These days, the gaming industry prioritizes expanding audiences over retaining core elements that make a game good or unique. For developers, this means lowering the barrier to entry and making the niche universally palatable. Sports Interactive’s Football Manager 26 is the latest example of this philosophy.
On paper, the idea of streamlining and simplifying complex systems sounds like a good idea. But if you’re going to do it in a way that makes long-time players more confused, you’re kinda losing the plot. Don’t get us wrong, FM26 is still highly complex, but it makes some decisions that leave you scratching your head.
Many other games have also been pulled in two opposing directions, trying to appeal to newcomers without fully committing to their original audience.
What’s Wrong With Football Manager?
The Football Manager series is known for its uncompromising depth, making it not just a sports game but a digital obsession. You might not master every system, but you’ll at least have the chance to understand how everything works. Unfortunately, things have never been more confusing for this franchise.
At launch, FM26 quickly garnered negative reviews on Steam. Our own FM26 Review praised the match engine, the tactical evolution, and the graphical improvements. We were also quick to point out the negatives: the clunky UI, plethora of bugs and glitches, and a couple of missing features from previous games.
They introduced an oversimplified tactical system using OOP role logic, visualized pressing shapes, and added further cinematic analysis. For newcomers, these changes might be easier to understand, but for veterans, tactics are now harder to control with depth.
On top of that, there’s no arguing that the game changes things a lot. The new tactical roles are fresh and modern, but some of them lack behaviours that used to be clearly visible through attributes and instructions. Staff management, which was one of the clearer systems, has also been overhauled. A lot of the attributes feel like they are wrapped in vague presentations and graphical abstractions.
Even the user interface reflects this problem. FM26 tries to look cleaner and more modern, but in doing so, it hides information behind vague visual elements, layered menus, and role-based abstractions. Staff attributes, training effectiveness, and player suitability are now hidden behind extra clicks and interpretation. It looks simplified, but it actually makes core systems harder to understand. Instead of improving accessibility, the UI takes away clarity, which is the one thing Football Manager could never afford to lose.
Why This Philosophy Fails
I don’t know if this can be called greed, but new sports games are in pursuit of the largest possible market, resulting in a failed execution. The main challenge is to maintain a balance between trying to make a game that retains the loyalty of old fans and is also a fun experience for beginners. It’s a line that’s hard to balance, and even veteran game designers struggle with it.
The Forza Horizon series sets up to be a textbook example of this. Forza Horizon 5 is quite a popular game, and its popularity mainly stems from letting you do whatever you want. You can follow the objectives, or just drive around and do nothing. That is not how the series started. Earlier games balanced free driving with strong identity, curated progression, festival atmosphere, and a semblance of structure. Forza Horizon 5 is freedom above all those aspects.
In an attempt to appear more modern and more accessible, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 fell into a similar trap. It abandoned the tight, responsive levels for poorly thought-out ones, and introduced shallow online mechanics that didn’t serve either audience. It wasn’t nostalgic or catering to fans, and it didn’t feel welcoming to newcomers either.
Learning from Wii Sports
Though difficult, it is not impossible to make a game that appeals to everyone, and Wii Sports proves just that. Instead of amplifying the sport or adding unnecessary features, it simplified the controls for each sport. Instead of teaching players football physics or tennis mechanics, it lets them experience those concepts naturally.
What made Wii Sports a “game for everyone” was that it had a low barrier to entry, but a high ceiling for mastery. Anyone could understand it within minutes, but timing, spin, accuracy, and positioning in most games still required practice. It’s a game that respects your time, without demanding prior knowledge.
The key difference is that Wii Sports didn’t try to be both a complex sports simulator and a mass-market product. It is fully committed to its identity. It was designed to be approachable from the ground up. Nintendo never tried to stretch an existing, complex formula to fit a wider audience; they came up with an entirely new one.
Pick A Side
Football Manager and many other sports games should understand that they just need to stick to their own niche. There is no need to be the second Wii Sports; rather, be proud of what you truly represent.
They can either commit to meticulous simulation that will create a loyal fan following or commit to a mass appealing arcade experience that grants immediate sales. Simplifying things doesn’t mean you need to strip away core mechanics or reduce the familiarity that defines your game. It means explaining them better. We didn’t really need a massive UI overhaul that hides things in a pretty way; we needed a cleaner way to understand systems we already had.
