Football Manager 26 Released: Fans Hate This One Key Feature

Football Manager 26 Released: Fans Hate This One Key Feature

A marquee moment every year it is uploaded to the gaming platform Steam (apart from 2025, of course - we all know what happened there), Football Manager 2026 early access has been officially released to the public and, as with every past edition, has split the fanbase, divided opinion, and generated a whole lot of discussions about the various upgrades, new features, and revamped interface.

With a two-year break for the boffins at Sports Interactive (SI) to totally restyle their flagship game, many expected the 2026 edition to comfortably go down as the best ever. However, fans of the game have already identified one big problem less than 24 hours after the game became available - the User Interface (UI).

Me spending five minutes on every screen trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing on this new User Interface pic.twitter.com/emg9rVy9I7

— Out of Context Football Manager (@nocontextfm1) October 23, 2025

In previous years, the interface has remained virtually unchanged, and Football Manager gamers became so familiar with it, they thought it was unlikely to ever change (myself included).

However, in their two years of meticulous planning for November 2025, SI decided to completely redesign everything, even down to the tactics management screen, and it’s safe to say that the FM loyalists are not happy.

I myself have only played for a couple of hours and am still learning my way around, but with a passable knowledge of the game, both past and present, I’m here to break down everything SI got wrong with the new UI.

Ticking Boxes

Firstly, the overall design must be addressed. The FM interface over the last five years or so has been orientated around clearly depicted, easy-to-understand columns, displaying all the necessary information you need with the option to easily substitute new columns in, replacing data you don’t particularly pay attention to.

This year, SI have decided to seriously modernise their UI pages - and the design they have picked is rather … well, boxy.

And they haven’t just made this design exclusive to certain areas - it is everywhere. Home page? Boxes. Player Profile? Even more boxes. Recruitment page? Boxy as all hell. Social media is already awash with people lamenting the departure of their easy-to-navigate column on the left side, which, in past editions, was all you needed to make your way around the game, jumping countries and even continents in seconds.

But in the new game, some of the options down that famed left side column have seemingly been removed, and players must manually search for whatever league, player or team they wish to track in a long and extremely frustrating side-quest, which, quite frankly, takes up our valuable game time… Who wants to spend a minute searching for how Notts County are doing when the old editions could land you on their page faster than the reaction time of an F1 driver in a game that is two years older?

Got through the UI to my safe place.

There we go. Beautiful. pic.twitter.com/IILYCnV65h

— Out of Context Football Manager (@nocontextfm1) October 23, 2025

Granted, these boxes do hold some extra data and new metrics that have not featured in previous games, but these are a small consolation - in reality, SI have ruined, or at least partially so, a recipe that had been working for over half a decade, and while modernising is part of gaming evolution, few see the need for the company to have binned it.

Allegedly, the new design is an attempt to integrate console players more, with the console version of the game selling more and more editions year on year. That’s fine if you want to give the console gamers something to shout about, but don’t inflict all us PC players with the same design - we were happy with it just the way it was.

What Have SI Missed?

So what is missing from the new UI? Well, it’s a little bit of everything, including popular shortcuts, frequently visited data screens, and the simpler recruitment process (although on this last point, I’m sure time will be its greatest ally).

For a start, and a big personal frustration for me, the competitions tab is missing - in previous games, this would allow you to see an overview of every league table and competition you were following, providing quick access to the league in your search for a specific club or player that you have your eye on.

Now, you must instead utilise the search bar - that in itself does not take much more time than the old “competitions” button, but it was almost immediately the first thing I noticed after reading the hour or so of tutorials I had to wade through.

Speaking of the tutorials, there are SO many of them. With a revamped UI, this is to be expected, and even those who play Football Manager for a living would struggle to navigate their way around quickly without at least a bit of instruction.

Each induction guides you through the purpose of each individual box on each individual page. In all, it adds up to well over 100 tutorials, which, you guessed it, also takes the number of boxes past the same number. If so much instruction and guidance needed to be put into the game, then what was the point of introducing something so complex in the first place?

