Perfecting Your Manager in FM26

We start by setting up our manager's appearance.

You'll notice along the top, we're at 'appearance' just now, and we've still got a fair few options to get through, including a biography, playing career, non-playing role, our badges, style and personality. All these options will have an impact on the type of manager we become, and our strengths and weaknesses.

If you want a quick refresher on what each part of the setup process does, there's a great guide waiting for you.

What I want to dig into today is the impact of some of these choices on your manager's profile, and what differences those make in-game.

The first, and clearest factor is your reputation. This is figured out in three areas: your playing career, your non-playing role, and the coaching badges you've achieved.

To give you an example - if I set up a manager who with no playing experience (pick 'none' for each of those three screens), I'll have no reputation at all. However, if we set up an ex lower-league player, who has dabbled in a bit of local scouting, and has got all of their national coaching badges, then we can start a save with an 'obscure' reputation. An ex-international, supported through all their coaching qualifications and with experience as a pundit on TV, can start with a Global reputation.

Each of these reputational choices has an impact on the baseline level of your manager's ability. Using the lower-league veteran as an example, you'll see that they’re either 'reasonable' or 'competent' in most areas of management. That makes them a useful baseline for showing how different style and personality choices affect your attributes.

This is where the choices we make about coaching style and personality start to have an impact. In the 'Coaching Style' tab, you'll be presented with a whole range of options, and can choose up to 3 of them for your manager. Some styles will also change your manager's tendencies, making you more prone or capable of doing certain things in-game

Each choice will have an impact on your manager's attributes. The more styles you select, the more your profile changes. Different combinations can also interact with each other.

All seems straightforward enough, right? Of course, once you start to combine different options, you'll get locked out of some. For example, you cannot be both an entertainer and a pragmatist.

To give you an idea of what I mean, I've set up a couple of 'archetypes' to show how they impact my manager's attributes and tendencies.

First, we've set up a manager with Attacking, Energetic and Entertainer, which gives us improvements to Attacking, Fitness, Technical, Possession, while downgrading our Defending, Goalkeeping and Set Pieces. We've also ended up with 'Plays Attacking Football', 'Plays Energetic Football' and 'Plays Entertaining Football' tendencies.

Second, I thought what's the opposite of that? A manager who looks for every edge they can, sets up a solid team and looks for simple, solid football? Well, I took Defensive, Pragmatist and Specialist, which improved our Defending, Goalkeeping, Tactical, Technical and Set Pieces, while downgrading our Attacking and Possession coaching ability, and gave us another 3 tendencies; 'Plays Defensively Solid Football', 'Plays Direct Football' and 'Specialist Coach'.

All this seems straightforward enough, but we have an extra layer of complexity when we add in Personality. On this screen, you're given 6 traits, from which you can select up to two.

Taking all of that into account, I’ve gone back and built a manager for a Youth to Glory save. I'll keep my Lower League veteran as the base, and we'll make some choices about both style and personality.

For my part, I'm going to take Developer for nurturing the young talent coming through, I'm going to take Systems Builder because I want to develop a long-term style of play for these players to adopt, and I'll take Defensive, because if the opposition can't score, they can't win.

For Personality, I'm going to take Convincing and Disciplined, in a bid to build a club culture with high standards, and keep players motivated and moving forward

So, with all of that said and done - here's what our manager looks like:

I'm not great at maths, but I did attempt some calculations, and I think there's around 2,000 different ways to build a manager in FM26. The possibilities are endless, so go and give it a go!