You can imagine what the home fans are singing in the Stadium of Light: “Top of the league, you’re having a laugh!” Your Liverpool team, who until this afternoon were five points clear at the top of the table, trail by two goals in the 82nd minute. You wonder where Mo Salah left his shooting boots, or why Virgil van Dijk seems to have forgotten the whole concept of tackling. But this isn’t on the players, it’s on you – or so you’ll tell the press – as you stare at the tactics screen trying to figure out which of the dozens of potential tweaks will change the tide of this depressing spectacle.
Football Manager was always the data-driven alternative to the visually opulent Fifa series (now EA Sports FC), but the latest instalment starts to bridge the graphical gap. The 3D-rendered match highlights have been given an upgrade via the new Unity engine, and the results are impressive. Premier League derbies, Champions League finals, and even away matches in the north-east have visual gravitas now, even if the replays and so-called important moments often overstay their welcome. There are no Fifa-style authentic chants ringing around the stadia, but the atmosphere is palpable and your imagination fills in the blanks.
This new engine and the elevated matchday experience are the biggest signs of Football Manager’s vision of the future. However, the visual upgrade is about more than spectacle – there is a tangible impact on tactics. While watching a game, you can study your players’ movement on the pitch, making changes accordingly. But when you desperately need to turn things around in front of 45,000 raucous Mackems, data-driven metrics are still king. You might want to switch your build-up strategy to play through the press, or overload one flank with overlapping runs. There are myriad possibilities and you will experiment with them all.
The biggest change is the separation of tactical strategies for when you have possession of the ball and when you don’t. It’s the most significant overhaul in a decade, properly representing the intricacies of the modern game. Now you can completely change formation, swap player positions, and give granular instructions that shift depending on which team has the ball. Want your fullback inverting when you reach the final third? It’s not only possible, but they’ll dutifully head back to their rightful position when Alexander Isak is bundled to the floor on the edge of the box.
But there are issues. After a fallow year to manage the transition to the new engine, Football Manager 26 remains remarkably unpolished. It has already received numerous hotfixes to tackle the worst bugs, but many remain, from overlapping UI and subs running on to the pitch in their tracksuits, to menu errors that prevent progress completely.
Between matches, the new UI will take some getting used to, especially as some important screens are multiple clicks away when they used to be more accessible. You have all the same information at your disposal (even more, with the addition of women’s leagues), it’s just found in slightly different places. Relearning a lifetime of muscle memory is frustrating and more customisation would be preferable, but it’s a minor gripe that time will soothe.
And despite these issues, this is still Football Manager, with all of its delicious tactical minutiae to get lost in. Thanks to the modernised tactics and match engine, making the perfect tactical tweaks to kickstart a stoppage time comeback and silence those oh-so-confident home fans has never felt better. Football Manager 26 provides tangible feedback to your split-second decisions and lets you conceive fictional rivalries that can last for seasons. And when you beat Sunderland with three goals in the final five minutes, the thrill remains unsurpassed.
