DISCLAIMER! On February 7th, 2025, Sports Interactive took the tough but correct decision to cancel Football Manager 25 and focus all their attention and effort to deliver Football Manager 26 later in 2025. You can read the statement by Sports Interactive here and learn more about why Football Manager 25 was cancelled.
After Football Manager 25 was cancelled, we can expect all the new features & game upgrades being moved towards Football Manager 26 release.
Get everything you need to know about Football Manager 26, including all the news about new Football Manager 26 features and game upgrades, when is the release date of FM26, how much Football Manager 26 will cost, as well as giving you all the latest news about the coming game.
Football Manager 26 or FM26 by Sports Interactive is the first game in a new era of football management. As the development of FM26 has been a long-term process starting already in the Covid-pandemic, fans of Football Manager has been eagerly anticipating the very first news on Football Manager 26 for years!
Now finally, the time of its release is closing in!
With huge changes to the interface, Women’s football introduced for the first time in the Football Manager series, and major improvements to the graphics, Football Manager 26 brings a new legacy after two decades of innovations.
FM26 is year one of the new era for football management. Feed your obsession for the beautiful game in a football universe where only you define your destiny.
In this guide to Football Manager 26 we will update you on all the latest news about FM26. Since FM25 was cancelled in February 2025, this gives us the opportunity to provide you with all the information about what to expect from Football Manager 26 in terms of changes, improvements and gameplay and features!
Here we’ll be able to showcase the very first screenshots of Football Manager 26 along with news about when Football Manager 26 will be released, new features and other game upgrades, as well as the expected release date of Football Manager 26!
Table of Contents
After the incredible success of Football Manager 2024 which sold over 10 million copies, there are huge expectations ahead of Football Manager 26 and its major changes to the game play and number of improvements.
These expectations has skyrocketed after the cancellation of Football Manager 25 – meaning there are huge expectations on Sports Interactive to deliver a enjoyful game since they have had an extra year to improve the quality of what was supposed to be Football Manager 2025.
Although we are around seven months away the very first news about FM26 and 9 to 10 months away the long-anticipated release of Football Manager 26, we believe it’s time to take a closer look at what to expect from Football Manager 2026!
Over the next couple of chapters we will give you a closer look at what was supposed to be Football Manager 2025 and what we can expect will be included in the new Football Manager 26 game.
We will update this post with more FM26 news as soon as they are announced, so you can get all the latest information about the coming changes to Football Manager 2026, and its release!
When is the Football Manager 26 Release Date?
Although nothing is officially announced, we can expect Football Manager 26 [PC/MAC], FM26 Console (Xbox/PS5) and FM26 Mobile (Netflix) to debut in late 2025.
Normally a new edition of Football Manager has been released late October / early November. For Football Manager 25 the game was originally set to be released November 26th, 2024 but due to the complexity of the move to the Unity Engine, Football Manager 25 was first postponed until March 2025 before it waas announced in February 2025 that the game will be cancelled.
In previous years, any new edition of Football Manager has been announced in late August / beginning of September with a release date set to late October/early November. We can expect something similar unless Sports Interactive experiences further problems in the development process of FM26.
Football Manager 26 Release Date: Late 2025
How much will Football Manager 26 cost? Price and pre-order offers on FM26?
Since Sports Interactive and SEGA not being able to deliver a game for two years and the huge losses the developers have had with the delays and cancellation of FM25, there are huge speculations about whether the price of Football Manager 26 will increase.
Football Manager 25 was set to be released in a number of different versions and we can expect FM26 to be available across a number of different formats.
Following is quick list of the available versions of Football Manager 25, and it’s price(s);
- The Original Football Manager 25 [PC/MAC]: EURO €59.99 / UK £44.99 / USD $59.99
- Football Manager 25 Console [Xbox One/S/X & PlayStation 5]: NOT YET KNOWN
- Football Manager 25 Touch [Nintendo Switch]: NOT YET KNOWN
- Football Manager 25 Mobile [Netflix]: Requires Netflix Subscription
At this early point, we can expect Football Manager 26 to cost around the same as FM25 but time will tell how much the game will actually cost at the time of its release.
