Football Manager fans aren’t impressed with the “unbelievably bad” Football Manager 26 which launched earlier this week.
Like the name suggests, Football Manager is a football management sim. The first game was released in 2005 and a new instalment of the hugely popular franchise has been released every year since, until Football Manager 25 which was ultimately cancelled after several delays.
“With FM25, we set out to create the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation, laying the building blocks for a new era,” developers Sports Interactive said in February. However due to a“variety of challenges” it became “unmistakably clear that we would not achieve the standard required,” they added.
“Through the cancellation, every effort is now focused on ensuring that our next release achieves our goal and hits the quality level we all expect. We will update you on how we are progressing with that as soon as we are able to do so.”
Eight months later, Football Manager 26 has been released but fans aren’t impressed.
Football Manager 2026 is currently the 7th worst rated game EVER released on Steam pic.twitter.com/ywFmgjpBV1
— Out of Context Football Manager (@nocontextfm1) November 5, 2025
The game currently has a “mostly negative” review score on Steam, with players criticising the reworked user interface, dodgy performance and various bugs that still have been fixed, despite the delay.
“This game is not even close to being finished. It is basically the same under the hood as it’s always been, just with a terrible paint job slapped over the top. They are basically charging us £50 to be their play-testers,” wrote one disgruntled fan. “This is the worst iteration of the game for many, many reasons,” added another. “Almost 4000 hours in FM games since Football Manager 2014. Thank you Sports Interactive for finally making a game so bad that my obsession is over,” said a third.
Similar complaints are being shared on Reddit. “We all had high hopes. But the release of this game has been unforgivable. Not only have they made a game that hardly works, with a UI that a monkey could’ve made better and match highlights that run at 2 FPS, they’ve also somehow managed to make incredible downgrades to FM24,” explained one player.
Sports Interactive has already shared one update hoping to address some of the issues with Football Manager 26, with more planned in the coming days. You can see the full patch notes here.
In other news, viral Roblox mini-game Grow A Garden is getting a surprising movie adaptation.
