Joe and Big Sid talk Football Manager from Championship Manager 01/02 to the FM26 disaster. Big Sid has been playing for 25 years. Joe started with FM12 and the San Marino Challenge, spending a year building a lower Italian league team into Champions League contenders. Both have lost relationships and jobs to this game.

FM26 launched in early access and immediately got review bombed on Steam. The new Unity engine brought performance problems. Menus take five minutes to open. Big Sid has a 4090 and still had problems. The UI overhaul moved everything around, breaking muscle memory from years of previous versions. Sports Interactive told people to give it 20 hours to adjust, which is absurd when most people quit games in 10 minutes if they don't like the feel.

FM25 got cancelled months before release. Miles Jacobson said it wasn't good enough and he wasn't having fun. The community questioned whether FM26 would also get delayed, but Sega's release schedule meant it had to ship. Maybe they should have delayed it anyway.

The transfer system improved with a recruitment hub for planning squad building. Women's football is in the game now with 14 playable leagues across 11 nations. The men's game has 100 fully playable leagues and around 800,000 players including coaches and scouts. The match engine got better with more natural player movement, but the trade-off was PowerPoint transitions between menus.

We talk favorite saves and legendary players. Big Sid runs journeyman saves, starting unemployed with Sunday league experience. His go-to tactic is the 4-2-3-1 Gegenpress. Joe gives himself one coaching badge and prefers building from nothing. Freddy Adu dominated FM05 saves. Lorenzo Kryzite bossed midfields as a lone defensive midfielder in FM12. Shane Long had one year where he was inexplicably the best player in the game. Joe once reloaded his youth intake 100 times to get his own kid as a regen and turned them into a national team player.

Big Sid says let them cook. FM26 needs time and iterations to fix the performance and UI problems. Or just play FM24, which got delisted from Steam. You can download it if you already own it but can't buy it anymore.

Tell us what your first save is in a new FM or which wonderkid you remember best.

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