Football Manager 26 launches straight into a relegation battle as Steam reviews plummet to Mostly Negative: ‘Been playing since 1993 and this is the worst one’

Oh dear. Football Manager 26 has gone down about as convincingly as Luis Suárez in the penalty box. Released yesterday after a year-long delay and the cancellation of FM25, the latest iteration of the world’s most riveting spreadsheet has immediately incurred the ire of players. Within 24 hours, FM26’s Steam rating has plummeted to a mere 23% positive at the time of writing, putting it a whisker away from the rarely seen ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ rating.

The complaints are multitudinous, but the general opinion is that, despite the delay, Football Manager 26 was not ready for release. “The game just isn’t finished. There’s still over 13k bugs on the forums,” writes user Ally. “The polish the game has for a full priced release is an absolute scandal, misaligned text, inconsistent UI design, buttons not working, freezing, poor optimisation.” User Saruwatari concurs. “From the most basic functionality to the actual match engine, there’s not a single area of this game that is not ridden with bugs.”

Beyond the game’s technical problems, the UI is by far the most cited issue, with players bemoaning how fiddlier it is than previous iterations. “You have to click a lot more to get the info you need,” writes user Frifonz. “Everything is separated into smaller widgets, when everything could have been on one screen like before.” The irony here is that this has resulted from Sports Interactive’s attempt to simplify the interface. Instead, the result is players are having a much harder time finding what they’re looking for. “It’s had way too much stripped out of it in terms of the details and information that you had on FM24,” Vanquishhx73 observes.

Not everyone is quite so negative. “As a newbie FM player I like the new UI, tutorial + FMPedia. It’s easy to get into, not confusing unlike the previous game,” writes Luzire.” Meanwhile, Jason360x wonders whether the backlash is partly due to FM26 simply being different rather than outright poor. “People want change, but when change is made, they cry about it. The UI takes some time to get used to but looks much better.” Jason does concede the interface is “somewhat buggy”, however.

Even the negative reviews tend to agree that the new match engine is a winner, or at the very least is on the right track. “The new engine looks promising. It clearly has potential for the future and there are moments when you can see what this new generation of FM could become in a few years,” writes user K, though they do go on to say that the “soul of the series has been ripped out.” Ouch.

Overall, the consensus is that Sports Interactive has hoofed this one into the stands, with many longtime fans feeling particularly burned. “Been playing since 1993 and this is the worst one,” laments Reck. StevehFC feels similarly. “As someone who has played FM for over 20 years and since the championship management days. This release is by far the worst.”

Considering Sports Interactive took a year out to work on FM26’s overhaul further, for this to be the result is deeply disappointing. It is worth noting that our own Football Manager 26 review took a more positive perspective on Sports Interactive’s changes, with Phil Iwaniuk praising the changes to the match engine in particular.

“With a deeper fidelity and variety of player animations in the match engine, FM 26 shows you details that weren’t there before,” he explained. That said, he similarly ran afoul of the changes to the interface, pointing out that “the UI was already overwhelming before, and this game seems to have doubled down on it while simultaneously disorienting me.”