FM26 Player Numbers Crash 30 Days After Launch - Here Is Why Everyone Crawls Back To FM24
I have never seen a Football Manager graph slap me in the face like this one.
Line after line for the last nine games in the series. Day 28, day 29, day 30 after launch. FM16. FM17. FM18. All the way up to FM24.
And right at the bottom of that chart, in 2025, sits Football Manager 26 - the most hyped, most talked about FM in history.
Not because it sold terribly. Not because nobody tried it.
But because thirty days after release, fewer people are playing FM26 than were playing any other modern Football Manager at the same point in its life.
Every single FM from 2016 to 2024 had more players online one month after launch than FM26 has right now at its own day-30 mark.
So what happened. Why did the big Unity era debut end up with the weakest day-30 numbers in the whole modern history of the series.
The graph that says it all
Let us be crystal clear about what the chart actually shows.
It does not mean that today more people are playing FM19 or FM20 than FM26.
What it shows is much more worrying from SI's point of view.
If you look at each FM and ask one simple question - "How many people were playing this game about a month after launch" - FM26 is dead last.
FM24 at day 30+ was around the low 70 thousands.
FM23, FM22 and FM21 all lived in the 60 thousand range.
Even FM19 and FM20 were comfortably ahead.
FM26 at the same stage - roughly day 32 - is just above 51 thousand.
The new era of Football Manager has, objectively, the worst one month retention of any recent entry.
The launch peak was big. The drop off afterwards is bigger.
Why FM26 lost people so fast
A console-first UI on a PC franchise
Football Manager has always lived on PC.
Mouse, keyboard, quick clicking through menus at the speed of thought. That is the core experience for most of us.
FM26 feels like it forgot that.
The new UI is clearly built with controllers and consoles in mind. On paper it is cleaner and more modern. In practice it is a maze.
Simple tasks that took one or two clicks in FM24 now take three or four. Key options are hidden under Actions drop-downs. Important information is split over multiple screens instead of being on one dashboard.
You do not feel like a manager any more. You feel like a poor intern navigating a corporate intranet.
Even after the big update that has already gone out to public beta players, the general verdict is brutal.
Yes, performance is better. Yes, some annoying crashes and UI glitches have been fixed.
But the structure of the interface is still wrong. It is still slower to use than FM24. It is still too many clicks. It still feels, to put it bluntly, a bit sad for a game that used to be famous for its efficiency.
A smaller, shallower world than FM24
The second reason people are drifting away from FM26 is simple.
Once the shiny new menus wear off, the world underneath feels smaller than FM24's.
A lot of long term tools that made your save feel deep and alive have either been removed, trimmed back or buried.
Data Hub is less powerful.
Development Centre feels undercooked.
Pass maps, heat maps and other nerdy visualisations that tactical sickos loved have disappeared or become harder to access.
Best XI history, deadline day drama, rich comparison tools for players and staff - all those little touches that gave FM its "living universe" vibe - are either missing or heavily watered down.
On top of that, a whole list of modes simply did not make it into FM26 at launch.
Create A Club. Challenge mode. Versus mode. Fantasy Draft. Full fat international management on desktop.
Things people built traditions around for years have suddenly been parked or postponed to some vague future roadmap.
So yes, FM26 is new and it runs on Unity. But in terms of features it often feels like FM Touch with better lighting, not the ultimate evolution of FM24.
Matches that feel more passive, not more intense
Then we get to the heart of Football Manager - match day.
On paper, FM26's match engine is the boldest step forward the series has ever taken.
Separate shapes for in possession and out of possession. More explicit pressing rules. Better recognition of roles and rotations.
In reality, right now, it often feels worse to actually play.
Defensive AI is chaotic.
Full backs and centre backs lose their men in bizarre ways. Cutbacks and low crosses are defended like your back line has never seen a football before. Pressing chains randomly break, leaving huge gaps. You concede goals that feel more like glitches than tactical failures.
On top of that, SI removed shouts.
For years they were one of the key tools that made you feel connected to your team during a match. You could see them switch off, hit Demand More or Encourage, and feel immediately involved.
Now you mostly sit there watching.
Combine that with a new 2D radar that a lot of people dislike, slower default match speeds and slightly longer highlight sequences, and the overall impression is clear.
