There is something rather peculiar about watching a Football Manager promotional video in 2026. A few years ago, the announcement of a new interface would have been met with the usual mixture of excitement, suspicion and people demanding to know whether their favourite obscure league had finally been included. These days, a considerable portion of the community watches with the concentration of a forensic accountant examining the books of a bankrupt football club.
Every misplaced button is noted. Every suspiciously empty corner of the screen is examined. Every promise of improved navigation is treated with the sort of scepticism usually reserved for a chairman announcing his complete confidence in a manager who has lost eleven consecutive matches.
Sports Interactive has earned some of that scrutiny, because let’s face it, we all expected (and hoped) better for FM26.
Today’s first FM27 deep dive video focuses on the interface and navigation. It is accompanied by a detailed explanation of the intended changes, including fewer unnecessary clicks, greater customisation and the restoration of familiar ways of accessing information.
On the surface, this is hardly revolutionary. A football management simulation allowing you to find the information required to manage a football club should not be a particularly ambitious proposition. Yet here we are.
The interesting thing about today’s reveal is not simply what Sports Interactive has shis what the studio appears to have learned about the relationship between its game and the people who have spent thousands of hours playing it, and, perhaps more importantly, what remains unresolved.
Table of Contents
The problem with reinventing the wheel
FM26 was supposed to represent a significant technological and visual departure for the series. The transition to Unity provided the foundation for a redesigned interface, with tiles, cards, a new navigation system and a central Portal replacing several familiar elements of the traditional Football Manager experience.
Sports Interactive presented the redesign as a way of making information easier to discover and reducing unnecessary navigation. The problem was that the intentions behind the interface and the experience of using it were not necessarily the same thing. Football Manager is an unusually demanding piece of software. It contains an enormous amount of information, but the value of that information depends on how quickly and naturally the player can access it.
Consider something as mundane as preparing for a match. You examine your opponent’s recent performances, identify a weakness in their defensive structure, adjust your tactical instructions and check whether your players are capable of executing those instructions. You might then reconsider your selection, examine individual training and return to the tactical screen. These are not separate activities. They are different parts of the same thought process. An interface that forces you to repeatedly navigate between screens, open additional cards and reconstruct the information you were examining interrupts that process.
You stop thinking about football and start thinking about the interface. That distinction matters because Football Manager’s complexity has never been its greatest obstacle. The complexity is part of the attraction. The challenge is presenting that complexity without making the player fight the software to access it.
In May, Sports Interactive acknowledged that the FM26 interface had disappointed some players, specifically identifying navigation and the loss of immersion among the problems it needed to address. Today’s video is the first substantial opportunity to examine what that acknowledgement means in practice.
A familiar direction
One of the most revealing aspects of the FM27 presentation is the emphasis on restoring familiar behaviour. From what you can see in the video, the primary and secondary navigation bars have been revised, with expanded dropdown menus intended to make different areas of the game more accessible. Players will also be able to choose which screen opens when selecting a main navigation category.
As players, we tend to develop habits. After several hundred hours, you know exactly where to find your scouting assignments, training schedules and player development reports. You navigate between these areas almost instinctively, often while thinking about something entirely different.
The interface becomes an extension of your decision-making process. Changing that interface is not inherently problematic. Sometimes established systems need to evolve. However, changing familiar behaviour without providing an obvious improvement introduces friction where previously there was none.
FM27 appears to recognise that familiarity has practical value. The apparent ability to configure landing screens also suggests a more flexible approach to navigation. Rather than assuming that every manager approaches the game in the same way, Sports Interactive is allowing players to determine which information deserves immediate attention.
A manager obsessively developing young players has different priorities from someone who delegates training and spends most of his time examining recruitment data. Neither approach is inherently superior and the interface should accommodate both. In that regard, the video looks promising.
The return of information density
Another significant development concerns the amount of information displayed on individual screens. Sports Interactive says that FM27 will replace many of the smaller information cards with fuller screen experiences, while providing additional options for adjusting how information is displayed. This is an important distinction.
A clean interface is not necessarily an efficient interface. Removing information might make a screen appear less intimidating, but it can also force the player to undertake additional actions to retrieve something that was previously visible. Some information was clear at first sight in older iterations of the game, yet FM26 forced you to click several times to retrieve it.
After all, sometimes I want a spreadsheet. A horrible, intimidating spreadsheet containing twenty-seven columns of information about players who will probably reject my contract offers anyway. The ability to compare several players simultaneously is valuable precisely because the information is presented together. Separating that information into attractive individual cards may improve its appearance while making the underlying task considerably more cumbersome.
FM27’s announced support for ultrawide monitors is therefore particularly interesting. Sports Interactive says that information-heavy tables will adapt to wider displays and that players will have three scaling options to determine how much information appears on screen. This suggests a greater appreciation of the different environments in which people play Football Manager.
Someone using a laptop should not necessarily receive the same layout as someone sitting in front of a large ultrawide monitor. The available space should determine how information is presented, rather than forcing every player into an identical arrangement. Of course, there is a difference between displaying more information and displaying it effectively. An overcrowded screen can be just as frustrating as an unnecessarily empty one. The real test will be whether the additional information remains readable, logically organised and useful during ordinary gameplay.
