Exclusive interview with Miles Jacobson: What can we expect from FM26?

We had the exclusive opportunity to interview Football Manager boss Miles Jacobson for our podcast Zweierkette.FM. Of course we talked about Football Manager 26 and the problems encountered during development, but also about Miles‘ favourite features, what we can expect from FM26 and … Miles‘ future departure from Sports Interactive.

Here you can find the complete interview as a lightly edited transcript to read along with. If you want to buy Football Manager 26, you can find the best deals in the linked FM26 price comparison.

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Tery Whenett: Today we are talking with Miles Jacobson, Studio Director of Sports Interactive, the creators of Football Manager. Welcome to the show, Miles.

Miles Jacobson: Thank you very much for having me. It’s great to be here and lovely to be talking to you as well, Tery, because you’ve been such a massive supporter of us in Germany for many, many, many years, even when we weren’t doing proper releases over there. I remember meeting you for the first time a long time ago.

Yes, 2018 in Leverkusen.

It’s lovely to be able to talk to you in this environment properly rather than just having a chat over a beer, as we’ve done many times in the past. Particularly now that I don’t drink, I don’t have beers anymore.

The last time we met in Liverpool – a little bit over a year ago. All three of us watched John Terry analyze Football Manager corner routines at the FIFAe World Cup.

That was crazy. The way that the team at FIFAe and the production team who were called Lively, the way that they managed to bring the game to life as a broadcast, it was quite an emotional day for me.

And John again, I’ve known for quite a long time. He was one of the first footballers to say that he played the game, actually back in the Championship Manager days. And he would invite me to a game every year to get free copies. I’d be sitting in his box. This is before we were digital, right? And I would have physical copies and I have to go and meet them in the car park after the game to give him and some other players copies of the game.

Having a proper fan there, it was great having someone who is a big fan of the game and is able to talk about it from that perspective rather than just someone who’s doing it for the cash, which sometimes people do. That was really special as well.

Emotional rollercoaster ride with Football Manager

I remember your face very vividly – that was an emotional moment for you … and just a few months later you had to make the decision to cancel FM25.

Which was also an emotional moment for me.

On a scale from 1, the cancellation, to 10, John Terry – where are you right now on your rollercoaster ride?

The scale changes every hour at the moment. I don’t know whether a band called Boyzone were popular in Germany or not. They were a boy band in England, but the singer had this song called ‚Life is a Rollercoaster‘ as a solo record. And that’s what it’s like at the moment.

Today I’ve been a two, a five, an eight, a 10. Probably around now I’m about a seven at this time. There are many things going on at the moment. Got an approval for an announcement that is coming tomorrow. We’re recording this on Thursday, but it’s being put out on Monday. I’ll be able to talk about that announcement a little bit. That was definitely a 10 moment. And we’ve recorded part of a live stream today, and that was definitely a 10 moment.

But there’s a also bug that I found this morning that we thought was fixed that’s come back, that was a two moment. Every hour at the moment is different. I think with the release, with the beta coming next week, the early access beta coming next week, I’m both very excited and nervous at the same time – because one of the things that we found with the consumer testing that we’ve been doing is, and this is a crazy thing to say, right? The people who play the game for 200 and 300 hours, any other game on the planet would call them the hardcore of the hardcore. For us, they’re fans of the game that play it a lot, but don’t even hit that average number. They’re coming in and playing the game in-studio and are getting into the UI in about half an hour to an hour, right? They’re understanding it.

The people like yourselves and your audience, the uber-hardcore audience who play for 500, 600, a thousand hours every year, they’re taking a lot longer to get into the UI because they have to forget everything that they know because when you guys are playing the game, you know where every button is that you want to click, right? You know where every option is. Everything’s moved. You have to unlearn all of that because this is a new game. It’s not a continuation of FM24. This is the first year. Think of it like a reboot, if you like. Reboot of Spider-Man or a reboot of Superman and a reboot of Football Manager.

I’m a little bit nervous about the early access beta, because some of our most hardcore players are going to be sitting there going, „Sorry, what’s going on?“
– Miles Jacobson

Part of the thing that we were doing today, when we were doing the stream, I actually sat down and the person that was recording the stream today is Spencer FC (Spencer Owen, Hashtag United), one of the first FM streamers that we were aware of. And I actually sat down with him at the start of the stream and did a tutorial on the UI, and that meant that he could understand it really quickly. We hope that everyone sees those little tutorial bits first because otherwise, there are going to be some people who struggle with the user interface and maybe take 20 hours before they get used to it. But once you know what you’re doing, then it becomes really easy to use.

