We’ve learned Football Manager 2026 is officially on the way thanks to long awaited signs of life from Sports Interactive. The ill-fated Football Manager 2025 was cancelled as the game shifted towards a new Unity Engine foundation. That new engine brings excitement for a series that probably didn’t need a generational refresh. But that excitement should also bring some concern, depending on the specs your laptop/gaming PC is running.
Football Manager 2025 Gave Us Clues at Least
Until now, Football Manager had the unique benefit of being able to run on older machines. You just had to accept it might be a little slow and that an underpowered laptop would likely burn the thighs off you while sounding like a 747 taking off.
But it would work. It’s one of the few democratically available games to most regardless of your hardware, even if you were running Mac. I’m a MacBook user and Football Manager has been a go-to game for me when travelling or staying away from home for a while.
I’m afraid that might change quite dramatically with the move towards the Unity Engine. Now, to be clear, at the time of writing there is no official announcement on Football Manager 2026 required specs. We do, however, know what the recommended and minimum specs were for Football Manager 2025 before it was cancelled.
Football Manager 2026 Will Likely Need Higher Specs
While Sports Interactive has yet to release official specs for Football Manager 2026, early previews and comparison with the unreleased Football Manager 2025 suggest a clear shift: the series is saying goodbye to ultra-light hardware.
FM 2025 proposed minimums include an Intel Core i3-530 (or AMD FX-4100), 4 GB RAM, and a GTX 960 or equivalent. This would only cater to the lowest settings and while it would run, it would likely not be utterly enjoyable. The game’s recommended specs called for an i5-9600 class CPU, 12 GB RAM, and an RTX 2060 GPU.
From the FM 2026 teaser, it’s clear that Sports Interactive wants to set an expectation that the in-game graphics experience is going to be significantly different to that of previous games in the series.
While FM 2026 won’t demand a bleeding-edge GPU, it places significantly more emphasis on processor muscle. In practice, gamers with PCs or laptops from the past five years, especially those with dedicated GPUs and mid-range CPUs, will likely be fine. I’ve taken a look through the Steam Survey and generally speaking a minority of gamers are facing spec issues.
But if you are running a truly budget or decade-old hardware that coughs and splutters through leagues in FM 2024, it might be time for upgrades.
If, like me, you are a Mac Manager, seasons should be a breeze, especially if you have Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3). That’s more than capable of handling the new 3D match engine at high settings.
The only potential bottleneck is older Intel-based Macs from before 2016, which may struggle or miss out entirely if macOS version support moves past Big Sur.
What Laptop Should You Buy for FM 2026?
Right now, this is impossible to say for sure. Sports Interactive has yet to reveal the final specs for the game. If you are buying with just FM 2026 in mind, you’re going to have to wait.
If I was a gambling man, most decent machines from the past few years with a fairly respectable integrated graphics card, will be ok. But we’ll have to wait and see for sure.
