The once venerable Football Manager franchise has fallen on seriously hard times. It wasn't able to even release a game in 2024, pushing the title back to this year to work on numerous issues. After its Nov. 4 release, almost 4,000 of its reviews on Steam are mostly negative.
One of the main complaints is the new UI, which is clunky and laggy. This would be bad in most sports games (Madden 25 comes to mind), but as a management sim, Football Manager 26 is almost 90 percent menus. Critics of this type of series deride them as spreadsheet simulators, but they are for fans who want to sweat the smallest of details. When each menu slows the process down, fun quickly becomes a hard thing to find.
FM 26 is the first in the series to run on the Unity Engine. Someday, we'll probably be glad about that, but right now it is saddling the title with a whole bunch of growing pains no one asked for. Making things worse, this year FM 26 is partnering with FIFA, fresh off its ugly divorce with EA Sports. The World Cup and a newly available FIFA pairing should have FM 26 flying high. but this is starting to look like a rebuilding year when fans were hoping for a championship contender.
The good news? We're in the era of the incredible patch that turns disastrous games around. Titles such as Cyberpunk, No Man's Sky and more recently Madden 26 have seen huge updates turn things around. By the time the World Cup and the inevitable related sale on FM 26 happen, the game will hopefully be in a much different (and much better) place.