Football Manager 26‘s launch has been rocky, to say the least. Between performance complaints, UI issues, and growing frustrations with Sports Interactive’s handling of the franchise, portions of the FM community are louder and angrier than they’ve ever been. Some have even said the quiet part out loud: it’s time for an alternative. Someone else should make a football management sim and give SI real competition.
That sounds nice. In reality, it’s not happening anytime soon.
Football Manager isn’t just a game — it’s a 30-year institution. SI has had decades to build the single most expansive football database in gaming, powered by thousands of contributors, scouts, researchers, and real-world partnerships. That database is the backbone of Football Manager. Even if a new studio somehow built a comparable match engine, UI, and set of features, they’d still need the mountains of player data, staff data, club histories, league rules, contract structures, and real scouting work to make it feel authentic. That alone takes years and a ton of money.
And this is where reality hits: nobody is going to spend that money.
Football Manager might be wildly popular within its niche, but it’s still a niche. The business model is straightforward — one annual release, an in-game editor, and that’s it. There are no microtransactions, no gacha mechanics, no Ultimate Team-style revenue stream. For a big publisher, a Football Manager competitor isn’t profitable enough to justify the cost or the risk. That’s the main reason that giants like EA and 2K haven’t bothered to make their own management sim, or have quickly abandoned them when trying. The math just doesn’t work.
Even if someone tried, the community would likely reject it anyway. If a rival launched tomorrow, it would instantly be compared to Football Manager‘s decades of history, features, and depth. People would expect it to match FM from top to bottom on day one, which is frankly impossible. The same players roasting FM26 right now would be the first to call a competing game shallow, inaccurate, or lacking realism.
There’s another uncomfortable truth: the Football Manager community doesn’t actually want a new game — they want Football Manager to be better. Fans want SI to listen more, patch faster, improve communication, and be transparent when things go wrong. They don’t really want to abandon FM; they just want the game to evolve faster than it currently is.
Could a serious challenger ever appear? Maybe, but it would require one of the following:
- A major publisher willing to lose money for years just to establish a foothold
- A studio using AI-assisted systems to build player databases without a human network
- An open-source project that slowly grows over time with community support
All of those are long shots. And even then, it would take years before it could stand next to FM and not look tiny by comparison.
So yes, FM26 is rough right now. The criticism is real, and SI needs to respond. But the idea of a brand-new Football Manager competitor sweeping in to save the day? Don’t hold your breath. Football Manager is still the only game in town, and unless something changes dramatically, it will stay that way.
