At its core, Football Manager is still the same as it’s ever been. Top heavy on data and realism, focused fully on the main goal – everything feeding back into your team and ensuring that you’re working with every possible option available to any manager of the modern game. It’s a statisticians dream, a smorgasbord of words and numbers that collide in a football haven that remained unrivalled in the industry since its infancy. Even EA Sports had a football manager game once and it conceded very early on. There’s simply no contest. 

And i’m one of those old gamers that can remember FM before it was FM but CM. Championship Manager was a game I played to death on my old PC’s. It was utterly the best of its kind at the time – though Ultimate Soccer Manager 98 was a favourite also – and it’s been running the ‘football sim’ game for a very long time. Only getting bigger and better. That is, then, until now.

Firstly, I’m reviewing Football Manager 26 on my PS5. Why did I choose the console version? I wanted to see what earthly business Football Manager had launching on a console. Of course this isn’t the first console release for the series, but after developer Sports Interactive took a wild swing last year and decided to skip releasing a game entirely, all eyes were on Football Manager this year to see what the fuss was all about. This iteration has a lot to prove, and especially to console players.

I felt like I had a handle on Football Manager (FM) as a series that I could jump into the console version with little fuss, having missed all other console releases of the game for the sheer bewilderment it was even releasing in the first place. In my mind FM sits atop the PC ladder with the likes of Warcraft and Counter-Strike. It just belongs on a mouse and keyboard, given that it’s spent a good majority of its existence presenting itself as a fancy PowerPoint. After hearing some dodgy things about the Football Manager 24 console port I was nervous but intrigued going into Football Manager 26. My instincts were correct – this is a ridiculous game to release on a home console. 

Maybe it’s because I’m from the era where Championship Manager couldn’t even launch on a console because it was too data heavy, and cartridges and discs just couldn’t hold the sheer wealth the game had to utilise to run. The less said about Premier Manager 64, the better. 

Now of course, consoles can run data heavy games with very little effort. Still, a wise doctor once said ‘they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’. The same applies here. This is not a game that is comfortable on a console, not least on a controller. Whilst SEGA have had huge success with the Two Point series utilising the controller for primarily mouse and keyboard games, the same know-how has not been shared with Sports Interactive. 

And you’d feel like this is the year where they should have pushed a little harder in that area. With a brand new UI, information aplenty on the screen at all times, the menus are exceedingly difficult to navigate, and trying to find the one thing you need becomes a lesson in patience and focus. It’s worth mentioning with the click of the left thumbstick you can bring up a cursor to navigate. Granted, this makes things indefinitely easier, but the fact it’s a straight port of the PC version means that it hasn’t been adapted for console in any way, and the new menu system will either infuriate or intimidate you. There doesn’t appear to be anything in between.

A big addition this year has been the full 3D realisation of the matches. This should be something most systems could handle with little struggle and yet, if there’s even a single drop of rain the matches become juddery and sometimes freeze – I’ve had three separate crashes of the game so far trying to render these PS1 looking highlights. It’s, quite frankly, unacceptable. Whilst the move to the Unity engine has no doubt been rocky for Sports Interactive – an entire game being canned last year, and all – there clearly needs to be an awful lot of work still to do to get their crown jewel back to the standards expected from the series. The hardcore have already made their voices very much heard, and sticking with FM24 seems to be the preferable move for the time being. 

The clunkiness is really quite surprising. Not just in the matches but in the UI itself, which as mentioned before is brand new and fairly untested in the big wide world, save a small beta a mere week before the game’s full release. The hardcore FM fans – those who would have taken a week off to fall deeply into it – will no doubt wonder what on earth happened here, with a menu system that’s worse than any before it.

Whilst Sports Interactive had to rebuild the entire game for it to work on a new engine, which must have been quite the task, it gave the developers a chance to refresh what was already great about the game. Being able to navigate at will and not even think about where menus are is the bread and butter of this franchise, and sticking with a series for so long because you know that there will always be updates, but the core fundamentals remain, will be a hell of a test for those who are so used to the familiar. Sports Interactive (SI) have asked an awful lot of their fanbase here, and for me, it hasn’t paid off. 

It’s so unfortunate then, because above everything else this is still Football Manager. It’s still incredibly in-depth, it still offers a core gameplay mechanic unlike anything else on the market. It still revels in its seemingly limitless knowledge of the beautiful game and, if you can stomach the new newness, continues to offer up hours and hours of blood, sweat and tears. It’s still the game that it was even when I played it on my Windows 95 PC in my Mum’s house. Those core elements are still what drives this series, and SI know all too well what sets them apart and why the yearly release of this franchise is so anticipated.

But it’s those little tweaks they were making to the game over years and years. Decades at this point. Those additions that allow players to feel even closer to their favourite teams, or even picking a random non-league starter to take them all the way to the final of the Champions League. There’s no feeling like it, and it feels like it’s been ripped away for the sake of wanting to do something new with a series that never really needed it. 

Could SI have just rebuilt the game we knew before? Perhaps. I’m not going to pretend to know anything about moving games from one engine to another, but one could imagine a scenario where such an enormous change to the series wasn’t entirely necessary. Every game has to evolve, sure. That’s how so many series have stayed relevant for so long, but you feel that when the jump is this enormous and seemingly uncomfortable for those who rely on this game, it becomes problematic.

And it’s just disappointing, overall. Whilst I wasn’t expecting miracles from a console port of a game so obviously designed for PC, the fundamentals of what connects them both are still here and the game, whilst still very much Football Manager, still feels a little lost in the shuffle.

That game is here, it’s just hidden under a shockingly clunky UI, a poorly implemented highlights match mechanic that barely runs on a PlayStation 5, of all things (yes your PC may be vastly more impressive, but if a PS5 can’t run these highlights but can run The Last of Us, Call of Duty, God of War and Spider-Man without breaking a sweat, it’s the game, not the console) then you have to be cautious of what you’re jumping into. The fact it’s on Game Pass is probably a blessing for most, that’s the ideal way to try and see if you can live with everything that’s new.

I’ll end on a positive note. It’s great to see women’s football added and integrated seamlessly into the overall Football Manager experience. It feels no different managing the woman’s Man Utd team as it does the men’s. If anything it’s a damn sight easier at this point. Great stuff.

(Though, given the incredible success of the national women’s game in the past few years, it’s utterly baffling why international management isn’t even an option at launch).

It’s incredibly difficult to recommend Football Manager 26 right now. I’ve no doubt Sports Interactive are working as hard as they possibly can to get this game up to scratch, with patches upon patches coming soon for a game that just wasn’t ready for launch. It’s unfortunate that last years game was cancelled, you have to wonder if the devs felt they could not delay this one because of that. It very much needed a little more time on the training pitch before it started its new season.

It’s still Football Manager, though. That primary selling point  hasn’t gone away, but perhaps the magic isn’t quite as alive as it was before.

Football Manager 26 is out now on PC, PS5 (review platform), Xbox Series X|S and macOS.

Developer: Sports Interactive
Publisher: SEGA

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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