The Ugly Stats Behind Football Manager 2026

Football Manager players are obsessed with numbers. We always have been. Match ratings, pass completion, attributes, xG, expected assists, the lot. There is a reason the series gets called the ultimate spreadsheet simulator with genuine affection rather than as an insult. So it felt only right to use stats to judge Football Manager 26 itself, because by any sensible measure this has not gone down as a warmly received release, and the numbers make that painfully clear. Some of these stats will already be familiar. Some are properly startling. None of them are pretty.

 

The Brutal Statistics

FM26 has not flopped in the traditional “nobody bought it” sense. Sega Sammy Holdings told investors that, immediately after release, sales were “about 30% higher” than Football Manager 2024 and that it was off to the fastest start in series history.

Where FM26 has fallen flat, badly, is in player satisfaction and retention, especially on PC.

Steam reviews collapsed to roughly 23% positive within 24 hours of release, which left it brushing up against the dreaded “Overwhelmingly Negative” label. For a series built on loyalty and absurdly sticky long-term engagement, that is disastrous.

By 31 March 2026, FM26 had 30,449 Steam reviews, with just 9,804 positive against 20,645 negative. That means 67.8% of them are negative, or 2.1 negative reviews for every positive one.

For comparison, over the same period Football Manager 2024 sits on 25,421 positive reviews versus 2,371 negative on SteamDB. That works out at roughly 10.7 positive reviews for every negative. You do not need a data analyst to tell you that is an enormous gap.

The same pattern shows up in engagement. FM26’s launch-month average concurrent players on Steam were roughly 18% lower than FM24’s, and its first five months saw a much steeper drop-off.

That is the heart of it. FM26 looks like a game that shifted units early, then immediately started burning trust, reviews and retention. A reputational flop, rather than a revenue one.

 

Steam Engagement and Retention Trends

Steam’s concurrent player figures tell the same story. FM26 started lower and then bled players much faster.

Using Steam Charts, FM26’s monthly average concurrent players dropped from 43,775 in November 2025 to 27,563 in the last 30 days as of 31 March 2026. That is a fall of around 37% in roughly five months.

FM24’s first five months were both stronger and steadier. It went from 53,173 average concurrent players in its launch month to 48,133 by month five, a drop of just 9.5%.

Put side by side, it is grim reading:

Month since release

 

FM26 avg players | FM26 peak players | FM24 avg players | FM24 peak players

M0: 43,775 | 82,750 | 53,173 | 86,828
M1: 33,616 | 57,928 | 52,521 | 83,961
M2: 33,179 | 57,965 | 53,513 | 88,894
M3: 30,556 | 52,103 | 50,878 | 82,807
M4: 27,563 | 48,124 | 48,133 | 77,964

The headline numbers say enough on their own. FM26 drops 37% from launch month to month four. FM24 drops 9.5%.

That is probably the clearest public stat that shows a  “this has gone wrong” signal. FM26 never settled into anything like the stable base FM24 managed.

 

Reviews and Satisfaction Metrics

If there is one piece of data that really buries FM26, it is the Steam reviews.

As of 31 March 2026, SteamDB lists the game as “Mostly Negative”, with a 32.99% rating built from 9,804 positive reviews and 20,645 negative ones across 30,449 total reviews.

The Steam store page backs up the same overall totals and shows “Recent Reviews” at 52% positive over the last 30 days, based on 793 reviews. That is an improvement, but calling it a turnaround would be generous to the point of fiction.

Again, compare that with Football Manager 2024 on SteamDB. That game sits at “Very Positive”, with an 89.56% rating, 25,421 positive reviews, and 2,371 negative ones across 27,792 total reviews.

Two derived comparisons are especially brutal. FM26 has roughly 8.7 times as many negative Steam reviews as FM24. And its review balance is completely inverted: 2.1 negative reviews for every positive, compared with around 0.09 negative per positive for FM24.

It also cratered immediately. PC Gamer reported that within 24 hours of launch, FM26’s Steam positivity had slumped to around 23%, which is perilously close to “Overwhelmingly Negative”.

There has been some recovery since then. Overall positivity has climbed to about 32%, and recent reviews are hovering around 52% positive. That suggests patches have improved the day-to-day experience for at least some current players. What it does not suggest is that the launch damage has been repaired. The review hole was just too deep… and too public.

Metacritic tells a similarly ugly story. On PC, FM26 has a Metascore of 68, classed as “Mixed or Average”, based on 44 critic reviews. Its user score sits at 2.7, classed as “Generally Unfavourable”, based on 169 user ratings, with 76% of those ratings negative.

Football Manager 2024, by contrast, has a Metascore of 84 and a user score of 7.4.

That is a 16-point drop from critics and a 4.7-point collapse from users between back-to-back mainline releases on the same platform.

 

Attention and Reputation Beyond Steam

The picture outside Steam is not magically kinder.

Streaming numbers suggest FM26 generated plenty of attention at launch, but not the sort of sustained interest you would want. SteamDB shows an all-time Twitch peak of around 36,657 viewers, while more recent snapshots have current viewers in the hundreds and a 24-hour peak of 4,540.

The most reasonable reading of that, especially alongside the Steam data, is that FM26 drew a lot of launch attention, helped in part by beta and release controversy, but could not turn that into proportionate long-term interest.

 

Conclusion 

FM26’s most damning stats are about what happened after the initial decent start saleswise. The reviews were awful, the player drop-off was sharp and for once Football Manager did not feel like the sort of game people quietly disappear into for the next six months. It felt like one they argued with, got annoyed by and in a lot of cases stopped playing. That is the real problem here. FM26 did not just have a messy launch. It cracked the trust that normally carries this series through almost anything. The stats show that in worryingly high definition.

 

Check out our Feature Articles for more FM26 Updates and Tips