With the release of Football Manager 26 right around the corner, the conversation around its suspected beta is already heating up. And once again, the community’s biggest question isn’t about the graphics or UI upgrades — it’s about the meta.
A Reddit thread that is quickly building up steam summed it up bluntly: “All those things about better graphics, UI, expanded tactics, new roles, etc. won’t matter if we get the same old meta intact.” For years, gegenpressing — the ultra-aggressive, high-tempo, pace-driven style — has dominated Football Manager saves. If you can take a mid-table side, load up on fast players, and sprint your way to a title, does anything else really matter?
That’s what players want answered when the FM26 beta drops.
Many fans expect little change. As one commenter puts it, “A lot of people have convinced themselves that the match engine will be different. Going to be a lot of surprised fans when they get the beta and see the new roles are the same as the old roles and the same old gegenpress tactics with pace merchants are still meta.” Others counter that the style mirrors modern football itself. Since Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool popularized the system, high-pressing and athleticism-first recruitment have become real-world trends. In that sense, FM isn’t broken — it’s just accurate. Or so the argument goes.
But there’s a key difference between reflecting modern football and oversimplifying it. In Football Manager, the physical attributes — pace, acceleration, jumping reach — often overshadow technical and mental qualities. In real life, a high press can only last so long before fatigue, focus, and tactical discipline fall apart. That balance rarely exists in-game, which is why so many are hoping FM26‘s underlying systems will finally address it.
Some players want pressing to remain strong, just not endlessly sustainable. One comment nailed the ideal middle ground: “Gegenpress should be meta […] but it needs to have the downside of exhausting the players way faster than other tactical philosophies to balance things out. If exhausted players perform worse, you must adapt and adjust your pressing intensity and attacking tempo.” That kind of stamina-driven risk-reward dynamic could be the shakeup the series needs.
Sports Interactive has confirmed FM26 will introduce in-possession and out-of-possession formations, one of the game’s biggest tactical evolutions yet. If implemented well, that could allow for more varied playstyles and punish all-out pressing more naturally. But until the beta lands, nobody knows whether the new system rewrites the engine’s long-running physics of pace and pressure.
So when FM26‘s beta finally arrives, expect one experiment to dominate the community: load up a lower-league team, hit “gegenpress,” and see if the magic still works. The answer will tell us everything about how far the match engine — and the series itself — has really come.