That’s why I’m a little bit nervous about the early access beta, because some of our most hardcore players are going to be sitting there going, „Sorry, what’s going on?“ Whereas our less hardcore players are going to pick it up really quickly. It’s the opposite to what we normally have, and that does make me a little bit nervous. But hey, we’ll see next week.

I’m really excited that people are going to get to play the game because there are some amazing things inside it. The animations on the match engine I absolutely love. FMPedia I absolutely love. The new in- and out-of-possession tactical formations I absolutely love … there’s many new things in there for people to discover. And that’s really exciting.

New tactical freedom in FM26

What struck me with the tactical in- and out-of-possession thing is that you said in the announcement, in the blog post, that you leave a lot of freedom to the players. How has the match engine been adjusted to reflect that? I mean, you need to penalize us when we play a center-back as a left winger on attack.

There’s been a huge amount of work that’s gone on under the hood with the AI of the match engine. Because there had to be to make the new tactic system work, right? We’re basically changing everything by allowing for those different formations.

And particularly with things like, if you’ve got a striker in possession and you decide to play them as a right-back and out of possession, for a start, you’re going to get a warning to not do that. But secondly, they’re going to get really tired really quickly trying to do that and you’re going to have a gap at right-back the whole time.

And for people who really want to go into the analysis side of things, you need to use the tactics visualizer, which was put into the blog, where you can click on three different zones on the pitch and then three different areas on each zone. And that will definitely help you work out whether your tactic might be successful or not and where the gaps are going to be. But yeah, the match engine team have been pretty busy for the two years that they’ve been working on it and yeah, it plays pretty well. I’m quite happy with the match engine at the moment.

Content Updates: The game grows after release

Jonukas: The match engine and the in- and out-of-possession roles are a really nice feature, but there were features that were stripped from FM25 and I think didn’t make the cut …

Well, there was nothing stripped from FM25. There are things from FM24 that aren’t in FM26.

Those things, as you’ve announced, will be coming back in content updates during the FM26 life cycles, or some of those things may come back.

Some of them will come back over time. If you look back at the blogs that were written back then, the dates that were given of when things were going to come back were based on us releasing FM25. You can basically add a year to most of them.

There is one exception to that, though, and by the time this goes out, this will have been announced: International management will be coming back to FM26 in a content update before the World Cup, revamped with a FIFA license. The World Cup will be licensed in the same way as with the Premier League and with the Bundesliga, we have the TV broadcast graphics that it looks like you’re seeing it as you would do on screen. We’re going to have the same for the World Cup. We’ll have real kits. We’ll have the proper groups all sorted, the proper fixtures all sorted. Yeah, it’s very, very exciting for us.

And for fans of the game, get used to content updates. We’re going to have minor updates are going to be what replaces patches. Minor updates will be bug fixes. And we will be supporting the game a lot. We’ve already got a good roadmap for minor updates ‚cause this is the first year, as I keep saying, it’s the first year of the next generation. With a game our size, there are going to be bugs in there on day one, right? There are going to be things that we haven’t found, and please to all the community members, please report those issues and we will be working very hard to fix them in minor updates.

And then we will have content updates that will be adding new content. At the moment, we’re planning two or three of those. One of those will include quality-of-life issue fixes, and based on the feedback that we get from the consumers, that will be content update one. And then content update two and three could have bigger things in there like the international management hub.

Tery: These content updates, are they free? These are no paid DLCs or something?

Yes, they are free based on the way that other people do it. As far as I’m concerned, you are paying for the game and content updates when you buy the game in the first place. It’s included in the initial price.

We’re not going to be charging for content updates because we don’t want to. Basically, we want our game to be the best value-for-money game on the planet. It’s part of the cycle now. And games, like lots of other mediums out there at the moment, games have become more like services where they’re providing more content throughout the year.

And you’re absolutely right to bring it up, Tery, that some of them sell those, and some of them let you have some for free and sell some, and some let you have them all for free, and we’re in the ‚Hey, you’re getting those as part of the initial price‘.

Are content updates planned for only PC or for all platforms?

No, they’re planned for all platforms apart from Netflix, apart from Football Manager Mobile. International management will be coming to console, international management will be coming to Apple Arcade. And Switch as well, I think. And PC and Mac. Yeah, all platforms apart from Netflix ‚cause Netflix actually has international management from day one because the Netflix Football Manager Mobile hasn’t moved across to Unity. That is a continuation of the previous series.

