After cancelling last year’s entry, Sega has revealed the first trailer for the long-awaited Football Manager 26.
Football Manager 25 promised to be a significant overhaul for the long-running series but, after several delays, it was cancelled entirely.
It was an odd situation because Football Manager games have been released annually for decades, so this means fans have had their longest wait yet for a new entry, with the last being Football Manager 2024 which dropped in December 2023.
Over a year and a half later, Sega has revealed the first trailer for Football Manager 26, which briefly shows off the switch to the Unity engine.
The trailer itself leans into the longer than usual wait between games. ‘The wait has been long,’ the narrator says. ‘The build-up impossible to ignore. So much has changed, but that feeling? It never left.’
While the trailer is interspersed with close-up crowd clips not from the game itself, a section showing the players walking out onto the pitch is highlighted as ‘actual game footage: not final’.
Developer Sports Interactive has described Football Manager 26 as ‘the most immersive and visually rich’ entry yet – and hopefully they don’t just mean the spreadsheets.
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After an agreement was struck in 2024, the next entry will sport the official Premier League licence for the first time.
While there’s no word on an exact release date, Sega states more news is ‘coming soon’. The publisher previously slated it for autumn 2025.
Along with a new engine, the cancelled Football Manager 25 was set to include women’s football for the first time.
In a post announcing the game’s cancellation earlier this year, Sports Interactive said: ‘With the launch of Football Manager 25 we set out to create the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation, laying the building blocks for a new era.
‘Due to a variety of challenges that we’ve been open about to date, and many more unforeseen, we currently haven’t achieved what we set out to do in enough areas of the game, despite the phenomenal efforts of our team.’
They added: ‘Through the cancellation, every effort is now focused on ensuring that our next release achieves our goal and hits the quality level we all expect.’
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