I've never left a review before but the state of this game has prompted me into venting a bit. As someone who has played CM/FM since 1992 and sunk an embarrassing amount of hours into the game in its various guises, I guess I'm the sort of player that SI is trying to move away from with this iteration.

But it's not just the change of UI and people shouldn't be gaslighted into believing that the negative reactions are solely down to older players who just don't like change. FM26 is simply a bad game.

The UI is very poor. It scales terribly to my 27" monitor, the panels are ugly, the colour scheme makes it very difficult to differentiate action buttons or spot new options, the information presented is truncated to near-meaningless summaries and then hidden away across multiple sub-menus. And even then there is often just less information than was available in previous games.

The new tactical interface looked like it'd be the main draw for me and the new basic positioning options are certainly a positive development. But the rest of the match experience is a massive disappointment. There are a few player animation upgrades but most of the graphic changes seem to be lighting, stadiums and 'cut scenes' which don't really affect the gameplay. Meanwhile, maybe 90% of the statistics and analytics have been entirely removed from the game.

Gone. It isn't even possible to tell how many passes an individual player has made during a match. Nor how many headers. There are some very, very basic menus with passing percentages but the information is of the most basic, nursery level of detail and is effectively useless. There are no analytics - none. In complete contradiction to real life football's ongoing recent trend, SI has decided to dumb down its game so no-one can really understand what's happened on the pitch outside of the highlights.

The addition of the 2d pitch in-between highlights is fantastic, but it doesn't overcome the removal of the analytics (and the basic bugs in the minimal data that is available) - even for players like me who play on Comprehensive highlights.

My overall impression is that FM26 feels like someone who has never played CM/FM asked a company who has never played CM/FM to make a mobile port FM-knockoff to try and fleece some Early Access sales. Will it get better? Who knows. I've seen a lot of people justify the state of the game by saying the move to Unity has resulted in a 1* CA / 5* CA game. So I guess I'm reviewing the 1* CA and right now I couldn't recommend this mess to anyone.

Football Manager 26 is a huge disappointment, especially after how solid and enjoyable Football Manager 24 was. Instead of building on what worked, FM26 feels like a rushed, bloated downgrade that somehow manages to be less fun, less intuitive, and more frustrating.

The new features are either pointless or half-baked. Many of the promised “improvements” barely change gameplay, while others actively make it worse. The match engine feels inconsistent and unreliable, with bizarre player decisions that happen far too often. In FM24, tactics felt meaningful and responsive; in FM26, it often feels like the game ignores your instructions entirely.

Performance is another major issue. FM26 runs noticeably worse than FM24, with longer load times, more stuttering, and unnecessary delays in menus that used to be quick and smooth. For a series that prides itself on depth, the interface is now cluttered and unintuitive, making simple tasks take far longer than they should.

The AI managers are also a step back. Transfers make less sense, squad building is chaotic, and long-term saves quickly become unrealistic. FM24 struck a better balance between realism and playability, while FM26 just feels messy and poorly tuned.

On top of all this, the decision to heavily promote the inclusion of women’s football feels like a distraction from the core issues players have been asking to be fixed for years. Representation is fine, but it’s not what the fanbase was waiting for when fundamentals like the match engine, AI logic, and performance still need serious work. FM26 should have focused on improving gameplay first, not adding features that don’t meaningfully enhance the experience.

Overall, Football Manager 26 fails to justify its existence. FM24 was more polished, more stable, and simply more fun. Unless major updates fix these issues, FM26 is an easy skip stick with Football Manager 24, the clearly superior game.

Been Playing FM sincie it was Champ Man 91 on the humble Amiga many years ago.
FM26 is by far the most dispointing version i have played. It feels like a cheap slow Android clunky manager game. Aboslutley no flow from one screen to another. The matchday game graphics are aboslutley brilliant though. Just a pity they didnt combine this part to the UI of Fm24.

I have unistalled the game, and gone back to Fm 24, and i wait for SI to get the Collier Brothers back to explain to the new devolpers what made Football Manager Special.