Over the last few years, Sports Interactive has offered a 10% discount if you pre-purchase Football Manager 25 [PC/MAC] from a SEGA-approved digital retailer, if you pre-purchase Football Manager before the release date. At the moment, nothing is confirmed whether there will be any pre-purchase discounts like this and we will update this post as soon as we know!
* Players across all FM26 titles will be able to carry forward save games from the corresponding FM24 release, with save game compatibility now introduced to our Mobile series for the first time.
New Football Manager 26 Features We Know About
Unity Graphics Engine Introduced in FM26
Football Manager 26 will certainly redefine the football management genre by combining decades of evolution with groundbreaking new features. A huge leap has been taken for FM26 as the game developed by Sports Interactive and published by SEGA transitions to the Unity Engine.
This brings one of the most significant visual and technical improvements in the series’ history with vastly improved graphical experienced, including enhanced player animations, better matchday visuals, and more realistic environments that bring the world of football to life like never before.
As Football Manager 26 will be the introduction of the brand new Unity Graphics Engine you will experience one of the most revolutionizing changes to Football Manager for years in terms of graphical capabilities!
We’re talking at the same level as when the 3D Match engine was added to FM09!
According to SI, the current graphics engine running behind the match engine has not had a major revamp since 2017 and the game has suffered since then from using a ‘outdated’ technology which didn’t managed to keep up with the pace of the rapid technological advancements in the industry.
With the game now being released on more platforms than ever before, Sports Interactive has worked on improving the backend technology that has made Football Manager into what it is.
The Unity Engine will come to the classic version of Football Manager 2026, FM26 Console and FM26 Touch*.
What will the power of Unity Engine bring to Football Manager 26?
Powered by the Unity Engine, Football Manager 25 let you discover smoother and more realistic animations, more detailed visual graphical enhancements and better performance whilst playing the game. From increased stadium details and more true-to-life visual experience both on and off the pitch to enhanced and more realistic player animations, the switch to the Unity Engine brings the game more to life than ever before!
The switch to the Unity Engine is a remarkable change we all will notice once loading FM26 for the first time.
By using one of the most powerful industry-leading game development platforms for Football Manager you will experience a brand new user interface to the game but that graphics both inside and outside matchdays is severily upgraded.
Here’s a quick list of the enhanced graphical capabilities in FM26:
- more visually immersive experience both on and off the pitch
- improved user interface
- smoother, more realistic player animations
- more detailed stadiums
- Immersive Matchday Experience
When we know the Unity Engine has been used to deliver games like Pokémon Go, Call of Duty:Mobile, the Cities Skyline series and the open-world, action role-playing game Genshin Impact – which gives you a similar look and feel as the Legend of Zelda game series – the possibilities for FM25 will be endless!
In the simpliest term, the Unity engine offers the opportunity to add more powerful user interface tools which will enhance how you navigate through the different screens and access information available to you.
We’ve been working closely with Unity over the last few years to be able to deliver a whole new UI which will dramatically improve the ways you are able to interact with the game, both inside and outside of a matchday. Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP) allows us to create more optimal graphics across a range of platforms, from mobile to high-end consoles and PC/Mac – but we’re also adding some enhancements on top.
The Future of Football Manager, Sports Interactive
More Immersive Matchday Experience
In FM26, we can enjoy a more immersive matchday experience with the switch to the Unity Engine and by taking advantage of technological enhancements.
Matchdays in FM26 will feel more authentic, thanks to improved volumetric animations and ball physics. You’ll notice the difference in how players move, react, and interact on the pitch, creating a fluid, true-to-life experience.
Every pass, tackle, and goal feels more impactful as you guide your team through every crucial moment.
For FM24, we could experience the very first jump towards the enhancements relating to match engine improvements and graphical enhancements with a greater focus on ball physics and player locomotion. This will further be improved for FM25 by continuing the effort into making the game a truer reflection of real-life football with new animations based on a new animation technology.
Read more about Volumetric Player Animations on Football Manager 25, which will enhance the authencity of gameplay experience within the FM26 match engine.
