While the football gaming scene has largely been dominated by titles that focus on the raw action on the pitch, from the EA Sports FC (formerly FIFA) and eFootball (formerly Pro Evolution Soccer) franchises, the allure of what goes on behind the scenes of the sport has become an equally enticing prospect among fans, an itch scratched by Sega and Sports Interactive’s football management simulator franchise, Football Manager.
Starting out in 1992 as Championship Manager, the franchise has garnered its own niche but dedicated fanbase over the years, allowing players to build their dream football teams from the ground up, playing a part in everything that goes on behind-the-scenes in real life, like budgeting, player loans, scouting and team formations, a complex and data-heavy experience that while thrilling for series fans, have always proven daunting for newcomers.
This concern was one of the main driving factors for the franchise’s upcoming sequel, Football Manager 26, which promises a host of new features and overhauls largely focused on making the game the most inclusive it has ever been, while being accessible to all.
“What we’ve seen is that a lot of new people coming to the game are dropping out after an hour. About eight million people carry on playing for five hours. And if you play Football Manager for five hours, you play for 100, right? So that starting point was very important for us,” explains Miles Jacobson, studio director at Sports Interactive, during an interview with Geek Culture and members of Southeast Asia media during the Tokyo Game Show (TGS) 2025.
“We wanted to make a lighter version of the game. So we have an accessibility team now at the studio, and we also have people on the script-writing side who we’ve really given a lot of time and freedom to be able to get the tutorial level right.”
“And then [we added] an absolutely key thing for accessibility, which [is that] we have to signpost better,” he continues, explaining the addition of a new search system within the game, which allows new players to not just find their way around its many mechanics, but is also built for those with a limited understanding of the sport, working alongside another new feature, the FMpedia, which essentially functions as a Wikipedia for football to explain the game’s system and its tactics.
These additions also work hand in hand with Football Manager 26’s overhauled user interface (UI), which now divides the game’s many complex elements into three distinctive navigation systems – the top and sub menu, alongside bookmarks.
“Attention spans have dropped over the last 30 years, thanks to social media and TikTok,” explains Jacobson. “You need to get the key beats into that first paragraph to keep people reading. So we have to do the same inside the game. With the new interface, we’re able to get more information on screen, but in smaller bite-sized chunks.”
Interestingly enough, Jacobson also admits that this new change might actually make the game more difficult for hardcore players to navigate compared to newcomers, as they have to re-learn everything that they are used to from previous titles.
“You have to cancel your muscle memory, and you have to relearn it, but once you do, it’s so much easier to use.”
Aside from making the title more accessible to new players, Football Manager 26 has also taken strides in inclusivity, too, with the addition of Women’s Football, a fully-fledged new mode that brings the equally important aspect of the sport to the franchise for the first time. This inclusion wasn’t as simple as just reskinning the existing game mode, however, as the team had to take into account the real-world difference in both genders’ physiques.
“On the graphical side of things, what some don’t realise is that women’s body shapes are different to men’s,” explains Jacobson. ”Women tend to have wider hips; their bodies are different, so if you take a bunch of male animations and put them onto a female body, they run like Cowboys, it looks wrong.”
“We had to redo all of the motion capture animation. So we brought in a bunch of women footballers to come in and redo every animation that we had in the game, plus being able to use volumetric data from real-life games as well meant that we’re able to make things look just as good.”
It wasn’t just graphical considerations the team had to account for, either, as individual player stats had to be adjusted in order to suit both genders.
“On the research side, [we had to] make the decision of whether to compare women footballers to men footballers,” he adds, “We decided that this actually wasn’t fair, because men tend to be stronger than women, while women tend to have better agility than men. So we’re comparing men to men and women to women when it comes to their performance attributes.”
While Football Manager 26 is set to mark a major improvement for the franchise, the team hasn’t forgotten their shortcomings. After all, the journey to the upcoming title wasn’t smooth sailing, marred by the unfortunate failure and cancellation of what would have been its predecessor, Football Manager 25.
“We’re one of the few games that have been going strong for over 30 years, and the only time we failed is with FM25. I failed. I didn’t release a game, and I’m at peace with that,” admits Jacobson, “I apologise to everyone out there for not delivering a game last year, but I had to come to peace with the fact that we made a game that wasn’t good enough and I cancelled it.”
“It was the most difficult conversation that I’ve had in my whole career, of having to sit down and go, ‘I’m really sorry we failed’, because it’s not something that’s happened to us before. But you can’t mope around, because you have to learn from failure.”
“We all make mistakes every single day of our lives, and that’s what you learn,” he adds, “We learned that we were too ambitious with what we were trying to do, and that things can sound like great ideas and look good on paper, but don’t work in reality.”
With this in mind, Jacobson and his team have their sights firmly set on making Football Manager 26 more of an evolution of the franchise rather than a mere sequel.
“When we approached [Football Manager 26], our previous engine had been running for so long, since Championship Manager 4 (2003). It was creaking and couldn’t handle what we wanted to do anymore, and it became a real problem,” Jacobson describes.
“We had to make the decision, do we spend tens of millions improving the engine, but being really slow to be able to make the changes, or do we move to a new engine? We also had to think about what worked and what didn’t, either to improve or get rid of them.”
“That’s why this is the first of our next generation of games,” he explains, “FM24 was the perfect endpoint of [the previous generation]. Football Manager 26 is that next stage of the next 20 years, and is setting up for the future.”
Ultimately, Football Manager 26 is stepping into the future while still providing that same core experience for both newcomers and fans who have been with the franchise since day one – a game that lets them live out their football dream, and most importantly, play it their way. But what if Jacobson had to describe the upcoming title as a single football tactic then?
“Love.” he describes, only half-joking, as that’s exactly what Football Manager 26 is, a love letter to fans, both a “thank you” and an apology for those eagerly awaiting its next instalment after its predecessor’s cancellation, and a “welcome” to new fans making their first foray into the franchise.
Football Manager 26 releases on 4 November 2025 for the PC via Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Microsoft Store.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
Si Jia
