Last Thursday, I went to the doctor. I caught a cold in September, you see, and I hadn’t been able to shift it. The doctor patiently explained that this was because it was no longer a cold, it was, “a bacterial lung infection,” and what I really need to do was go home, take a stack of antibiotics and steroids and rest up. And last Thursday just happened to be the day that the beta version of Football Manager 2026 was released. What luck, I thought. And tweeted.

I’ve just been diagnosed with “a bacterial lung infection” and sent home for a weekend of rest with a big bag of antibiotics and steroids.

FM26 drops in a matter of hours. The stars so rarely align like this.

— Iain Macintosh (@iainmacintosh_) October 23, 2025

But after a weekend in which I dutifully took my stack of pills and rested, I have to confess that I did not play very much Football Manager 2026. I didn’t really want to. And if you’re even halfway aware of anything I’ve been up to over the past 30 years, you’ll know that this is unusual.

In my review of the ‘alpha version’ I commended FM26 for its vastly improved graphics and enhanced tactical options. But I did not care for the new User Interface (UI) and I was concerned by the number of bugs I’d found. I tempered my words though. It was an alpha version.

When I downloaded the ‘beta version’ on Thursday, I was pleased to see that a number of these bugs had been removed, as you might expect, but many still remained. A further update on Saturday morning cleared some of the worst ones, but there are still outstanding problems that need to be fixed. Though this is to be expected; it’s an incomplete beta version.

I’m not too worried by the basic structure of the UI. As every hour passed, I felt more comfortable with it. Given that I sank about 100 hours into learning the sprawling medieval economic/strategy simulator Europa Universalis IV (and it was 500 hours before I was comfortable with all of the mechanics) it’s not too big an ask to put 20 hours into a new menu.

But my desires are unconventional. When I play Football Manager, I want to sink into an alternative reality. I want to take over a club and mould it in my image. Well, not my image, per se. Turning a football club into a middle aged nerd serves no-one.

But I want to manage the youth teams and I can’t. I want to micro-manage and I can’t. I want to systematically rebuild the backroom staff and I can’t. I want to watch the highlights of a future opponent to find weaknesses and I can’t. I definitely want to be able to shift from comprehensive highlights to key highlights because I had to spend nearly 35 real minutes watching a game the other night because all of the relevant buttons were greyed out and unresponsive.

Right now, I don’t want to play FM26. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t ever want to play FM26. I’ve seen a lot of chatter online about this edition being a ‘franchise-killer’ and a surprising number of people are claiming to have had their purchases refunded. This seems a little hasty.

For starters, this is not the finished version. Admittedly, the beta version is usually in much better shape than this, but then the beta version isn’t usually a version of a completely rebuilt game. This beta version plays like some of the alpha versions I’ve seen in the past. You got a sense of what the game would look like, but it wasn’t really playable.

I can understand the disappointment. It’s been two years since the last version. People are impatient and they’re angry. But you can’t judge a game on its pre-release state. If it’s still like this on November 4, its official release date, then you can justify taking the gloves off.

And yet, I’d still urge caution. Two of my favourite games of the past five years, Civilization VI and Crusader Kings III, were profoundly flawed on release and dramatically improved with free patches. Admittedly, there’s a time sensitivity with FM26 that doesn’t apply to historical strategy games, but it’s worth considering that Sports Interactive do seem to have landed their big improvements.

The new graphics are fantastic. I said in my alpha review that this wasn’t really a priority for me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not impressed with how good it looks. And the enhanced tactics promise a far greater level of depth with the possibility that ‘gegenpress’ will no longer be the over-powered go-to option it once was…

None of this means that FM26 will be the game you hoped it would be. They might not fix the bugs. We may discover more in time. In another corner of the game-playing world, Civilization VII is nine months old and still markedly inferior to Civilization VI.

But it’s definitely too early to say that it won’t be the game you hoped it will be. It’s a beta version. It’s an incomplete advance version given to you as a reward for your pre-order.

In the meantime, do what I did. Sink the spare hours into something marvellous like Stellaris. Or watch Slow Horses. I don’t watch much TV, but that show is fantastic. Have you seen For All Mankind, the unheralded cult hit that charts an alternative history space race that opens with the USSR beating the USA to the moon? Wonderful stuff.

Let’s all take a breath, reconvene on November 4, and perhaps then we’ll have a better idea of the state of play.

Click here to read the latest episode of ‘FM Classic: Return to Goodison’ and click here to read the first episode.