Football Manager 26 Review: Is the King Back?

Football Manager 26: The Return of the Management Sim Par Excellence!

After many years where the release of Football Manager was a fixed appointment, Sports Interactive decided to take a break and set aside the hypothetical FM 25, to focus on what would become Football Manager 26, the title you are about to read our review of in its PC version, which is also available on Microsoft's PC Game Pass. Introducing Football Manager is almost superfluous, given that for years it has literally been synonymous with football management and has accompanied intense gaming sessions for many enthusiasts, to the point that even if you don't love football, if you are looking for a management title capable of delivering satisfaction, you have always looked to FM as a safe haven.

An endless database, the ability to take charge of your favorite team or the most unknown club in the world, and the certainty of literally holding the team's destiny in your hands, managing both the economic and technical-sporting aspects, naturally having to keep dozens and dozens (and dozens...) of numbers, factors, and statistics under control, whether you want to play alone or in multiplayer.

Let's not waste any more time, come with me to the tactical whiteboard of our training ground and let's take the reins of Cagliari together to discover what FM 26 has to offer, but don't worry, if you don't want to embrace the cause of the Rossoblu team and settle elsewhere, I won't hold it against you. Also, know that you can perfectly use your FM 23 and FM 24 saves, so you don't lose your historic career.

The main innovations in this edition of Football Manager are the arrival of a new 3D graphics engine, Unity, and the inclusion of women's football (14 leagues divided across 11 nations), but there's much more to discover about running our team. We start by choosing which database to load, how many leagues to make playable, and, of course, which bench to sit on (but the option to start as unemployed and look for a job after the first seasonal sackings remains valid). You create a manager profile where you give your avatar a face and appearance, as well as a sporting resume: are we a living legend, a coach like many others, or a rookie looking for the opportunity of a lifetime? Needless to say, our credibility will be important for clubs, players, fans, and the press, but this is just one of many elements to consider. As always, when choosing the size of the database to load, the game indicates whether your hardware can handle it without slowdowns or if you'll have to arm yourself with patience between calculations, but for your convenience, I'll point out what the development team stated under "requirements," where it's noted that even without a latest-generation PC, you can become a virtual manager, perhaps sacrificing some frills and loading only one or two database leagues:

Football Manager 26: Requirements 

Minimum Requirements:

• Processor: Intel Core i3-530 or equivalent AMD.
• Memory: 4 GB RAM.
• Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9600 or AMD Radeon HD 5450.
• Disk Space: 7 GB available space.  

Recommended Requirements:

• Processor: Intel Core i5-2400 or equivalent AMD.
• Memory: 8 GB RAM.
• Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon HD 7850.
• Disk Space: 7 GB available space. 
  

Football Manager 26: The Hard Law of the Goal

As soon as I sat on my new bench, I moved from the main screen called Portal, from which all incoming news branches out and it's possible to access any factor concerning team management. Naturally, the basic idea is always the same: you control your squad, youth teams, training system, assistants, infrastructure, finances, transfer market, and so on: nothing that could surprise an FM veteran. What, however, left me bewildered is the new interface management system and navigation between sections, as well as the flood of information that some screens expose us to, including pop-up news that we will systematically have to close to move forward. Furthermore, while in the past it took relatively little time to perform specific actions, now you are forced to make more "clicks," often in situations that are anything but intuitive. The transfer market phase suffers the most, where moving between scouts and lists of male or female players is overly elaborate. As game hours pass, things improve, but not by much, especially if we want to observe a possible acquisition in all its qualities and, perhaps, compare it to who we already have in the squad. 

Not only visual but also managerial innovations regarding tactics, where the ball possession phase is well distinct from the one in which we will have to contain the opponent. This is certainly one of the most appealing novelties for managers and allows good freedom of action to have truly complete control of your team, but here too a certain visual confusion of the interface reigns, while some choices could have been decidedly more obvious. There is a large quantity of tactics to choose from, but once a base is selected, I would have liked to be able to act directly on the player and move him on the field with the mouse, so as to adjust his position to the millimeter. The fact remains that, by dedicating adequate time and with a little patience, the results that can be achieved are satisfactory.

During my adventure, I tested various formations with relative all-round instructions, trying to match them with the strengths and weaknesses of the squad, and I noticed, as always happens in Football Manager, that the system continues to be consistent with the choices made and with the abilities of the players on the payroll, so much so that I spent months desperately trying to contain a clear problem on my right defensive flank, and then managed to find a solution, to my great satisfaction. I have some doubts about the functioning of the option that allows you to see the immediate result of a match: for example, dominating the first half, choosing to immediately skip to the "ninetieth minute," sometimes I suffered resounding defeats that seemed to have little to do with the real values on the field, but I imagine that everything can be fixed via patches.

FM 26: How Does the New 3D Engine Work?

Let's move on to the much-cited use of the Unity engine for the 3D representation of matches, which we can use as we please based on how much time we want to spend following a single game. Testing the various options, I noticed some bugs related to seeing only the most dangerous actions in 3D, as sometimes the system "froze" and even after the end of the dangerous moment continued to show us the continuation of the game. From a tactical point of view, the use of 3D is useful for seeing the real movements of our athletes, but the rendering is decidedly revisable, with a quality that has little to do with modern games.

Naturally, no one expected such a computationally intensive title to show graphics even remotely similar to those of games where the match is the core, but the rendering is quite disappointing, with clunky movements and even the appearance of the most famous players not doing justice to a title that boasts FIFA rights. We remind you that, to date, the rights to the football world are fragmented, and although the game published by SEGA has acquired many official tournaments (including the World Cup, which will have a dedicated update), the situation is more complicated for leagues and athletes. Some teams are without official names and brands, not to mention that not all players have their profile picture. For example, in Serie A, Atalanta becomes Bergamo, Inter becomes Blu-ner, Napoli is Parthenope, and others, with a handful of teams falling into this compromise.

Football Manager 26 carries on the tradition, and to be a good manager, many aspects of the "gaffer's" life must be taken into account, but it seems that Sports Interactive's attempt to innovate has not been entirely successful. Of course, the game has never been aimed at casual players, but now some steps seem truly too convoluted and could have been made simpler, not to mention that the use of the new 3D engine requires more experience. FM 26 makes some people frown, but beneath a not perfectly packaged exterior, it maintains undeniable qualities in its management structure.