Football Manager 26 review: fantastic match engine, tangled mess of menus

Here’s how we imagined life would be after taking the Roma manager’s job: wake up, stand enigmatically on balcony while sipping espresso and gazing over breathtaking architecture. Don effortlessly elegant menswear, take Purosangue daily driver to club training ground, host Paolo Dybala and Lorenzo Pellegrini for breakfast meeting at outdoor table, gesturing expansively. Watch team dominate at Stadio Olimpico while wearing a giant puffa, back to office for more expansive gestures, dinner, bed.

But Football Manager 26 knows more about football than we do. A day in the life of the Giallorossi manager, or any other in fact, goes more like this: wake up, emails. Decline meeting with junior coach about sending youth player on an extensive course to improve his language skills. Decline second meeting with scouting team, who’ve identified that that Lamine Yamal kid looks alright. More emails.

Enter office to find it’s been rearranged and you can’t find where you kept the bit of paper you wrote your tactics down on. Or your player shortlist. Or all the stats and info you have on your own players. Have existential crisis, dinner, bed.

It’s a game of two halves, you see, this one. If you think that’s such a tired metaphor as to be downright offensive, consider that even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day: sometimes the lazy metaphors are absolutely bang on. Because as brilliant as the new 3D match engine is in Football Manager 26, steeped in newfound animation detail and in-match storytelling potential, there’s also a UI overhaul that causes frequent disorientation and frustration.

The really heartbreaking thing about that is developer Sports Interactive went about this in such an admirable manner, taking an entire year off in 2025 in order to fine-tune an ambitious new project, which involved switching to the Unity game engine. More studios who work on annual franchises should take note of that approach – if not the end result.

Let’s give the bad bits the hairdryer treatment now, because there are considerable positives to talk about, too. In simple terms, there’s simply too much information on every screen in this game, and time moves way too slowly. The UI’s trying to make life easier for you by showing you stat points and menu shortcuts across every bit of screen real estate, but it seems to ignore the fact that your brain can’t digest that much info at once, nor does it have any design cues as to where to focus its attention.

Add to that the fact that the UI was arranged in a certain way for over a decade before that, and suddenly it feels very hard to do basic things which were previously second nature.

With so many interactive menu elements and the series’ trademark depth of simulation, it feels sluggish to get from one day to the next. This game’s at its best when you’ve let that deep simulation play itself out for a few seasons, and build up a convincing ecosystem of football. It just takes way too long for that to happen in modern FM, and particularly in this new iteration.

Right, then. The good bits. If nothing else, the year off for Sports Interactive was worth it when it comes to kick off. Now running in Unity instead of the old proprietary game engine (which legend has it still had some code DNA intact from the ‘90s Virtua Striker games which publisher Sega made available to the studio) it offers up noticeably more detail in both animations and overall fidelity. You’re hardly rubbing your eyes in disbelief that this isn’t Match of the Day – it’s still decades behind FC 26 and eFootball in graphical terms – but it shows you so much more granular detail that FM 24 did.

Back to our Roma save, it was in the matches where we felt the glamour of the job. Watching Angelino’s stepovers, Matias Soule’s marauding runs on the right wing, Bryan Cristane’s strength in the air, and Paolo Dybala feigning injury to win a juicy free kick on the edge of the box. All these details, rendered that bit sharper, made the players feel more real. And thus, our job as manager more real too.

There are simple wins on the feature list. A fully licensed Premier League, for one. 14 leagues from 11 nations in the womens’ game, for the first time ever. A tactics screen tweak that lets you arrange your formation into dramatically different shapes when in or out of possession.

But the biggest win for FM 26 is the way that revised match engine combines with the series’ longstanding depth. It simply builds a world for you to fall into, where things you previously clung to as important, like housework, family, employment and daylight are eclipsed by Brazilian wonderkids and beating Liverpool at Anfield. It’s a flawed reintroduction, this one, and it’ll take considerable patching to smooth out the UI experience, but it’s not so flawed that you don’t still find yourself fantasising about your imagined life in that Roma job.