'It would have damaged us forever': After the calamitous cancellation of Football Manager 25, what does FM26 need to deliver?

The contemporary football landscape has one thing in greater abundance than ever before: scrutiny. The sport is now covered 24 hours a day, every nugget of news sliced-and-diced across every platform there is, while things like the recent transfer deadline are the subject of countless live blogs and breathless studio coverage that often amounts to praise, criticism and will he, won't he—who knows!

Then there's the actual matches, swarmed with statistics, and the players themselves, whose performances are broken down Moneyball-style. But well before Moneyball grew notoriety, videogames had been reducing sports to their starkest numbers: and in 1992, developers Paul and Oliver Collyer released their calculating, statistic-obsessed vision of the beautiful game.

The first Championship Manager wasn't a hit, but it wasn't a flop either, and follow-up Championship Manager 93 made several improvements. The Collyer brothers founded Sports Interactive in July 1994, to develop and manage what was becoming a (relative) sales success, but the game had one core piece of magic. The design of Championship Manager—the focus on statistics, the simple-if-elegant visual style, and the authentic link to the real-world sport—was perfect for annual entries and updates. Football has seasons, rolling competitions, constant player flux, and regular iterations of Championship Manager could capture all of this change and intrigue that fans live for.

New Formation

Fast-forward over three decades and everything around football has changed almost beyond recognition, but over that time, Championship Manager kept pace with it. Re-named Football Manager in 2004 after a publisher split the series, by then, was already one of gaming's most reliable annualised sports franchises, constantly iterating but with that management fantasy always at the heart. The thing about football, of course, is that it can always surprise you.

On February 7, 2025, following two prior delays, Football Manager 2025 was cancelled. Sports Interactive offered the rather fuzzy rationale that "the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be."

Six months later and SI studio head Miles Jacobson is being a little more forthright. "If we had released FM25 in the state that it was in, it wouldn't have been good value for money and it would have damaged us forever," Jacobson recently told the BBC. "It's the most expensive decision we've ever made."

Jacobson may have offered up a mea culpa but, as popular FM content creator Clayts says, "It would be nice to have things explained in more detail, what specifically wasn’t ready, how confident they are heading into a new game etc."

FM26 will, per SI, feature a new game engine, a new UI, and improved graphics. But the pre-cancellation FM25 was also supposed to be the "biggest technical and visual advancement for a generation," so expectations are sky high.

Squeaky bum time

"Everything about the FM25 lead up was about how it was going to be a huge step forward with Unity," says Clayts, and the most highly anticipated change is to the game’s match engine. The FM franchise has a loyal and enthusiastic fanbase, but you don’t have to look far to find critics of the game’s aging approach to simulating the on-pitch action, whether that centres on what it’s actually taking account of behind-the-scenes or how it communicates the salient info to wannabe Guardiolas like myself and others, who feel a sheer exuberance in attempting to master the profundities of football’s tactical side.

Following FM25’s cancellation, fans turned coders even went as far as creating their own mods of FM24’s match engine, with adaptations to ball physics, opposition AI decision making and general lighting at the forefront of their experiments. These match engine tweaks have been, for the most part, a roaring success, with notable FM content creators filling the cancellation’s gap by promoting the best mods.

"This is impressive." says @RishiJParmer in the comments of the below Zealand video where he demonstrates the XYZ mod. "I could never change back," said @whichva.

Tiki Taka

This particular mod brought welcome alterations to players’ conduct on the pitch: one New Zealand viewer mentions a time where Pau Torres, a centre-back, scored an audacious bicycle kick as a result of applying the mod—in SI’s recent Matchday First Look for FM26, welcome minor details like these were spotted with what appeared to be Dominic Calvert-Lewin having a similar bicycle-kick effort well saved by the goalkeeper.

What matters is that on-pitch players are making decisions that make sense based on what's happening. I tend to play using the classic 2D camera angle and, like fellow managers, have reached boiling point at times watching my bewildered full-back throw the ball straight to the opposition for the third time in a game.

Other minor details include Premier League arenas like Bournemouth’s Vitality Stadium and Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park, alongside noticeable changes to the nets’ visual effects in-game.

The most eye-catching reveal was, of course, the brand-new match engine graphics, which are a spectacular leap beyond FM24 and certainly seem to justify the shift to Unity.

