It took me a long time just to get through all my inductions, in Football Manager 26, before I could even set foot on the touchline for my first match. That part at least is pretty familiar, for any long-running Football Manager fans. Every save takes a little while to set up, many minutes, hours, often days dedicated to press conferences, budget meetings, tactical overviews and scouting department overhauls before the first ball is kicked on the squad's return to pre-season training. But in FM26, Sports Interactive's big gamble on a new engine and new user interface, that's taken to a whole new level. There is a lot to learn here - or more accurately, re-learn, if you've played the series before. A lot of it is the same, though within a new layout, like returning home to find your furniture's been moved between all your rooms - maybe the odd bit re-upholstered for good measure. And some of it is properly, at first confoundingly but also potentially brilliantly, new.
The newness starts on the very first screen. There's a greatly improved character creator for your manager, but beyond the significantly less-dodgy visuals there's also something noticeably more impactful, in a more RPG-style setup to your manager's attributes. For one, these are now described verbally, rather than represented by a hard number, and so your attacking coaching attribute, for instance, is now rated as average, good, very good, outstanding, and so on. That's something I don't love, personally. If an attribute has a number behind the scenes we might as well be able to see it, given we can see all the other ones and will only be going to Google what 'very good' means in numerical terms anyway. (The same goes for the long-hidden attributes that decide things like a player's personality descriptor, in my opinion - if we can have a visible numerical rating for Teamwork or Determination, why is Professionalism or Ambition hidden?)
More interesting is how this is decided. You now pick three coaching styles from a choice of nine (Attacking, Defensive, Developer, Energetic, Entertainer, Pragmatist, Specialist, Systems Builder, and Tactician), and three mental styles from a choice of six (Driven, Disciplined, Resilient, Convincing, Inspirational, Accomplished). These then determine your ratings for individual coaching attributes - such as attacking coaching, set piece coaching, man management, etc. - according to your choice. It's essentially like a 'background' system for classic RPGs, where you pick fixed elements of your character that impact the actual numbers used to govern your success in the game. The people who like to remind everyone FM is actually an RPG should be happy! It also gives you some in-built tendencies, such as 'plays attacking football' or 'plays entertaining football', which seem to largely impact in-game dialogue elements like how the press describe you.
After this came the usual wave of min-tutorials, delivered via the 'Portal' - more on that shortly - and largely operating in the usual way, of having you work through slide-like pages that represent key points of a meeting. This also, however, was where I encountered my first proper snag with FM26's new UI.
For those not in the loop, the brief description is that FM26 now features a Windows-like system where clicking on certain 'tiles' within your not-Inbox will open up a smaller window within the game UI that temporarily overlays what you're seeing. Basically, it's a pop-up. It essentially means staying on the original page in the background, expanding something you might see there in only light-detail to quickly looking at it in medium-detail in the window, and then closing it when you're done. But here's a snag: there's no 'back' button within the windows. Here's an example of where that causes a problem: I was in the team dynamics induction pop-up, featuring a series of pages of (slightly verbose) information on how the system works, where I get to one showing me tiles within this window on a few of my key leaders in the squad. Let's say I want to click on one of those to see the player in more detail - I wanted to see a bit more info on Bruno Fernandes' leadership potential to decide who'd be my captain. What happens next? Within the window you're taking to Bruno's page, but there's no way to get back to where you were in the induction. So you have to close the whole window, then find the not-email in your not-Inbox that prompted the induction, and work your way back to where you were in that.
As for the Portal, it's basically your Inbox. And that's good! The Inbox worked absolutely fine, and while yes, technically, football management in the real world isn't typically done via a laptop and Gmail account, a pseudo-email system of a series of to-do's listed in brief on the left, and a big pane on the right to view that task or notification in more detail, is ultimately a very efficient system for a game like FM where you are, ultimately, working through a series of in-tray messages and tasks while exploring the wider UI when you want to look into something in depth. The main tweak here is the addition of those tiles (or cards? I never know which is which in Sports Interactive's official terminology) within the detailed email window. Rather than a block of text, in actual email formatting, you now get several boxes with bits of relevant info within them. I'd say it's a mild improvement, but it's very early days - over time it could prove a huge time-saver, or potentially more of a pain than just having text with a few handy hyperlinks in it.
The big change though - even bigger than the UI - is on the pitch. Or rather, on the pitch and under the hood, and in the changing room. And on the whiteboard. It's the tactics!
This stuff is, after a few hours, fantastic. The most obviously noticeable change is the visual improvement within the matches themselves. FM26's matches look dramatically nicer and more realistic in motion than they've ever done before. There's a swathe of new animations and more seamless blending between them, and it immediately shows. Yes, there are plenty of familiar ones - if you've played many hundreds of hours of FM, you'll recognise FM-like movements anywhere - but fundamentally these matches simply look much, much more like real football. It's also lovely to finally have the 2D visuals running in between highlights as well. Long live the 2D match viewer.
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That stuff's all lovely, but as any football cliché merchant knows, the hard work's done in the dressing room and at the training ground, and this tactical stuff is equally, at first glance, excellent. Training largely seemed to operate the same - though there was only so much time I had to poke around every corner of this thing - but tactics have had the most dramatic reworking since the introduction of roles and duties over a decade ago. Now, there's a split between in-possession and out-of-possession tactics - you literally have two tactics screens with distinct formations on - plus a kind of unified view of the two, and a new tactics visualisation system. In practice it's a bit of a revelation.
"It's something we wanted to do – something we've been discussing – for a very, very long time," Jack Joyce, a senior product owner at Sports Interactive who looks after the tactics and match engine systems, told me during an interview at the studio. The team has been working on it for more than four years, he said. "Fundamentally, it just comes from the idea that we could recreate certain tactical systems that we're seeing in real life with the tools we had at our disposal."
