Barring any unforeseen last-minute disasters, Football Manager 26 will be available around the world in less than three weeks, with an open beta period expected to start any day now. While the good news for fans of virtual management is that the two-year wait brought about by the cancellation of Football Manager 25 is nearly over, it’s not been entirely smooth sailing for Sports Interactive, as news about the game has dropped in recent weeks.
While fan reception to the carefully timed rollout of preview videos has been largely positive, even if slightly tinged by a caution among the fanbase which still wants to actually try the game before getting too excited, there is one major omission that has caught a portion of the fanbase’s attention: Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive’s studio director, confirmed that the game would not be including international management this year.
This would be bad news under any circumstances, but it is particularly troubling this time around. Here’s why:
How Did We Get Here?
The release of Football Manager 26 comes with perhaps the highest amount of pressure any annual sports game has ever been under from its fan community, and this is for one simple reason: Football Manager 25 never happened. After the release of Football Manager 24 in late 2024, Sports Interactive announced that the game would be making a big change for the next edition, moving from the company’s proprietary engine that had been powering the game over to the popular Unity engine.
This news arrived to cautious excitement. While fans were worried about the risks of having to move the game over to an entirely new base, it came with promises of overall quality improvements, most notably the ability to raise the level of the game’s fairly basic graphics for the in-match engine. If executed well, the move to Unity would be seen as a watershed moment that made the game reach unprecedented levels.
Unfortunately, FM 25 was unprecedented, just not in the way Sports Interactive or fans would have liked. After a series of delays pushed the release from fall of 2024 into spring of 2025 — which would have closed the window where it was the current edition to barely six months if FM 26 arrived on time — the game was ultimately shuttered entirely after Sports Interactive decided it didn’t meet the quality standards required. For the first time, Football Manager missed a release, leaving fans now sitting on two years of new-engine anxiety as they wait out these final weeks.
No World Cup Is A Massive Opportunity Lost
There are two huge reasons this is a costly error for Sports Interactive, but the most obvious and glaring one comes in the form of the most-watched sporting spectacle in the world: the World Cup. The international championship of men’s football goes down next summer in a triple-hosted event across Canada, Mexico, and the United States. As always, the Cup is expected to lead the way for the year’s most-watched events, and is a thing that virtually nobody into soccer enough to be playing FM is likely to miss.
In the months leading up to the World Cup, FM fans will no doubt be eager to try their hand at leading a side to glory in the biggest sporting event on the planet, and because of this omission, there will simply be no way to do so. Blowing a tie-in like this is an unforced error for the ages.
Welcome To The Women’s Game, Just Not Its Most Popular Setting
In any other year, the lack of a World Cup would ease tensions over international management being absent a bit, but the second reason this is such a poor time to lose it would be true no matter the season. The major addition to Football Manager 26 is the inclusion of women’s clubs, and the international game is a massive part of the rise of the women’s game around the world.
While experiencing a boom in the world’s biggest leagues, with England’s WSL and America’s NWSL both cashing in on surges of popularity in recent years, the largest growth in the sport has come with international success. Tournaments like the World Cup and European Championship have seen huge viewership and have often served as the introduction to women’s club players for fans in a nation. Introducing women to the game without the venue, many fans will have watched them for the first time, and most often is another huge miss.
A lack of international management won’t sink Football Manager 26, and will be forgiven if the underlying game is strong, but it’s still hard not to feel a void where it should be. Are you also going to feel the siren call of international management that is not available this year, or were you already planning to be club only?