But looks are looks. After almost two years of FM24, the game can feel predictable and repetitive, hence fans flocking to a mod that changes-up what's happening in the background. The dream for FM26? A match engine that looks this good but also captures a little more of that edge-of-the-seat essence of football in real life, where anything can happen—Garnacho’s brilliant bicycle kick vs Everton, Che Adams’ tremendous halfway-line effort vs Empoli… that’s what is missing. The mod may go too far in some respects but, if SI can deliver a match engine that captures even a tenth of this euphoric unpredictability, it will surely make the wait for FM26 worth it.

Whatever changes are coming, players are united in hoping SI will make transformative adaptations to the match engine. Although, after such a long wait, not everyone’s expectations are so lofty. "Honestly," says Clayts, "I’m just hoping for a polished game that works with everything that they originally promised for [FM] 25, perhaps one or two advancements on top of that."

The match engine may be the main focus, but there are other major footballing reasons for excitement, not least SI’s announcement of their partnership with the Premier League. Within the metaphorical metaverse that aligns gaming and sports, the Premier League—arguably the greatest football league in the world—is the licence of all licences. One so precious that only EA Sports, with their FC (formerly FIFA) series, has equal bragging rights.

The potential this particular licence holds for the football manager fantasy is massive: the drama, politics and razzmatazz of management at the sharpest end. The potential of this tie-up may not be felt to the full in FM26 but could transform aspects of how the series approaches management: being a Premier League manager in 2025 is a whole different ballgame to even 20 years ago. Another intriguing benefit of this partnership is the flexibility and endless possibilities of ‘Road to Glory’ saves for FM players, with seven separate leagues in the English football pyramid now fully licenced; The Stattos will be salivating.

Interestingly enough, one of the FM25 features that didn't work out was replacing email inboxes with WhatsApp-style messaging: Jacobson says "that system didn't work", but that doesn't mean it wouldn't work as a smaller part of something else.

Finally, the most genuinely new element of FM26: the introduction of women's football. This was due in FM25 and has been a long time coming, not least because SI built a new player database and did motion-capture from scratch.

The last decade has seen women's football achieve greater visibility than ever before and, in England at least, the huge success of the Lionesses has attracted millions of new fans—in fact, the quarter-final stage of the recent Women’s EURO saw a record-breaking number of spectators. SI wasn't always so keen on adding the women's game for commercial reasons but, then, it turns out we can probably thank the Lionesses for changing that too:

"At an event, some of the Lionesses came and told me that it would never be commercially viable unless people like us got behind it," recalls Jacobson.

The women's game will be a whole new world for Football Manager aficionados and, while I'm sure there will be grumbles from the usual suspects, surely most will, at least, be curious to see how FM26 simulates it. Different statistical priorities, a different pace, different tactics: in this aspect, at least, FM26 will offer something way beyond the usual.

Play to the last

Some community hopes may, for now, remain fantasy football. But you'd hope FM26 would indicate where the future lies with things like mid-season updates, given things like that Premier League tie-in: imagine a regular patch offering players the chance to unpick that month’s knottiest problems, whether that’s digging one of the newly-promoted sides out of a rut in their crucial, final games, or winning a Hail Mary trophy at Spurs and getting the sack.

FM26 will, in large part, be an iterative entry in an iterative series: but it faces more scrutiny, and higher expectations, than the series has had in a long time. "So much pressure on FM26 now, if it’s a disaster they’re in big trouble." said @96LeedsAlex on X, in response to @DoctorBenjy’s tweet breaking down Miles Jacobson’s recent extensive interviews.

The pressure on SI cooled upon August’s FM26 teaser video, with Football Manager fanatics raving with excitement: "This means everything," said @htomufc, amidst a stirring sea of "Yessss" replies to SI’s tweet.

Football Manager and Sports Interactive being up against it almost tempts you towards clichés about a game of two halves, and wondering whether they can do it on a cold, wet and rainy night in Stoke. That’s fine: football does, too, whilst heckling fans on social media ask the latter question of Messi almost constantly.

Beyond the cliches, Football Manager's granular vision of this vast sport has always been weirdly prescient about the way football was and is going, and in some ways has even influenced it. You don't lose that kind of talent overnight. But as we all know: you're only as good as your next result.