After unprecedentedly taking a year out in 2024, you can finally buy spreadsheet simulator Football Manager 26 – but long-time PC players are already giving the release a red card.
At the time of writing, the game has attracted ‘Mostly Negative’ reviews on popular storefront Steam, with one of the common points of criticism being how the release has been designed first and foremost with console players in mind.
Football Manager has been releasing on consoles for a few years now, with Football Manager 2024 Console being the first entry to kick-off day-and-date on Sony’s system with its PC release.
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As previously mentioned, dev Sports Interactive cancelled Football Manager 2025 while it worked on transitioning to a new game development engine.
It said at the time that “the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be”, so it decided to skip that version and focus all of its energy on Football Manager 26.
But just reading through the Steam reviews, many are accusing the dev of favouring the PS5 version over its PC counterpart, especially when it comes to the game’s UI.
“[The] UI [is] enhanced for console not PC, which is a slap in the face to your original fanbase,” one aggrieved player wrote.
Another added: “Forget what Sports Interactive has told you in interviews and blog posts – this was built with console in mind. In theory, this is fine and nobody has a problem with that. In practice, the PC experience has been decimated beyond repair.”
There does seem to be other issues beyond the UI, with other reviews citing bugs and missing features. But tedious menu navigation does appear to be the biggest complaint overall.
This is tricky territory for Sports Interactive because a franchise like Football Manager does live and die by its UI.
But we can see how console may be the biggest potential growth vector for the series, with its PC userbase already very large.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it’s found the right balance here, frustrating its long-time fans in an attempt to appeal to a new crowd on the PS5.
It’s going to be interesting to see how it responds to the fierce criticism.