Football Manager 26

Not recommended - even at 50% off I bought FM26 around nine months after release at a 50% discount. This review is based on roughly 25 hours of play and one full season. For context, I used to buy Football Manager roughly every two years, but I had not played or bought one since FM21 in 2022. I was expecting some adjustment after a few years away, but FM26 feels less like a modernised version of the game and more like a frustrating redesign that gets in the way of things I used to enjoy. TL;DR: I would not recommend buying this unless you really cannot wait. At the very least, wait until the end of August for a deeper sale. The biggest issue is the UI. I know this has been widely discussed, but it really does affect the experience. Setting up training feels awkward and unintuitive, and it feels like a significant step backwards from the last version I played. Keeping track of player development and adjusting training used to be one of the parts of FM that kept me invested. In FM26, I have very little desire to engage with it. This also affects youth development. I could not clearly tell what tactics my youth team were using, or how to make sure they were aligned with the first team. Youth training also seems to have been removed or hidden in a way I could not figure out. To be clear, some of these things may be possible and I may simply not have found them, but that is part of the problem. If basic squad development systems are so unintuitive that a returning player cannot work them out after a full season, the design has failed. Cup draws are another strange downgrade. I often skipped through the full draw presentation in older games, but it at least made it obvious that something important was happening. Now it is effectively just another email, and like most emails in real life, I barely notice it. The result is that I often just move from match to match without really feeling aware of what competition I am playing in. There are also various UI bugs and annoyances. In press conferences, I have had questions appear behind the reporter cards, making them impossible to read. The “manager beef” emails are another example of poor interface design: the email summary box often is not large enough to show what was actually said, so you have to click into the article card just to see the relevant comment. That is a common theme across the game: too many clicks to do things that used to feel much quicker. There are smaller frustrations too. When a match is loading, the league table appears, but the two teams playing are not highlighted. By the time I have found both teams, the screen is usually gone. I also have replay settings enabled for disallowed offside goals, but I have not seen a single replay of one I have also had the match engine get stuck in a loop, repeatedly replaying the same minute of a match again and again. The in-game editor is now £7.49, compared with £3.99 for FM21. I have not bought it for FM26, so I cannot comment on whether it has changed meaningfully, but as a returning player that price rise feels unreasonable. There are positives. Loading and processing times feel snappier to me, although I have no hard evidence for that. But faster processing does not make up for the game being less enjoyable to navigate and less satisfying to manage. A common defence seems to be that the UI has been made more console-friendly. I am not convinced. Plenty of views and screens do not even fit properly on my PC monitor, so I do not think “designed for console” explains it. To me, it just feels poorly designed and poorly quality-controlled. Overall, FM26 has made too many of the satisfying parts of Football Manager harder to access, harder to understand, or less engaging. I am sure there is still a good football management game buried underneath, but the interface constantly gets in the way of it. I would wait for the next iteration, or at least a much deeper discount.