According to Sports Interactive Design Manager Ant Farley, Football Manager 26 is as good as it is today because the team decided to completely restart development after the previous version didn’t meet their standards.
This new installment represents a big shift for the series, moving away from its long-standing operating system to the Unity engine. This transition caused several delays and some features had to be removed from Football Manager 25, eventually leading to its cancellation. The developers ultimately decided to prioritize quality and ensure the game lived up to the expectations of its dedicated fans after more than 20 years of the franchise.
Farley told Football Gaming Zone that calling off last year’s game was a difficult decision, but ultimately unavoidable.
Honestly, if we’d released FM25 as it was, FM26 wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is now. We had to make some big changes and really rethink things, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that if FM25 was already out there. Once something’s released, it’s way harder to overhaul – we’d have been stuck just patching things instead of improving them from the ground up.
Honestly, we realized trying to finish the game as it was would have meant spending all our time just squashing bugs. But shifting our focus to Football Manager 26 actually fired us up even more – it gave us a real drive to make the next one the best it could be.
He explained that while the cancellation was initially upsetting, the team quickly shifted focus to creating something truly exceptional. Their main reason for cancelling the previous version, FM25, was that they didn’t believe it offered enough value for players, and that’s what’s driving them now.
“When we had news of the cancellation, it gave us the determination to get it right for FM26.”
Football Manager 2026 comes out on November 4th. You can try an early version through an open beta starting October 24th, and any progress you make in the beta will transfer to the full game when it officially releases.
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2025-10-20 18:18