More Detailed Stadiums
In Football Manager 26, the graphical enhancements will be present both on the pitch and off it. At match days you can expect enhanced visually improvements to stadiums and its environments by offering more details.
Perhaps the switch to the Unity Engine will offer us the chance to custom-build new stadiums and watch the new stadium being build or upgraded with a scenomatic overview of the process – just like we would expect to see upgrades of buildings and environments in other gaming genres.
These improvements will also be evident in the surrounding scenes of the whole Match Day experience on FM26.
On top of that, its introduction will opening up the opportunity to dramatically improve how newgen faces look and the quality of the faces generated, such as in the case of manager creation by offering more realism and depth.
In the end, it will open the possibility of better-quality graphics across all supported devices of Football Manager – from the console version of the game to the fully-fledged career game and multiplayer modes.
NB! FM25 Mobile will be the only platform that won’t benefit from the switch to the Unity Engine but may be incorporated to a future version of FM Mobile.
READ MORE | Volumetric Player Animations | A More Realistic Football Manager 25 Match Engine?!
New Leagues & Nations
In addition to its technical advancements, FM26 introduces women’s football, making it the first game in the series to feature fully integrated men’s and women’s leagues. Whether you’re competing in the Premier League, which is now officially licensed, or rising through the ranks of women’s football, FM26 ensures every managerial challenge is as engaging and authentic as possible.
The game’s expanded database now includes more leagues, nations, and players than ever before, allowing you to take your club to new heights.
Official Licence of The Premier League
Screenshot of the licenced teams in the Premier League on Football Manager 26 – showcasing real Premier League logos and player photos of Premier League teams.
On the 10th of June 2024, it was announced that Football Manager would get the official Premier League licence. Gone are the days of Man UFC saga and the experience of managing in the English Premier League will be more immersive than ever before!
From the 2024/25 season, all 20 Premier League clubs will be fully licensed in future FM releases with official logos, kits, and player photos featuring across the entire FM-series.
Expect further information about the Premier League’s in-game integration with Football Manager and the partnership activities between the league and Sports Interactive coming later this year.
Women’s Football introduced to FM25 FM26
One of the first Football Manager 2025 features we can look forward to is the introduction of Women’s Football coming for Football Manager 2025, for the first time in the game’s history. We need to head back to 2021 when this was first announced but it’s now becoming the reality.
Over the last few years the studio has been working on the major project of adding Women’s Football to Football Manager and it’s been perhaps a longer process than anticipated to include women’s football in the game. Even though Sports Interactive was beaten by EA Sports FC 24 to include women’s leagues into a football management game by acquiring the licence for the National Women’s Soccer League and let you play with some of the biggest women’s football stars in EA Sports, the creators behind Football Manager 25 has spent years researching female footballers and leagues to try to perfectly reflect the female stars skills and give you the most accurate squads.
In Football Manager 25 you’ll be able to move seaminglessly between managing men’s and women’s clubs and vice-versa in one world, one ecosystem.
Women’s football on Football Manager 25 will let you manage any teams across several leagues with a database size of 25,000 players and staff.
With the introduction of female players on FM25, the developers of Football Manager has decided to remove player’s weight from all player profiles in Football Manager 25.
Through the creation of our Women’s Football database, we discovered that while the weight of male athletes can change a bit month to month, women’s body types are very different from men’s and their weight fluctuates a lot more, often weekly.
FM25 Development Update – Miles Jacobson
A screenshot of the player profile of a female player on Football Manager 25.
Women’s Leagues Licences
How many Women’s leagues and what licences Sports Interactive has acquired is yet to know but according to recent news SI has secured multiple licenses for FM26 and they are sure more will follow in the future.
However, since Sports Interactive acquired the licences of the UEFA competitions ahead of FM24, we can hope the game also has similar licences for the UEFA Women’s Champions League.
“The hard work doesn’t stop here, though. There’s a lot more to come from us over the next few years, starting with FM25 and all that means with the move to Unity and introduction of Women’s Football. We’ve been releasing games for 33 years but what we’re doing now is setting things up for the next 30, where we expect to continue to innovate for decades to come.”Sports Interactive on breaking the milestone of best-selling game ever in the series
The New User Interface of Football Manager 26
One of the first significant changes to FM26 is the drastic changes to the game’s user interface. Along with that, the user experience will also be very different from what you’ve gotten used to.
