06 Nov, 2025
Football Manager 26 Historically Low Scores & Bad Reviews on Steam Launch
We take you through the historically poor response that Football Manager 26 has received on the Steam platform and the impact that has had!
The launch of Football Manager 26 represented a moment of crisis for Sports Interactive (SI) and Sega, altering the franchise’s reputation to some extent. After a high-stakes, two-year development cycle intended to transition the series in to a new era, the game was immediately met with mass disapproval, registering a catastrophic user review rating on the Steam platform. This initial reception established FM 26 as a major failure upon release despite good sales, prompting immediate and significant patching of big issues within the game from the SI development team.
Following an intense beta period where users reported over 13,000 bugs on forums ,players were disappointed the full game launch did not include a new patch. Sports Interactive initially announced that the game would skip a traditional day one patch on November 4th. The intense backlash meant a response was needed. SI quickly deployed a major post-launch patch the following day, November 5th, providing over 300 targeted fixes and upgrades intended to stabilise core functional and technical flaws. However, this patching strategy addressed key bugs but left the structural criticisms regarding the game’s design and user interface.
FM 26’s Historically Bad Steam Performance
Within two hours of launch, the title garnered over 1,000 user reviews on Steam, accumulating negative reviews and ratings so rapidly that the overall Steam rating immediately dropped to ‘Mostly Negative’. At one point, FM 26 had achieved only approximately 22% positive reviews out of over 4,000 total ratings.
Football Manager 26 rapidly became the 7th worst-reviewed game on Steam ever. For a deeply established, highly popular simulation series with a uniquely dedicated and historically understanding fanbase, this collapse signaled a fundamental issue in the product delivered after a two-year delay. Prior iterations of Football Manager have consistently maintained a high standard of user satisfaction, achieving the ‘Very Positive’ status across all recent annual releases.
Previous Football Manager Steam Ratings
| Title | Overall User Review Status | Positive Review Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Football Manager 26 | Mostly Negative | 22.0% |
| Football Manager 2024 | Very Positive | 91.2% |
| Football Manager 2023 | Very Positive | 89.8% |
| Football Manager 2022 | Very Positive | 92.6% |
| Football Manager 2021 | Very Positive | 93.5% |
| Football Manager 2020 | Very Positive | 89.3% |
The chasm between FM 26’s 22% positive rating and the series average, which typically sits between 89% and 93% positive, confirms an unprecedented sea change. This decline of nearly 70 percentage points in user satisfaction represents a mass rejection of FM 26 by it’s core player base. The speed with which negative reviews accumulated suggests that the dissatisfaction was shared widely among the pre-order and beta community who were eager to deliver a verdict on launch day.
Many negative reviews explicitly advised potential buyers to purchase Football Manager 2024 instead. This phenomenon introduces commercial friction, forcing SI to compete directly against its own critically acclaimed older title. User-generated content heavily influences purchase decisions on Steam, and this overt recommendation of a FM 24 over FM 26 threatens the sales longevity and discovery of the new game, which is severely penalised for its ‘Mostly Negative’ status within Steam’s algorithms.
Erosion of Veteran FM Player Trust
The negative response was spearheaded by the most dedicated segment of the fanbase: players with thousands of hours logged and decades of playing FM. One veteran with over 25,000 hours of playtime explicitly stated they “cannot recommend FM26 in its current state”.
The qualitative criticism centered on a perceived compromise of the series’ core identity. Users reported that the game felt incomplete and that the focus on the new engine had come at the cost of the managerial depth they expected. One user lamented that the experience felt as though “the soul of the series has been ripped out”. This profound sense of disappointment from the core audience suggests that the operational failure transcended mere technical glitches and struck at the heart of the franchise’s design philosophy.
Sports Interactive’s Response
Sports Interactive’s immediate response to all of this criticism was to bring fans a major patch update with over 300 fixes on the 5th of November, a day after launch day. The content of the patch notes provides objective evidence of the game’s deeply flawed release state. Key functional errors fixed included:
- Resolution of bugs preventing certain players from being registered due to broken in-game interpretation of complex rules (such as the non-EU rule in Serie A).
- Fixes for core UI logic errors, including tooltip issues with text wrapping and display location.
- Correction of display issues where critical panels, such as the Medical Centre Season Summary, failed to load.
However, while the patch strategy effectively targeted technical instability and restored functionality, it failed to address the underlying structural design criticisms. The most significant source of consumer discontent—the “clunky” and “cluttered” UI/UX—is a matter of design philosophy, not merely a bug to be patched. Users continued to display doubt that the game could be salvaged by incremental updates, fearing that the issues were too deeply rooted in the foundational design choices to be fixed by patches.
Long-Term Implications of the FM 26 Debacle
The launch of Football Manager 26 represents a catastrophic failure and resulted in an unprecedented ‘Mostly Negative’ Steam rating that ranks the title among the platform’s worst in history. This collapse was directly caused by the release of an unstable, feature-incomplete product, exacerbated by the introduction of a universally condemned user interface after the development team promised a “revolutionary” experience following a two-year delay.
The long-term implications for the franchise are severe. SI has lost the trust and faith of it’s core base who are now actively rejecting FM 26 in it’s current form. Sports Interactive must dedicate significant resources not just to fixing the remaining bugs, but to undertaking a transparent and thorough redesign of the core UI/UX to meet the functional expectations of its dedicated PC audience before the next annual installment is released. The future success of the Football Manager franchise hinges on proving that the Unity engine switch was an investment in depth and stability and not a superficial improvement of visuals at the expense of the game’s core functionality.
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