What’s new in Football Manager 26?

Speaking of features, I remember the days when you did those Twitter feature announcements of little features. Do you have any smaller features you are very excited about – aside from the headline ones?

There’s probably a few thousand, Tery. It’s difficult to pick out one. Okay. The way that the back and forward arrows work, the way that the back and forward buttons work is really important to the game. And is great. That’s one little one.

Because everything has changed, it’s really hard for me to pick things out. Most of those things would be user interface-wise. The way that you don’t have to click on dropdowns to open them on the navigation side of things is great.

FMPedia we have announced, but I don’t think we’ve given it enough of a fanfare. FMPedia is when you’ve got the search bar, you don’t just search for players and clubs in there anymore. You can type in ‚tactics‘ or you can type in ‚recruitment‘ and you’ll get a description of what recruitment is and a description of what tactics is, as well as links to the screen in the game.

So it’s a complete hub into the game and the game world.

Absolutely. Some of the new player instructions and team instructions are really cool. Change the way that I set up my tactic as well.

Save game compatibility with FM23 and FM24. We’ve actually written a tool to convert your save games to the new format. That’s pretty damn cool. I don’t think that we’ve spoken about that a lot in the announcements.

Then you’re going to see some announcements next week about the character creator, which again is really cool.

And something else that we spent quite a bit of time on, and I know that your show, you mainly deal with the PC game, right? And I’m talking about this from a PC perspective, but just hear me out first before judging. The changes that we’ve made for controller support are really, really cool. And the reason that that is important for PCs as well is loads of people now play PC games with control pads. Loads of people are playing PC games on Steam Decks. You are about to have a new generation of PC handheld devices. PCs are quite a varied beast. You go from a 9-inch screen through to playing on a TV, right? A 60-inch screen. And we have to make sure that our UI and our controller methods can work for all of those devices. That’s been really cool.

But one of the reasons I’m pointing out things in the UI rather than going deep into gameplay stuff, which is what you guys want me to do, is I want people to be discovering this stuff for themselves. This is a new game, a new experience. I don’t want to spoil it too much. If someone’s coming in and they’re making a new TV series, they’re not going to tell you what happens in the end. They’re not going to tell you big story plot lines through it because they want you to actually watch it and play it. Go on in there and discover things yourself.

What makes a successful FM part

Jonukas: When Football Manager 26 is out, how do you actually measure success of the game beyond sales? Do you look at retention, how long players play the game? Is it community feedback or technical stability? What’s the main thing?

For me, it’s going to be average play times, and we won’t know that for six months, nine months. Are people playing the game as long as they do with our other games?

If you look at FM24, and obviously FM24 was a two-year cycle, right? There were more people playing it, but we still didn’t expect to get to 20 million players. 20 million is an obscene number.

We had two million people play the game in September this year. It’s the same amount of people that played in December when the game first came out.
– Miles Jacobson about FM24

But what’s more important to me on FM24, more important than the total amount of players, was the retention and how many people were playing each month. We had two million people play the game in September this year. It’s the same amount of people that played in December when the game first came out. That level of stickiness to me is the judge.

Because when it comes to community feedback, which community are you talking about? Because there are loads of different communities out there. The different streamers and even your followers will be different. You don’t have complete crossover with all the other streamers and all the other podcast shows. Then you have the millions of people who don’t talk to us, but they still play the game.

Then you have things like other forums like Reddit, you have Instagram, you have TikTok. They’re all different communities in different places.

We know that when the game first comes out, for the reasons I’ve spoken about with the UI, we’re probably going to be greeted at launch with some people going, ‚Oh my God, I can’t understand how to play the game. They’ve changed too much. What am I doing?‘ I’m very confident that three months later, those people are going to be sitting there going, ‚Yeah, the game’s great.‘

I’ve been setting those expectations, particularly with Sega, that I think the community sentiment is going to get better the longer the game has been out. Normally, it’s the other way around with games. But for me, I’m not going to be judging anything until six months in.

And we’re sitting here at the moment with really good pre-order numbers. More than double what we had on FM24, and that’s great. But I’m telling Sega, don’t get too excited about that because the anticipation is like nothing I’ve ever known. It could just be people buying it earlier than normal. But that will be interesting day one, and that will be interesting in day 30, and that will be interesting in day 90.

