15 September 2026
Football management games are a strange genre. No other type of game asks you to spend hundreds of hours not controlling the thing on screen. And yet it has been going for over 40 years, it's produced one of the most played PC series in Britain, and it once caused a divorce that made the national papers.
Here's how it got from there to here.
Kevin Toms wrote the original Football Manager on a Sinclair ZX81 with 16K of memory and published it through his own company, Addictive Games. You picked from a list of clubs, set your team, and watched matchstick men re-enact the goals. It sold in numbers nobody expected and got ported to almost every home computer of the decade.
Toms's face was on the box, which is why a generation of people know what a 1980s software developer looked like. He's still making football games today.
The genre spread fast. Football Director (1986) went deep on finances. Tracksuit Manager (1988) introduced live text commentary you could react to during the match, which is the ancestor of every match engine since. The Double (1986) and a dozen budget titles filled the Spectrum and C64 shelves. Most were 8-bit, text-heavy, and played at a speed modern games have forgotten.
Anco's Player Manager (1990) bolted a management layer onto Kick Off 2, so you picked the team and then played the games. It was huge on the Amiga.
Then in 1992, two brothers in Shropshire, Paul and Oliver Collyer, released Championship Manager through Domark. No graphics at all. Just a database, a text match feed and a sense that the players were real. The 93/94 edition added real names. It sold well enough to fund a second game, and that second game changed everything.
Gremlin's Premier Manager came out the same year and went the other direction, focusing on stadium building and working up from the Conference. For a few years the two were direct rivals.
Championship Manager 2 (1995) and its 97/98 update are the games people mean when they talk about wasting their twenties. Regens, the Scottish league, Tonton Zola Moukoko. Championship Manager 3 (1999) moved to Windows and let you run several nations at once.
Championship Manager 01/02 (2001) is generally treated as the peak of the era. It was fast, the database was enormous, and it's still played today thanks to a free release from Sports Interactive and a community that updates the data every season.
Elsewhere: Ultimate Soccer Manager (1995) let you bribe referees and set pie prices. Codemasters' LMA Manager (1999) proved consoles could do management with a 3D engine and PlayStation controls. EA entered the market with Total Club Manager in 2001, later renamed FIFA Manager.
Sports Interactive, the Collyers' studio, made the games. Eidos owned the Championship Manager name. In 2003 they parted ways. SI kept the code and the database, signed with Sega, and released Football Manager 2005. Eidos kept the brand and had to build a new game from scratch. Championship Manager limped on until 2011 and never recovered. Football Manager became the genre.
Football Manager added a 2D match engine, then 3D in 2009. The database grew to hundreds of thousands of players and became a scouting tool real clubs used. FIFA Manager was the only meaningful competition and EA cancelled it after the 2014 edition, which fans have kept alive with yearly community patches ever since.
Mobile arrived with Football Manager Handheld on PSP (2006) and then iOS and Android. The free-to-play wave followed: Top Eleven (2010), Online Soccer Manager, Soccer Manager. Hattrick had been running in browsers since 1997 and kept going.
FM got bigger every year and changed less. Each edition added systems: dynamics, medical centre, development centre, data hub, a women's game promised and delayed. The core loop stayed the same, and so did the engine underneath it, which was starting to show its age.
SI announced FM25 as a ground-up rebuild on Unity, with a new interface and match engine. It was delayed to November 2024, then to March 2025, then cancelled outright in February 2025, with pre-orders refunded. The studio said releasing it as it was would not be the right thing to do.
FM26 launched in November 2025 with a full Premier League licence, women's football at last, and a tactical system that reviewers generally rated as the best the series has had. It also launched with a new interface that veteran players found slower and more confusing, over 100 missing features, and enough bugs to tip Steam reviews to mostly negative. SI patched it for seven months, added international management in time for the World Cup, then in July 2026 called time on updates and said the game had fallen short of its own expectations.
FM27 is due in November 2026. SI has said it will keep the new design but restore ideas and behaviours from earlier games that players missed.
The genre has swung between two ideas since the start: the deep, slow simulation (Championship Manager, FM) and the quick, club-focused game (Premier Manager, LMA, Kevin Toms). The first won commercially. The second never went away, and every time the big game stumbles, people rediscover it.
That's the space Manager of Football lives in: a Premier League season you can play through in an evening or two, with real decisions and a real table at the end. Play it free in your browser.
For a free football manager game live for the 2026-27 season, check out www.manageroffootball.com.