Sports Interactive dropped the first Football Manager 27 feature deep dive this week promising a clearer interface and smoother navigation, and my first reaction was mild dread rather than excitement. That reaction is earned after Football Manager 26 arrived with almost identical language about efficiency and clarity, then launched to Steam reviews that dipped into mostly negative territory, with the interface among the most common complaints.
But lets put my optimistic had one for the new video, presented by associate game director Remy and senior features manager Ant. It’s the first of several planned feature deep dives ahead of FM27’s launch in November later this year, with the exact date still to be confirmed. Rather than a cosmetic refresh, Sports Interactive have built this one specifically around navigation, reworking how menus, screens and messages behave so managers spend less time hunting for the right tile and more time running a club.
On paper, most of what’s shown here answers the exact complaints FM26 players have been making for a year. Whether it survives contact with a real save file in November is a different question, and one I’ll come back to. But at least we can start hoping.
What actually changes in FM27’s navigation
The headline change is that navigation now lives entirely in two menus fixed to the top of the screen, a primary bar for your core areas and a secondary one for everything else, clubs, leagues and the wider footballing world. Tiles are no longer doing double duty as navigation, so screens can be built around what’s actually useful to see rather than what’s clickable. Windows and pop-ups have largely been converted into full screens too, so you always know where you are and don’t need to close something down just to keep moving. Each core section, squad, tactics, recruitment, training and club, now opens straight into its relevant screen rather than a generic overview, cutting a chunk of the clicks FM26 became known for.
Control panels and colour coded messages
Each main section now carries what Sports Interactive call a control panel at the top, a single place to run a team meeting, adjust budgets, review staff advice or delegate responsibilities, rather than digging through separate menus for each one. Messages get the same treatment. They’re colour coded by type, and a scout report or transfer offer now sits inside the message itself rather than behind a tile you have to open. A flood of transfer interest from other clubs becomes something you can act on straight from your inbox instead of something you click into six separate times.
Deeper customisation, from screen size to shortcuts
FM27’s interface is also built to recognise your setup, scaling tables and lists to make the most of whatever screen and resolution you’re on, whether that’s a laptop or a 4K monitor. The preferences menu gains new scanning modes, one for denser information and one for bigger UI elements, on top of the default view. You can swap tiles via dropdowns on the Portal and other screens, drag and reorder a bookmark bar that now carries text labels, edit your own keyboard shortcuts, and choose which screen you land on within each section instead of defaulting to an overview. The same tile-swapping logic is promised for the match screen too, with more detail saved for a dedicated match engine deep dive still to come.
It could be the path away from FM26
The scepticism here isn’t manufactured. Sports Interactive built its FM26 pitch around efficiency, familiarity and predictability, language that reads almost word for word like what’s being promised again for FM27. That game shipped with a UI plenty of players found genuinely worse to navigate than what came before, on top of a rocky first outing for the Unity engine, and the review scores reflected it.
None of that makes FM27’s specific changes bad ideas. In fact, it largely makes them neccesary and a sign of hope.
Full screens instead of pop-ups, messages you can act on directly, a control panel instead of buried menus, these target real, named complaints rather than vague marketing language. But a studio that made the same pitch twelve months ago and missed is one to judge on the beta, not the trailer.
The TL;DR
This is the right list of fixes. Tiles no longer gatekeeping navigation, fewer clicks to your actual job as a manager, messages you can act on rather than click through, and a UI that finally seems designed around different screen sizes rather than one reference monitor. If Sports Interactive deliver on it, FM27 addresses the single biggest complaint about FM26 in one go. For anyone who abandoned their FM26 save purely out of navigation fatigue, this is the deep dive worth paying attention to. For players who never touched FM26, most of this will read as sensible design rather than a comeback story. Football Manager 27 is set for a November 2026 launch, with a match engine deep dive and further feature reveals still to come, detailed further in Sports Interactive’s official FM27 announcement.
Frequently asked questions
Football Manager 27 is confirmed for November 2026. Sports Interactive haven’t announced the exact date or platform list yet.
The first feature deep dive targets FM26’s most common complaints directly, fewer clicks, full screens instead of pop-ups, and messages you can act on without opening a tile. It’s a promising direction on paper, but FM26 was pitched in similarly confident terms before its own launch went badly.
Navigation moves entirely into two top menus, tiles are decoupled from navigation, core sections open straight to their relevant screen, and each area gets a control panel gathering key decisions like budgets, team talks and staff delegation in one place.