The background is also more than questionable - when loading into a match day or advancing days, the background changes to a strange dystopian landscape of faded circles and half circles, usually with a bright colour such as red or green to mark out the trendy angles and odd pattern.

However, this can only be seen on the right-hand side of the screen – as you slowly scan from right to left, the colour slowly fades to a darker and darker shade until it reaches black - strange choice, and with no apparent relation to the competition or team you are playing. It is seemingly just a random attempt by SI to showcase their artsy side - no one asked, lads.

The transfer and recruitment screen is another page to fall victim to the game’s allegedly ‘woke’ design - they many features from previous games have survived and been put under the recruitment tab, such as Squad Planner and both incoming and outgoing transfer clauses, the actual transfer market has undergone a wholesale change.

You can still set recruitment focuses, but a new feature also allows you to advertise the positional and quality requirements you are looking for in the transfer market, which sees players from various nearby clubs pop up and offer their services.

It seems like a limiting feature, and the guilty pleasure for almost any Football Manager player is finding a wonderkid or top talent of an obscure nationality in a rarely checked league. My feeling is that this feature limits players’ ability to find these gems, and removing some of the magic from the game as a result.

There are also a couple of other little bugs I’ve noticed which are more humorous than anything – the primary one being that when a player is subbed off the field, they magically change into their tracksuit whilst still on the pitch! I thought a physio team had come on the first time I saw it, but my doubts were banished as my striker, who was about to come off, scored a disallowed goal, and as soon as the flag went up, he changed into a blue and white tracksuit, confirming that was indeed a player and not a member of the medical staff.

Trossard just forgot to get changed in someone's game pic.twitter.com/4be1Fyo7hF

— Out of Context Football Manager (@nocontextfm1) October 23, 2025

The in-game commentary also seems a bit patchy - its description of what is going on in the game itself is fine, but at full time, referring to your team’s performance and you as manager, it won’t say your name in the text. Instead it will simply say #manager‘package’ or something else, indicating that your own manager’s profile is not yet properly coded into the game.

However, while the interface may have a myriad of problems, it would be remiss of me if I didn’t mention the match engine.

A New Football Manager Era

The entire reason why Football Manager 25 was cancelled was to allow SI to fully integrate the Unity 3D match engine into the game, removing the dated in-house-created FM Match Lab version, which had seen fans become tired of the repetitive problems and lack of realism.

I can emphatically say that, just three games into my save with Colchester United, that the new 3D match view is the best ever seen in the game's history. Everything is smooth, player movements have been given increased realism, and Unity have even added a skill move here and there to keep you guessing, something that occurred so infrequently on older match engines they might as well have been non-existent.

Initial impression.#FM26 pic.twitter.com/MRGl2Gvt87

— Out of Context Football Manager (@nocontextfm1) October 23, 2025

The match engine was the major reason behind the excitement for this year's newest instalment of the game, and despite shortcomings elsewhere, SI certainly lived up to their end of the bargain when it came to the quality and immersion of the match engine.

It is just such a shame that they couldn’t pair their vastly improved gameday experience with a clean, simple, attractive design throughout their landing pages.

Of course, this is still the beta version, and it will be in early access until the release of the full game on November 4th – given that the Football Manager series has a history of listening to customer feedback and improvement recommendations, at least some of the more minor flaws will be ironed out.

But I’m afraid that it looks like the overall UI design is here to stay, which is a shame. With two years to work on it, there was so much potential to do something special with the in-game menus, but at the moment, it just looks a little lazy. Box everything off, give each box a little explanation, and hey presto, you’ve got a video game.

Me this weekend: pic.twitter.com/M4GHYIsFiz

— Out of Context Football Manager (@nocontextfm1) October 21, 2025

At least with the public uproar surrounding the design, it will be very hard for SI not to learn from their mistakes, which means that we can hope for a vastly improved design this time next year. In the meantime, happy gaming football manager’s, and i hope that, despite the lack of clarity in places, you find success wherever your career takes you. Over and out.