The new UI for FM26 is built with a powerful design and a technical foundation that can be scaled and improved for the future. You can expect to see the user experience being strengthen for any future additions of the game without compromising the consistency of the user interface.
The difficulty has always been at balancing the way Football Manager should deliver key information at the right time without overwhelming the player and make it user friendly regardless of whether you are playing with a mouse and keyboard, controller or even a touch screen.
For FM26, the game developers and technical staff has worked with the engineers at Unity to adapt their engine to give us the flexibility and dynamics needed from a UI perspective.
Screenshot of the new and improved club overview interface on Football Manager 26.
The New Tiles & Cards UI/UX for FM26
For Football Manager 26, the new UI/UX system will be driven by what Sports Interactive entitles as a “Tile and card” system.
The “Tiles” are panels of information with multiple different “states” which ranges in different sizes, from small amount of information to larger “cards” which contains more material and further detail. This is done to build a sense of exploration for every player to reveal the depth and detail of Football Manager.
With tiles and cards SI can display appropriate information in various different screens and scenarios.
Below is an example of a Player Form tile in different “states” to provide you with more important context. If you click on the form tile, you will open up a card with more information about the player’s form.
The idea behind “tiles” and “cards” is to reduce the volum of screens in-game to try to make navigation easier without compromising the detail level.
To help you understand the potential of the new Cards and Tile system, here’s a screenshot of the new in-between match highlights*.
More information on how it all works will follow during Sports Interactive’s gameplay rollout in October.
Replacing Inbox with News Portal
The Inbox has always been your main source of information with in-game emails delivered to your inbox as messages. For FM26, the Inbox screen will be re-modelled into what they call the Portal.
This change of name aims to represent how we access information and news via our phones rather than laptops. Through the Portal you will get a richer window to the footballing universe with better tools to develop your story through the Agenda and Messages sections.
The Portal will also deliver more insight into what’s happening elsewhere via News and Matches – making the Portal a one stop place for all your manager businesses whether you wish to look at your squad, look for new recruitments or get information about ehat’s going on around you.
More Tactical Mastery & Better Strategic Depth in FM26!
In Football Manager 26 you will discover a major revamp to the tactical system and how you would go about creating tactics in Football Manager. In short, FM26 offers deeper tactical control and more immersive enhancements that will let you dictate every aspect of your team’s playing style.
In Football Manager 26, the revamped tactical system is more in-depth than ever.
From new player roles to deeper customization for formations, player roles, and in-game decisions you’ll be able to showcase your tactical brilliance on another level than ever before!
As a manager, you’ll have access to detailed controls that let you set formations (both in and out of possession?), define player roles, and issue in-game instructions that can turn the tide of a match.
The enhanced matchday experience means that the success of your tactics is immediately reflected in how your players perform on the pitch.
New Player Roles in FM26 (In & Out of Possession?)
Football Manager 26 will let you discover new player roles, such as this screenshot of a female player in Football Manager 26 reveals by being able to play as a Channel Forward.
The new player role Channel Forward
Improved Match Experience
Coming soon…
Your Manager
Coming soon…
Other Changes for Football Manager 2026
Transfer Saved Games From FM24 to FM26
For FM24, the ability to transfer saved games from FM23 to FM24 was first introduced. According to the information from SI about the future of Football Manager this feature will continue – letting you transfer your FM24 saved games into FM26.
For the first time in the history, players across all FM26 titles will be able to carry forward save games from the corresponding FM24 release, with save game compatibility now introduced to FM26 Mobile series, as well!
READ MORE | Play Football Manager 2024 as if it was FM25 – Download the 2024-25 League Update Database
Future Game Updates to Football Manager 26
One of the news that might have been overshadowed by the major changes coming to Football Manager 26 in terms of the new graphics engine and the prospect of shifting seamlessly between managing women’s and men’s team on Football Manager 26 is the groundbreaking news about future game updates.
