The desire to get playing Football Manager 26 has reached a fever pitch, as players forced to wait an extra year following the cancellation of Football Manager 25 now see themselves just weeks away from finally getting to try the new game, and have decided that is entirely too long to still be waiting. The desire to get access to the game as soon as possible is only amplified by the switch to the Unity engine, which means that the game has the potential to be the most radical shift in the gaming experience Football Manager vets have seen in quite some time.
Unfortunately for fans, after the experience with Football Manager 25, where Sports Interactive overpromised and never delivered, the developer has taken a more cautious and circumspect approach to announcing what is coming in FM 26. This has meant a controlled rollout of videos, but still no hands-on opportunity for gamers to start buying and selling players, building tactics, and making in-game adjustments.
This has made the announcement of the game’s open beta period among the most anticipated news items in sports gaming this year. While gamers have been left to keep speculating on when the date will be, a combination of past iterations and recent comments by Sports Interactive Studio Director Miles Jacobson has sleuths on Reddit thinking they’ve cracked the case.
In the interview, Jacobson discusses the status of bug identification and squashing, noting they had reduced the number of known bugs and crashes from 80 to 43 in the prior week, and that it was good progress to make with “around three weeks left” to get the game shippable. Based on the date of the interview being given, that would put the targeted release date in the window of October 15 to 21.
This aligns well with history, as the series traditionally has had a three-week open beta period where players who preorder can get playing early, which provides a valuable final round of beta testing before full release. Football Manager 26 is set to release on Tuesday, November 4, with three weeks prior being the 14th, right before that previously mentioned window.
Although this evidence remains circumstantial, with how carefully tight-lipped Sports Interactive has been with its rollout to date, it represents the best evidence we have seen to date for a possible open beta start date. Do you think this is finally the date players will be able to try Football Manager 26 for themselves, or is this a case of gamers getting ahead of themselves and connecting dots that aren’t meant to be connected at all?