He gave an example of a classic 4-3-3 in FM24, the most recent entry. "You can have it with the roles set up [so] that it transitions into sort of a 3-2-5 attacking shape, maybe like you see with an Arsenal or Manchester City. But you can't really get them to defend as a 4-4-2 at the same time, which also you see in real life, with Martin Odegaard defending alongside the striker."
The team considered adding more roles which approximated that effect, but ultimately settled on splitting the two systems, as they've increasingly been done in the real world by those with a modern understanding of the game. Here in FM26, there are indeed new roles too on top of that, but they're also split across in- and out-of-possession setups. An example: out of possession a player playing wide on the right can be asked to fall in line, track opposition attackers even deeper, or sit high and wide waiting for the 'out ball' to launch a counter-attack. Likewise, you can indeed have your CAM - in my case dear Bruno - playing as a 10 when in possession, then moving up to sit beside the centre forward to defend as a front two when you lose the ball.
There's also a huge amount of fluidity available here. I saw some ludicrous formations around the room at the preview; you can, technically, ask your centre back to run up to centre forward when in possession and back to centre back again when you lose it. But just because you can doesn't mean you should - you'll get a little yellow warning sign from your assistants telling you they'll struggle to move between such distant positions if you really push your luck, though you can of course always choose to ignore them and press on with your asymmetrical left back-to-right-winger transition if you really insist.
The team talked about restricting this, mind. "It was a big decision that came up early in the design discussions," Joyce said. "Surely you've got to restrict people in some way?" But the team instead decided, "yes, they can do crazy stuff, but [restricting the system] was something I was really adamant that we shouldn't do, because I feel like FM has always given you that freedom to do whatever you want experimentally, and it might not always work. It might be crazy. But I think that's sort of the heart of what the tactics system is." The warning system was the team's compromise.
The visualiser is also a crucial factor in this - something I hadn't even seen at first until Joyce mentioned it during our interview. Within the tactics screen you can now quickly view how your team will look, in a visualisation that resembles something close to a heat map, or pass network: each player's likely average position during all phases of the game. So when you're defending deep, you click the third of the pitch closest to your keeper, and see that right winger you told to stay high lurking slightly further up, potentially exposing your right back but also potentially pinning your opponent back a little. This evolves through all three thirds of the pitch, and likewise all three vertical thirds as well, so you can see how you'll look when you have the ball to the left of the opposition's penalty area as well.
Ultimately however, the proof is in the playing of the matches themselves. Quickly my 4-2-3-1 to 4-4-2 system began to struggle. I wasn't sure if it was down to moving between two shapes, or something more fundamental to how we played (not helping was the fact I had a warning for Bruno moving from his CAM to ST role, which threw me until I had it confirmed it was actually a bug). I soon switched to Ruben Amorim's 3-4-2-1, keeping it the same both in and out of possession, and had more success. That also threw up an interesting question I'm keen to test in the full game: how do players with naturally hybrid roles, such as wing backs, work here? The essence of a wing back is that they drop deep when out of possession and push high when you have the ball - so should this new system mean I can just leave them at wing back in both phases, or should I drop them into a back five without the ball and more like a front five with it? If nothing else, for the tactics nerds like me it's exciting to actually have such tactical dilemmas available to mull over in such depth.
All this excitement should, however, be at least a little bit tempered. The one other persistent theme beyond wide-eyed wonder at all the new tactical toys here was one of very regular encounters with bugs and other minor hiccups. A lot of this stuff is the type of thing that gets squashed with a quality pass, and I played a roughly two-week-old build here, back at the start of October, meaning there was still a decent bit of time for tinkering before release. But the sheer volume of little issues was noticeable, and in my experience more than a team will typically eliminate from a game within one-to-two months of launch.
Some examples: text overlaps the UI in multiple places. The text for the tactics visualiser didn't match the phases of play I selected. Players' roles sometimes didn't change in the different pages of the pop-up when I was trying to set them for in- and out-of-possession. Plus the warning bug and lack-of-back-button issues mentioned above, and many more. Likewise beyond bugs, and perhaps more significantly to FM26's true success: some things just don't quite work as well as they used to. Must-reply not-emails aren't highlighted in red in the queue anymore, making it harder to skip to them directly to resolve whatever needs sorting before you can mash Continue once more. There's no "i" button to hover over to quickly view a player's attributes - something I realise now that I do all the time in the current game.
Even more examples: substituting players and organising your selections for the matchday squad feels fiddly, with only small parts of a players' row in the list being selectable as something you can click and drag. And on a player's dedicated attributes page, there's no option to highlight their key attributes for a role, and when you select a position they can play from the little miniature pitch visual, noting to indicate what's been highlighted, what roles there are available within that position, and what their rating is for each - a key tool I again used more than I realised for sussing out who to sign, sell, or use within my squad in what way. All these are things I found myself butting up against within just a few hours of play.
The question, of course, is how much of this is actually resolvable in a way I'm yet to discover. Bugs might be squashed, and UI snags might have new workarounds, new ways to be navigated to, discovered, used - new muscle memory to be built, essentially. Part of my time with the demo felt like walking around that home full of rearranged furniture and accidentally sitting on a coffee table instead of my office chair, just because it was in the place I always used to sit. Over time, the new layout will become natural. But just how natural, and how comfortable and practical that new layout is, will take a lot more time to truly figure out. In the meantime, get planning on those two-phase tactics. This feels like a game, if nothing else, that'll reward you for all those late nights at the training ground. And from Football Manager I'd expect no less.