Customisation should serve the manager
FM27 also introduces additional options for customising information tiles, bookmarks and shortcuts. On the Recruitment screen, for example, players will be able to replace the default transfer-window information with alternative information, including affiliate clubs or transfer history. Bookmarks will receive text labels and can be rearranged through dragging and dropping.
These changes might sound like relatively minor conveniences, but they touch upon something important, as Football Manager is an intensely personal experience. Two people managing the same club can approach the game in completely different ways. One might meticulously control every aspect of training, recruitment and tactical preparation. Another might delegate almost everything outside matchday responsibilities.
Some players spend hours developing intricate scouting systems. Others sign whichever Brazilian teenager has the most entertaining name. An interface that allows players to prioritise information according to their own approach is therefore more than a cosmetic improvement. It recognises that there is no single correct way to play Football Manager.
However, customisation also introduces a potential complication. Giving players the ability to rearrange an inefficient interface does not automatically make that interface efficient. The default experience still needs to work. A player should not have to spend the first three hours of a new save reorganising menus simply to recreate functionality that previously existed. Customisation should provide additional freedom, not become an unpaid administrative assignment.
The importance of staying in the moment
Perhaps the most interesting changes concern how players interact with messages and news. Sports Interactive says that news articles will appear directly within received messages, while certain actions, including responding to transfer offers and scout reports, can be completed without navigating away from the message itself.
This is potentially significant because the inbox has always been central to the Football Manager experience.It is where the footballing world comes to you and immersion takes place. A transfer offer arrives. Your assistant reports a training injury. A journalist asks an irritating question. Your best player announces that he wants to leave because you apparently failed to congratulate him on his excellent performance against a semi-professional side.
The inbox provides, for me at least, the rhythm of a managerial career. When information requires repeated navigation away from that central experience, the natural flow of the game can become fragmented. Allowing players to examine information and respond within the same context could make routine management considerably more fluid. It might also help restore some of the immersion that Sports Interactive (and the community before that) has identified as a priority.
Immersion is mostly about maintaining the illusion that you are managing a football club rather than operating a collection of disconnected menus. FM was never heavily reliant on graphics, but it relied on people being able to come up with their own storylines, so the less attention the interface demands, the more attention you can devote to the decisions taking place within it.
The detail hiding in plain sight
There is another development worth examining, although it receives less attention than the interface itself. Sports Interactive’s accompanying FAQ confirms that the Training and Tactics screens contain a new system called Tactical Effectiveness. The studio has not yet explained its mechanics, stating that the feature will receive further attention in a forthcoming presentation about training and tactics.
As someone interested in the relationship between tactical instructions, player development and actual match performance, this is potentially one of the more intriguing details to emerge from today’s reveal. I am genuinely curious about what this will bring. Does it represent the players’ familiarity with a tactical system? Does it evaluate how effectively particular players can execute specific instructions? Is it connected to training, positional suitability or the relationship between individual roles?
If Tactical Effectiveness introduces a more meaningful relationship between training, player suitability and tactical execution, it could become an interesting addition to the managerial experience. If it merely provides another numerical representation of existing mechanics, its practical value may be considerably more limited. For now, the sensible approach is to recognise the feature’s existence without inventing an elaborate explanation of how it works. There will be plenty of time for that once Sports Interactive actually tells us, but at the very least, it is an intriguing tidbit of information.
What the video cannot tell us
The presentation also has limitations. Sports Interactive confirms that the footage comes from a development build and that visual refinements and optimisation remain ongoing. The overall interface direction is expected to remain largely unchanged, although the background and colour scheme are still being finalised.
Some viewers have identified overlapping text and alignment problems in the footage, particularly around the Team of the Week presentation. Sports Interactive’s community team has acknowledged that visual issues remain to be addressed. These details deserve attention, although an unfinished development build should not be treated as a finished product.
More importantly, a carefully edited presentation cannot establish how an interface behaves over hundreds of hours. We have not yet experienced the repeated transitions between screens, the accumulated demands of a busy transfer window or the small frustrations that only become apparent after several seasons. A six-minute presentation can demonstrate an intended improvement but it cannot establish whether that improvement remains effective after six hundred hours. That requires sustained gameplay.
A different kind of progress
What today’s presentation suggests is that Sports Interactive is reconsidering some of the assumptions behind its previous interface redesign. The emphasis has shifted towards familiar navigation, adaptable layouts, greater information density and reducing the distance between receiving information and acting upon it. In short, from revolution to evolution.
They will not produce spectacular promotional screenshots or convince someone unfamiliar with Football Manager that the series has suddenly become a revolutionary new gaming experience. Instead, they address the practical relationship between the player and the simulation. That relationship is probably fundamental to Football Manager and I feel it is important that this is acknowledged.
The studio has already acknowledged that FM26 did not meet the expectations of many players. Today’s presentation provides a more concrete indication of how it intends to address part of that problem. Whether those intentions translate into a substantially better experience remains to be seen, but the first impression looks good. For now, the most encouraging aspect of FM27 is that the studio appears increasingly willing to recognise the value of the things Football Manager already knew how to do.
Sometimes progress requires a revolutionary new idea. Sometimes it requires admitting that the old button was in a perfectly sensible place to begin with.
Guido is the founding father of Strikerless and main nutjob running the show.
0 Comments