Unless the game comes out and sells zero copies, in which case there probably won’t be a Football Manager 27, right? Realistically, if we don’t sell any games, we won’t get to make another one. Unless it’s like that the time for us to judge is going to be six to nine months down the line.

One Football Manager, many target groups

Tery: When you speak about those different communities, how do you ensure the balance that the game stays challenging for experienced players but also attracts new ones?

When we’re designing the game now, we design for six what we call ‚cohorts‘. Some people call them ‚personas‘. Here we call them ‚cohorts‘. And those range from new players to … there are two groups who will be watching this that are part of that: the thousand-hour-plus players and the 500 to a thousand-hour players or 400 to a thousand-hour players.

Whenever the design team here are working on a design and then coming to me with it, they have to put on the first sheet, they have to say which of the cohorts they’re designing this for. And then we end up with this huge map of all the features we’re working on and work out what features are being done for what cohort. And the perfect split is around 20% for each because that nearly adds up because there’s some crossover as well.

We tend to skew more towards the hardcore fans in reality because we’re all hardcore fans of the game as well. And maybe the cohort just above new players might miss out a little bit on some things because of that, because we skew it.

That’s how we try and balance things is basically by ensuring that we’re designing for every group who play the game. By trying to appeal to everyone and, to be frank, we don’t always get it right. You can’t keep all people happy all of the time. It just doesn’t happen, right?

We do our best and we hope with FM26 that people see that it’s a very different game. It’s a very different experience. They’re going to need to relearn it. But my favorite quote throughout all of the testing that we’ve done during this cycle was the first time in a consumer test, someone turned around and said, ‚It’s like FM but feels really new.‘ And that’s what we’ve been going for.

That was one of the moments where there was a bit of a sigh of relief inside the studio because it’s just like, ‚Okay, that’s what we’re going for. Someone’s seen it.‘ And then after the first person said it, in pretty much every session since that we’ve done, people have said that. Yeah. That’s good. That’s what we hope people think when it comes out as well.

The switch to Unity

Jonukas: About game development as a whole: When switching to Unity, how did that change your perspective on game development? And is it easier to work with Unity than what you had before?

We’re getting to a stage now where many of the team are finding it easier to use Unity than they did. Now, that was not the case in year one. We have now also trained a bunch of our designers, and particularly the UI/UX designers, in Unity. They’ve been able to go in and fix some of the bugs themselves, which is awesome.

Things like text overruns, which of course is a bigger problem in Germany than it is in anywhere else ‚cause your words are long. I don’t think it’ll be perfect for launch, but we fixed a lot of issues in the last week thanks to that. It’s becoming easier now, but again, we’ve had to unlearn 30-plus years of how we’ve made stuff, moving to the other engine, and that was definitely something that was more complicated than we thought it would be. And I got warned about this from some people at other studios, and I was being told, ‚No, it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine.‘ And those same people who said ‚it’s going to be fine‘ were then saying, ‚Yeah, this is maybe harder than we thought it was going to be.‘

But we learned from our mistakes. We have no regrets. We’re very happy, very comfortable that we moved over and I think as we get more used to using it, it’s going to speed things up a lot more in the future.

Tery: Have you found new possibilities through Unity that you weren’t aware of at the start?

I think some of the tools that we now have in place. Being able to get screens designed in one tool and then we’ve got a converter that puts it into Unity, which isn’t perfect yet, but it does pretty well. That’s something that would not have been possible in our other engine. And I know that ‚cause we tried for about 10 years to have that tool.

The fact that the designers can go in and do something. I’m sorry to give the same answer, but those are genuinely the most important things because it’s going to speed up development across the board. It’s going to mean that someone can show me a mockup and if I approve the mockup, it can be in-game within a day rather than it requiring three weeks or four weeks. That’s the holy grail.

As I said, we’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting close to being in that position. And if we’re able to speed up the development side, that means we’re able to do more in a year. That’ll be pretty cool.

How EA Sports helped with new licences

Now to something completely different: You collaborated with EA Sports building the women’s database or getting the women’s licenses. How did that work out? And are there maybe future collaborations planned?

We didn’t work with them on the database. It was on the licensing side.

They had a bunch of exclusive licenses and because our relationship with EA FC is pretty good. We have huge respect for the team there, both the dev team and the business team. We’re not rivals. I know that some people online think that we are rivals. It’s just ridiculous. There’s a huge respect level there. We play EA FC. They play Football Manager. It’s great.