FM26 matches can look nice. But they often feel passive. You do not feel like you are driving the game the way you could in FM24.
Launch bugs, wage madness and cursed regens
No one expects a brand new engine to be perfectly smooth on day one.
But FM26 launched rough.
Crashes. Freezes. UI elements overlapping. Certain buttons simply not working. Save oddities. You name it, someone experienced it.
The economy has its own issues.
Players on modest wages suddenly demand insane money in the next negotiation. Board logic and budgets behave strangely. It feels like several underlying systems needed more time in the oven.
And then there are the regens.
Attribute distributions look wrong. Too many youngsters with absurd physicals. Some positions get weird attribute combinations that make no sense in real football.
The faces are meme gold, but not in a flattering way - a lot of people have started calling them lizards, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
One or two of these problems would be fine. All of them at once, on top of the UI and feature cuts, make FM26 feel more like a paid early access than the polished "next chapter" it was marketed as.
The big update - and why it is not enough yet
To SI's credit, they are not pretending everything is fine.
A huge update has already been released on the private/public beta branch.
It improves performance, fixes a big list of crashes and UI bugs, tweaks parts of the match engine and generally makes FM26 feel more stable.
If you are not opted in to that beta, you should see the same update hit the main public version around the 8th of December, assuming testing does not throw up anything catastrophic.
That is positive.
It shows they know FM26 shipped in a rough state and that they are prepared to throw serious resources at fixing it.
But it also exposes the deeper problem.
A patch can fix crashes. It can smooth performance. It can adjust a few behaviours in the match engine.
It cannot magically redesign the entire UI.
It cannot instantly bring back ten missing modes and twenty beloved tools.
It cannot, overnight, turn FM26 into a richer, more detailed world than FM24.
Which is exactly why that day-30 player graph looks the way it does.
Why FM24 still feels like the real Football Manager
When FM26 frustrates you, what is the easiest thing to do.
You click close.
And then you click on FM24.
It is stable. It is fast.
The UI is efficient, even if it looks a bit dated now.
Your favourite skins, tactics, graphics packs and custom databases are already installed.
You have saves you care about. Youth prospects you have nurtured for years. Narratives you are still attached to.
On top of that, FM24 is constantly on sale. It was marketed as the big "last of its era" FM, and it feels complete in a way FM26 currently does not.
So when FM26 makes you fight the menus, fight the bugs and fight the match engine, the temptation to go back to FM24 is massive.
The graph you saw is simply a visual representation of hundreds of thousands of players doing exactly that.
Why this should seriously worry SI
Every long running series has weaker entries.
The danger for Sports Interactive is not that FM26 had a bumpy launch. That happens.
The danger is that FM26 becomes the game that teaches a big chunk of the audience that they do not actually need to buy Football Manager every year.
If enough people decide "FM24 is good enough for the next 3 or 4 seasons", that hits everything.
Sales numbers.
DLC potential.
Licensing negotiations.
And the entire ecosystem of YouTubers, streamers, bloggers and modders that gives FM free marketing.
FM26 was supposed to be the grand debut of the Unity era, the game that made us all excited about the future of the series.
Instead it has the weakest day-30 retention in modern FM history and a community split between "I am trying to love it" and "Wake me up when FM27 fixes this".
What needs to happen next
The bones of a great game are there.
The tactical engine has massive potential.
The new visuals, when they behave, can look fantastic.
Unity opens doors for features that would have been impossible on the old tech.
But SI have to be brutally honest with themselves - and with us.
They need to acknowledge that the UI direction is unpopular on PC and either fully open the game to heavy skinning and modding, or commit to a more mouse friendly redesign.
They need to rebuild the missing world building tools - Data Hub depth, Development Centre richness, proper match analytics, Best XI history, deadline day drama, international management and the rest.
They need several big match engine updates that make defending logical, pressing consistent and match day feel intense again rather than passive.
Only then will FM26 start climbing out of the hole that graph shows so clearly.
Over to you
So, where are you right now.
Grinding through a long term FM26 save in spite of the rough edges.
Or happily back in FM24, wondering if it is worth touching FM26 again before a few more major patches land.
Let me know in the comments. Because if that day-30 graph tells us anything, it is that the community has already delivered its first verdict on FM26 - and SI cannot afford to ignore it.
