Ask me what I’m thinking about, at a random moment any hour of the day. There’s a good chance that however you time it, the answer will be either Roma youth academy players, Goncalo Ramos’ egregious salary demands, or that time Maurizio Sarri bodied me in a press conference following our Derby della Capitale. By rights this should not be the case.
Football Manager 26 is currently sitting among Steam’s very worst-rated games by user reviews. If you’re part of the community, you’ve probably seen AI-generated gravestones bearing the franchise name pop up in your feed, along with other miscellaneous hyperbole about exactly how badly Sports Interactive messed up this time. And yet here I am, 227 hours in, painfully aware of all the shortcomings, the badly designed UI, the sluggishness, having quite a nice time please and thank you.
They say about pizza, don’t they, that even when it’s bad, it’s good. What we’re learning this year is that perhaps the same’s true about Football Manager. It’s true that it’s the most frustrating and unintuitive incarnation of the storied sports management sim for years. It’s also true that it’s still possible to immerse yourself in it and appreciate all the longstanding strengths that made it great in the first place.
The best way to describe that dichotomy is probably this: as I’m writing this piece, I don’t want to tell you about how bizarrely hidden away key menu items like league tables and top scorers are. I want to tell you about my stint managing Roma.
The outrageous interactions with tabloid journalists and bloodsucking agents I’ve had. The personalities that emerged in the dressing room. The signings, the tactics, the player ratings. Just how well Brazilian rightback Wesley is playing within my system.
I’m more compelled to tell you about those things than its extremely well-documented failures, because they’re so specific to my game. Football Manager has always had a singular knack for building a little world that lives in your brain, full of characters, storylines, vendettas, far-off objectives and deeply felt relationships with pages full of numbers between 1-20.
It used to go about this like a great impressionist painter, sketching the footballing ecosystem out in the broadest strokes and leaving you to author the particulars. The ‘match engine’ was, for many years, simply text onscreen that conveyed matches like this:
Kewell takes it just outside the box
Kewell…
Kewell must score!
He hits the post!
It falls to Kewell…
Kewell must score!
But Poom gets a hand to it!
Bowyer with the follow up…
But that’s easy for the keeper to get to
Poom with the goal kick
GOAL FOR BOLTON!!!!
You’d read this text, and you’d visualise the lithe manoeuvres and thundering shots. You’d see the agony on a player’s face after missing a penalty. It all lived in your mind’s eye. Latter day FM takes a different approach, more of a Jackson Pollock splatter of sports data analysis data points than a Claude Monet enigmatic brushstroke. Perhaps as a simple result of trying to find innovation at an annual release cadence, it now endeavours to show you absolutely everything, from a detailed 3D match engine to visual readouts of exactly where on the pitch your centre-backs spat up some phlegm.
It’s within this approach that FM 26’s greatest strength and most accursed failing can be found. When it wants to show you more detail during a match, things go well. The series took a year off, cancelling FM 25 in order to properly implement a shift to Unity engine that allowed FM 26 to show you better animations and (slightly) more impressive visuals.
This is the right amount of detail. It’s showing you subtle differences between the way players take a touch, and that informs who makes your starting eleven. It’s also good at bubbling up some drama, giving you highlight clips of fouls on the edge of the box, referees checking VAR, players in consternation.
It’s when it tries to show you more detail off the pitch, and thus in its menus, that things go awry. The redesigned UI seems desperate to convey how much detail there is in your particular career save. The beating heart of it is your Portal screen, intended to be a bit of a homepage from where you click on sub-menus and navigate into the most useful menu destinations. When I first loaded the game up, I felt like it was simultaneously showing me more information than I could actually process, and surfacing the wrong information while hiding the things I actually wanted to see, like player ratings, injuries, and transfer activity. Over 200 hours later it’s safe to say I’ve acclimated to SI’s menu feng shui, and I feel exactly the same about it.
In some cases, the UI overhaul feels simply unfinished. I know this Roma squad pretty well now, and that’s just as well because when the time comes to make a substitution, I can’t quickly check out the attributes of my players on the bench by clicking on their name. This was a feature present in Championship Manager 96/97. I have no idea why it’s not present now.
In others, it feels like a missed opportunity. There are lavish graphs tracking a player’s progress over time, while league table screens look confrontationally ugly, full of dead space while at the same time hard to parse.
Players who’ve left negative reviews aren’t wrong. It isn’t incorrect to express dissatisfaction with a full-price game that arrives after a two-year break which its developer took to get things right, and which arrives having got a lot wrong. Still, now that I’m so deep into this career save, I wonder what the right way to appraise FM 26 actually is.
That massive database of players, staff and clubs, layered so expertly over time with systems that make them all feel alive and dynamic, is still thrilling. It’s not a new feature by any stretch, but it feels overly punitive to discount it because the menus are bad and it chugs along whenever you press continue. It’s a bad version of a fundamentally great experience, and that means my brain’s going to be full of AS Roma matters for the foreseeable, no matter how many AI gravestones I see in my feed decrying the death of the series.