Once Football Manager 26 is released, you can expect for the future more regular mid-cycle feature releases – meaning that the game will evolve with new improvements to the game, far more often.
So far, the Football Manager game has been updated twice a year after the vanilla version is out – with a patch being released around two weeks before Christmas and the main data update featuring all the winter transfer updates fixed at the end of February. Now, on top of these regular game updates, Sports Interactive is able to update the game far more often with the move to the Unity Graphics engine.
This means bug fixes and new additions to the game can happen more regularly than before.
International Management to Return for FM26?
On September 9th 2024, it was confirmed that International Management won’t be playable for Football Manager 25, FM25 Console or FM25 Touch. Instead, it will be available on FM25 Mobile as that’s on a different development track and codebase. However, International Management will continue to exist in the game, but you won’t be able to manage a National team.
However, with FM25 cancelled and Sports Interactive have been given 8 extra months to perfect Football Manager 26 there is a huge chance International Management will return on FM26, FM26 Console or FM26 Touch in a much more feature-rich way!
Whether that’s the fact will be speculations until Football Manager 26 is announced and we know more about the Football Manager 26 features.
The concern whether International Management will return for FM26 or be skipped until FM27 depends on the difficulties Sports Interactive experiences in the making of what will be Football Manager 26.
According to Sports Interactive took the difficult decision to cancel Football Manager 25 “due to a variety of challenges that we’ve been open about to date, and many more unforeseen, we currently haven’t achieved what we set out to do in enough areas of the game, despite the phenomenal efforts of our team. Each decision to delay the release was made with the aim of getting the game closer to the desired level but, as we approached critical milestones at the turn of the year, it became unmistakably clear that we would not achieve the standard required, even with the adjusted timeline“.
Although they have got an extra few months to deliever a feature-rich FM26 it depends on which areas of the game they are forced to prioritize to release a game that reaches the minimum standards and quality.
With FIFA World Cup 2026 arriving in the latter part of Football Manager 26 cycle we can all hope International Management will be playable in the next iteration of Football Manager.
We will update this post as soon as we know whether it’s a fact International management will return for FM26 or be skipped for FM27.
Removed Features for FM26?
As you might be aware of, Sports Interactive collects unanoumous data about how you play the game and what areas of the game you use. After consideration the work load of updating, revamping and re-modelling several parts of the game under the new Unity graphics enginge, the developers at Sports Interactive has decided to make several changes to FM25 that means that some features or game modes won’t be immediately available for Football Manager 25.
Beneath is a quick list of what’s been removed. Some of these might be brought back in future iterations of Football Manager in order for the game developers to properly implement these features and modes in the best possible way.
- Touchline Shouts won’t be back to the series for the forseeable future but may be added to the game if or when Sports Interactive is able to make them work properly.
- Social Media Screen is taken out and instead incorporated into the game in other game areas as supporters are still an integral part of the game.
- Data Chalkboard is another area that will be gone for FM25. With data metrics and visualisations a major part of the game, how you analyze your team and your players has become superfluous for many of you. Personally, I favour to analyze my team’s performance and look at players individual performance from specific matches, so removing Data Chalkboard will be another feature that’s greatly missed!
- Create-A-Club will be brought back for Football Manager 26 with lots of changes and improvements as the current experience of Create-A-Club can’t be improved in the way they want it to appear for FM25.
- Versus Mode is used by 0.5% of the audience and because of that Sports Interactive is looking at either to supersude it by something else or return it in a completely different format one time in the future.
- Challenge Mode is scheduled to return completely revamped for either Football Manager 26 or Football Manager 27. However, sicne it’s only used by under 0.5% of the audience, the game developers has prioritized other parts of the game for FM25 release.
- Fantasy Draft will be significantly improved and is scheduled to return for FM25 as a mid-cycle feature. This means that Fantasy Draft won’t be playable from day one. However, Fantasy Draft will be brought bak to the series bigger and better than ever! Learn more in the chapter about the new FIFA eSports Activities.
Stay tuned for more information about Football Manager 26, its feature reveals and first screenshots later in 2025.
