Your Style, Your Personality: FM26's revamped manager creator

Crafting your game world

When you load up FM26 for the first time, you’ve got two options to kick-off your career: Quick Start and Advanced Setup. 

If you want to get right in the action, Quick Start is there to take you rapidly through club selection and the essential settings. If you want to craft every element though, it’s Advanced Setup you’re after.

Whichever route you choose, you’ve got more options than ever when it comes to playable nations, leagues and clubs. As well as all of the new Women’s Football competitions, we’re delighted to welcome Serie B BKT, the ADNOC Pro League and A Lyga to the FM family as licensed competitions.

In terms of the game world you create, the choice is entirely yours – you can load just men’s teams, just women’s teams or a mixture of both. You’ve also got familiar settings from previous titles to play your way, from screen resolution options like windowed mode through to the Original, Real World and Your World transfer mode settings introduced in FM24.

Your look, your presence

With your game world created, it’s time for you to explore our completely rebuilt Manager Creator. 

We’ve levelled up the creator, delivering higher quality in some areas and more options in others, allowing you more visual definition for your virtual self. 

As a starting point, there are now more than 30 preset character options for you to choose from - all of which sport brand-new hairs, more realistic-looking faces and enhanced apparel.

These presets are just a starting point, though. Once you’ve determined the body type, skin tone and height, you can explore the sculpting tool we’ve built to shape and perfect every aspect of your character’s face, from their jaw and chin through to their cheek definition and forehead. 

Improvements to our internal tooling and the move to Unity have helped us to recreate all of our hairs with smoother blends and higher-quality renders. These come to life when you’re customising your character as we’ve adapted and repositioned the cameras we use here to give you a better, more natural perspective. 

What your manager wears on the touchline is important, too. 

The clothing models, textures and materials have been recreated from scratch, all designed to take on a more lifelike quality. To that end, you’ll now discover more customisation options and a broader range of outfits, with jeans, polo shirts and t-shirts among the additions. 

For the outfit styles we’ve had in previous games, you’re now able chop and change the tops and bottoms in every outfit and pick different colours for every layer to find the perfect look for you.

With further settings for skin details and cosmetics for all body types, every manager in FM26 will feel more alive and unique than ever. Simply put, you’ve got more freedom to express your look, your presence and your style.  

New look Newgens

Talking about changes to manager appearances means we’re also able to talk about the big leap forward that Newgens have taken in FM26.

The improved visual fidelity provided by Unity and upgrades to our own tooling have allowed us to level up the renders and algorithms for the characters faces and eye colours, marking a significant improvement on previous editions. 

There are other changes to their appearance too, particularly with regards to hair and skin. We've added some new skin details and made some existing ones rarer, while in general you’ll notice a more accurate skin tone ethnicity match.

We’ve also been working under the hood on Newgens. We’ve added greater consistency between Jumping Reach and Aerial Reach and limited some hidden attributes. Elsewhere, you’ll get a greater sense of anticipation in your Youth Intake Previews with notes on their performances at youth level before they arrive at your club.

Developing your backstory

Back to you in the dugout. Great managers aren’t decided on looks alone. Everyone that steps into the dugout has a backstory.

Now, you can script more of yours with an immersive profile builder that allows you to combine your background and different elements of your football and leadership philosophy into something truly reflective of the kind of manager you want to be. 

It all starts with sorting your Credentials. The first step is a familiar one – determining your level as a player from a generational superstar all the way down to someone who never progressed beyond kickabouts in the local park. 

Then comes the new. You’re first asked about previous non-playing roles you may have had, with options available to you in the worlds of Coaching, Recruitment & Football Operations, Medical, Punditry & Media and Referees & Match Officials. You can define your role within each area and how well known you are for it.

It’s then time to select your level of coaching badges (only available in our PC edition). You’ll notice throughout these three questions that your manager reputation is generating on the right-hand side, with every stage influencing the level you’ll be stepping into the dugout at. 

Setting out your Style and Personality

Those answers set a baseline for your Coaching and Mental Attributes, which you’ll notice are now displayed visually with text descriptors. What really sets you apart is your Style and Personality.

Nine diverse elements define your Coaching style in FM26, and these are an expression of how you think and feel about football.

Your preferences will probably vary from job to job but you can pick three in each career, giving you the full freedom to be a solid all-rounder or a specialist with a focused view on the way to lead a team towards victory.

As for your Personality, you can select up to two of the six available traits that best express you as a character, how you interact with people and the sort of leader you are.

The selections you make here allow you elevate the things you care about most and deprioritise those that are less important to you.

They also determine your starting Tendencies as a manager, which are a dynamic, evolving part of your career. Many Tendencies are only available as you progress through your saves. For example, you will only pick up Signs High Profile Players if you actually sign them in the transfer market. Other Tendencies can be lost as well as gained through your in-game choices. Ultimately, every choice you make impacts your Attributes – and how your players respond to you from day one in the hotseat.

Change your background, change your personality and style, change the game.

In FM26, your story begins long before the first whistle - with the most immersive manager creation and game setup experience we’ve ever had, redefining what it means to step into the dugout. 

You can express more of yourself in every career as you plot your path to footballing greatness with more playable leagues, clubs and nations. It’s almost time to step into the dugout.