Game intel
Football Manager 26
The first football management simulator, many of the hallmarks of the incredibly complex games which exist in this genre today are found in embryonic form here…
Football Manager is the kind of game that swallows your evenings whole. I’ve lost seasons-literal seasons-to this series. So when Sports Interactive binned last year’s entry and promised a bigger leap for Football Manager 26, I was cautiously optimistic. The launch numbers looked solid, too: a peak around 85,000 on Steam and tens of thousands online at any given moment. But then you look at the reviews: FM26 is sitting on a 22% user score on Steam. That’s “mostly negative,” and it’s not the usual salty grumbling about difficulty tuning. This is a full-blown fan revolt.
Let’s separate the noise from the signal. Yes, some reviews are knee-jerk. But a lot are coming from people who’ve put in serious hours thanks to pre-release access. The recurring pain points are consistent: stability issues, crashes mid-save, performance hitches, and features veterans consider non-negotiable simply missing at launch. Heat maps are a big one for tactics nerds; they’re foundational for reading space and role execution. International management being MIA is another “wait, what?” moment for long-timers who bounce between club and country to keep saves fresh. One review summed it up bleakly: “This feels like a beta for FM27.” Hard to argue when basics aren’t all there.
Then there’s the UI. The series has always been menu-driven first, spectacle second. When you shuffle the menus, you shuffle the whole game. FM26’s interface has been rebuilt on Unity, and players are not gelling with it—navigation feels slower, key information is buried, and the visual language is unfamiliar. If you’ve played FM for a decade, your muscle memory is a superpower; FM26 turns that into a liability. In a tactics screen, two extra clicks is a buzzkill. Across a save? That’s a thousand cuts.
The scale of the backlash is quantifiable, too. SteamDB’s snapshots put FM26 among 2025’s worst-reviewed new releases with 50+ reviews, behind games that were themselves dragged for microtransactions or simply flopped. When a flagship sports sim is rubbing shoulders with those disasters, you know it’s not just a loud minority.
To be fair, there’s a reason big studios overhaul tech: you can’t keep duct-taping legacy tools forever. Moving to Unity theoretically gives Sports Interactive a modern pipeline, broader platform support, and a chance to rethink systems that were creaking. We’ve seen this movie before, though. Overhauls often arrive with growing pains—remember eFootball 2022’s faceplant? Or how some grand strategy launches feel half-baked until six months of patches and mods sand down the edges? FM’s strength has always been iteration: refine, refine, refine. A ground-up UI rebuild and engine switch flips that script. The fundamentals might be stronger in the long run, but the day-one experience can suffer horribly.
There’s also the community angle. FM thrives on custom skins, mods, and spreadsheets of doom. A new UI blows up that ecosystem overnight. Even if the new foundation is ultimately better, pulling away long-standing tools and muscle memory with no safety net—like a legacy UI mode or robust customization out of the gate—was always going to provoke backlash.
If you’re already in, protect your time. Use frequent autosaves, keep multiple rolling save files, and consider minimizing background apps to avoid Unity hiccups until patches land. If you’re on the fence, waiting a few weeks isn’t cowardice—it’s sensible. Historically, SI pushes at least one rapid-fire hotfix post-launch, then multiple stability patches before the traditional “winter update” that integrates January transfers. Given the state of things, I’d expect an accelerated cadence.
Feature gaps are trickier. If heat maps and international management are core to how you play, hold off until SI confirms timelines. UI complaints might be mitigated with options—scaling, compact views, alternative layouts—but that requires the studio to prioritize usability over visual refresh. A toggleable “legacy navigation” mode would go a long way toward cooling tempers.
Yes—with urgency and honesty. The player base is clearly there; that 85k peak shows demand didn’t evaporate after FM25’s cancellation. What’s missing is confidence. A public bug tracker, a clear feature-restoration roadmap (with dates for heat maps, international management, and other staples), and a UI commitment—either rapid iteration or a legacy option—would change the mood fast. SI’s track record on post-launch support is strong, but that goodwill took a hit last year. This is the moment to over-communicate and over-deliver.
The optimistic read is that FM26 is laying foundations for the next five years of the series. The realistic read, today, is that it shipped before those foundations were ready for prime time. If SI treats this like a live triage—with weekly updates, transparent patch notes, and meaningful UI concessions—FM26 could still become the best version to date. If not, players will treat it like a paid beta and wait for FM27. And that would be a shame for a series that usually nails the fundamentals.
FM26 launched big but messy. The Unity-powered UI is divisive, key features are missing, and stability needs work—hence the 22% Steam score. If SI rolls out fast patches and a clear roadmap, there’s a path to redemption. Until then, consider waiting before you commit your next decade-long save.
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