Football Manager 2027 is on the way, and while we still have plenty to learn about the new game, there is already one thing we know for sure: FM has never been short of depth.
The question is what Sports Interactive does with that depth next.
FM has become an enormous simulation. There are tactics, training, scouting, recruitment, dynamics, finances, staff, development and thousands of little details that make every save feel different. But after spending hundreds — sometimes thousands — of hours with the series, you also start noticing the areas that don’t feel quite as convincing as the rest.
So rather than putting together another huge wishlist of everything we’d like to see, we’ve narrowed it down to five things we’d really like Football Manager 2027 to improve.
Not because FM needs to become simpler.
Quite the opposite.
We want the depth to matter more.
1. A Match Engine We Can Trust
The match engine is the heart of Football Manager.
It doesn’t have to produce perfect football. Real football isn’t perfect. Strange goals happen, defenders make mistakes and even the best tactical decisions can go wrong.
What matters is whether the things happening on the pitch feel understandable.
When a tactic succeeds, we should have a reasonable idea why it succeeded. When it fails, there should be something we can investigate and change.
That’s where consistency becomes so important.
One of the most satisfying parts of Football Manager is making a tactical adjustment and seeing it produce a noticeable difference. Maybe your midfield is getting overrun, so you change the structure. Perhaps your full-backs are being exposed, so you alter your rest defence. Maybe you’re struggling against a low block and need to create better attacking rotations.
Those moments make you feel like a manager.
The frustrating moments are the opposite: when the same tactical setup appears to produce wildly different outcomes without an obvious explanation.
FM27 doesn’t need to eliminate randomness. It needs to make the relationship between what we ask our team to do and what happens on the pitch feel more reliable.
The best match engine isn’t necessarily the one that produces the prettiest highlights.
It’s the one that makes us believe the football we’re watching.
2. Make Player Relationships Actually Matter
Football Manager already has many of the ingredients needed to make player relationships one of its best systems.
There are personalities. Social groups. Hierarchies. Morale. Dynamics. Mentoring. Player happiness. Leadership.
But we’d love to see those systems become much more meaningful during a save.
Because ultimately, managing a football club isn’t just about managing attributes.
Players have relationships with each other. They have relationships with the manager. They have relationships with the club.
Imagine a young player spending three seasons at your club alongside an established captain. The captain mentors him, the youngster eventually becomes a regular starter, and years later they are still important members of the squad.
That should create a story.
Likewise, if you sell a club legend, replace him with a big-money signing and suddenly upset several influential players in the dressing room, the game should allow that decision to have consequences that go beyond a temporary morale drop.
We want more situations where we think:
“I need to handle this carefully.”
Not:
“I’ll just wait for the unhappiness icon to disappear.”
The beauty of Football Manager is that every save creates its own stories.
Player relationships could be one of the biggest sources of those stories if they were given more weight.
Players should feel like people, not just profiles.
3. Make the Transfer Market Feel More Real
There is something incredibly satisfying about finding a player nobody else seems to have noticed.
You scout him. You look at his attributes. You check his personality. You investigate his contract. You negotiate a fee that fits your budget.
Then, two seasons later, bigger clubs are asking about him.
That’s Football Manager at its best.
But the transfer market is also one of the areas where immersion can quickly disappear.
Football transfers are complicated. A club doesn’t buy a player simply because he has good attributes and a reasonable asking price.
There are squad needs, finances, wages, registration rules, club reputation, tactical preferences, existing players, manager preferences and the player’s own ambitions.
We’d like FM27 to make those factors feel more connected.
AI clubs should have clearer recruitment identities.
A club fighting relegation shouldn’t suddenly behave like a Champions League contender. A financially struggling club shouldn’t make enormous transfers without consequences. A manager known for developing young players should ideally recruit differently from one trying to win immediately.
And perhaps most importantly, clubs should appear to learn.
If a club has a weakness in a particular position, it should address it. If a young player becomes one of the best prospects in the league, other clubs should react. If a manager repeatedly builds successful teams in a particular way, rival clubs should eventually adapt.
The transfer market should feel like an ecosystem rather than a collection of individual transactions.
Because when you spend ten seasons in one save, you’re not just building your club.
You’re watching every other club build theirs too.
4. Make Long-Term Saves Feel More Alive
This might be the biggest opportunity of all.
The first season of a Football Manager save is exciting.
You arrive at a new club. You look at the squad. You make your first signings. You change the tactics. You play your first big match.
But the real magic starts much later.
Season five.
Season eight.
Season twelve.
By then, you’ve created a football world that didn’t exist when you pressed “New Game”.
There should be more ways for Football Manager to acknowledge that history.
Who are the club legends?
Which players defined your most successful era?
What records have you broken?
Which clubs have become your biggest rivals?
Which managers have repeatedly stood in your way?
What happened to the players who helped you get promoted ten years ago?
Football Manager already stores an enormous amount of information about your save. We just want more of that history to feel visible and meaningful.
A long-term save should develop a memory.
Imagine finishing a season and being able to look back at the moments that actually mattered — not just the final league table.
The striker who broke the club scoring record.
The academy graduate who eventually became captain.
The dramatic promotion playoff.
The rival manager you couldn’t beat for five years.
The Champions League final that changed everything.
Those are the stories we remember.
FM27 has an opportunity to make the game better at remembering them too.
Because Football Manager isn’t really about managing one season.
It’s about creating a football history that belongs to your save.
5. Less Repetitive Admin — Without Making FM Simpler
This one is perhaps the easiest to misunderstand.
We don’t want Football Manager to become a simplified game.
The complexity is part of the appeal.
What we do want is to spend more of our time making meaningful football decisions and less time performing repetitive administrative tasks.
There is a difference.
If something happens once, it can be interesting.
If we’re asked to perform essentially the same task dozens of times during a season, it starts to feel like work.
This is where better delegation, automation and shortcuts could make a huge difference.
Give us better ways to tell our staff:
“You handle this unless something important happens.”
Let us create smarter rules for routine scouting, staff responsibilities and squad administration.
Make the inbox better at identifying what genuinely requires our attention.
Give experienced players more control over how much information they want to manage themselves.
The goal shouldn’t be to remove depth.
It should be to remove friction.
There are managers who love getting into every tiny detail of their club. Give them that option.
But there should also be a better middle ground between “I control everything” and “I delegate everything.”
Football Manager doesn’t need fewer systems.
It needs those systems to work better together.
Football Manager Doesn’t Need to Become Simpler
If there’s one thing we’d like Sports Interactive to remember with FM27, it’s this:
Football Manager’s complexity isn’t the problem.
It’s one of the reasons we keep coming back.
We don’t want fewer tactical options. We don’t want fewer scouting tools. We don’t want a simpler transfer market or a game that makes every decision for us.
We want the opposite.
We want the things that already exist to feel more connected.
We want our tactical decisions to have believable consequences.
We want our players to develop relationships and stories.
We want AI clubs to behave like clubs with their own ambitions.
We want ten-year saves to feel different from one-year saves.
And we want to spend our time managing football rather than managing menus.
FM27 is still some way from release, and there is a lot we don’t know yet.
But that’s what makes this stage of the cycle exciting.
There is still time to imagine what Football Manager could become.
And if FM27 can make the existing depth feel more alive, more coherent and more rewarding, it could be one of the most important steps forward the series has taken in years.
Now, over to Sports Interactive.
