhere where they should be essential.
These issues may be ironed out in time, but I came away thinking that the UI changes were made in the name of style rather than out of the nobler goal of improving the user experience.
Visuals spruced up
Matches do look better than in FM24, which is hardly a surprise given a move to a modern game engine was a huge reason why there was no release last year. However, it’s hardly the game-changing improvement that fans are due and seems, at times, underwhelming.
The writing has been on the wall on this one for a while; a quick look at the trailers showed definite improvement, but still much of the same. Even so, I held out hope that, on starting up the game myself, I would see something.
The match-day experience disappointment didn’t end there. More than once during poorly attended matches, I found myself checking that I hadn’t turned crowd noise off, as the only noises coming from FM26 were bizarrely echoing ball touches and the referee’s whistle.
It sounded like I was listening to a blind football game played in silence on an indoor court.
Tactics are king
To great fanfare, Sports Interactive announced we would now pick our tactics in and out of possession. The real FMheads among us were most excited for this, offering the opportunity to wreak tactical havoc on the league.
It did give me more to tinker with, looking for unexpected combinations that would work with my players’ statistics. The underlying impact of these changes is difficult to quantify, though I can confirm that if I give truly absurd instructions to my girls, the game will fall apart. So far, so normal.
I was asking a lot of my players, veering from a 4-1-1-3-1 aggressive style in possession to a 4-2-2-1-1 counter-attack out of it. It was tiring, but it seemed to do the job, and we won our first two league games before injury required me to shake things up. This varied approach was engaging in its execution and highlights the positive elements of this welcome new feature.
Overall, there are enough new features here for me to keep me engaged. However, the football revolution that was suggested pre-release isn’t quite here. Some elements seem like missed opportunities. Match-day graphics still leave much to be desired, and plenty of old content systems are still creaking on. Football Manager 26 is a worthy entry in the series if you’re a fan or particularly looking forward to women’s football, but don’t expect a reinvention of the formula.
Reviewed on PC. Code provided by the publisher.
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