Because of that good relationship, we were able to reach out to them and say, ‚Hey, look, we’re not competitors.‘ And they agree. ‚Will you carve us out of the licenses?‘ We were able to do it. And they went, ‚Yeah.‘ That’s how we’ve been able to get the level of licenses that we’ve been able to get. Thank you very much to the whole team over there.

We don’t have any other collaborations planned, but I’m not against collaborating with them. If they wanted to, if there’s something that they think of or something that we think of, and it works for both of us on a creative level as well as on a business level, then yeah, we’ll work with them in the future. I think we’re very lucky in that we’re friends with quite a lot of studios. Some that are based around the same sport and some others, like I love the games from Two Point Studios. I’m sitting here today wearing a RGG t-shirt, another Sega studio.

We’re very open to collaborations wherever they may come along. I love collaborations when they happen in other entertainment industries. We definitely like to do them, but Football Manager is still the most important thing. We wouldn’t do a collaboration if it’s going to get in the way of what we’re doing on FM.

 

When speaking of collaborations, you now have the Premier League license, which must be a dream come true for you.

It only took 20 years. I know when we announced the Bundesliga license, that one took long enough. This one took even longer.

We again, we’ve had a great relationship with the Premier League for a very long time. There’s a charity dinner that we work on together each year. That just happened last week, actually. We’ve known them for a very long time and again, we probably couldn’t have got this license if it wasn’t for EA because EA have had the exclusive license for a long time and were happy for us to have one as well. Yeah, it’s incredible working with them.

If you look at our license portfolio now, we have so many. I mean, the loading screen in the game is now absolutely crazy with the amount of licenses. I think we’ve got some that we still haven’t announced as well.

We’ve got some licenses that we’ll be announcing soon, but you look at that top level, we’ve got FIFA, we’ve got UEFA, we’ve got Premier League, we’ve got the Bundesliga, we’ve got Ligue 1 in France. You can’t get much bigger.

We’re very honored that the leagues trust us with their intellectual property to be able to accurately reflect their leagues. It shows how far we’ve come from that bedroom team 34 years ago to where we are now that they want to work with us.

The future of Sports Interactive

I read that you were thinking into the future, into your personal future as a Studio Director. At which point would you say you are ready to pass the baton on? In which state must the studio and the game be?

When I believe … how can I put this? When I believe that there’s someone better than me to do my job. Because this is my life’s work. I’m not going to hand that over to someone. I’m not the kind of person who will want to leave here and watch it burn.

The legacy must continue in the same way as I’ve carried on with Oliver’s and Paul’s legacy from when they first started doing what we’re doing. But I’m not young anymore. Okay, I still think I am in my head, but I’m not.

We have lots of people here who have the promise to be able to do exactly that and got a bunch of people getting promoted into roles where they can help. But it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. It’s something that’s going to happen over a number of years.

Marc Duffy, for example, has taken over the production side of the business with Grant Appleyard, with Stu Boyd and others, and I’m a lot less involved in that side of things now than I was a few years ago. Matt Carroll, our COO, does a lot of the working with Sega, doing all the budgets and that kind of thing, which again was something that I used to do. Alan Granger on the comms side of things. Rich Trafford on the partnership side of things. He gets involved on that side of things. Ant and Remi and the roles that they have now on the design team.

This stuff has been thought about for a long time. And it’s slowly, slowly getting there. And when the time is right, I don’t know if I’d end up leaving entirely or whether I’d end up moving to another role. Because I think I’ve built up quite a lot of knowledge over the last 30 years that might be pretty useful to still be part of the studio.

But at the end of the day, we’re owned by Sega. It’s going to be Sonic the Hedgehog who makes that decision, not me. If this game doesn’t do well, then Sonic may get angry with me and that may be it for me. Hopefully not, because I think the game’s really good.

I still like being here and I’m still just as passionate about the game as I was 30 years ago. But I have to think about the long term of the studio and the game because I don’t want my life’s work to die. I want it to continue forever.

We’ve said this about FM26 many times. We want FM26 to be the base of what we do for the next 10 years or 20 years. And if I’m still here in 20 years, if I’m still on this earth in 20 years, I’ll be surprised.

We’ve got to make sure that the succession plan is in a state that I’m not needed anymore. And it’s a weird thing for someone to have to put in place themselves when they’re doing it. But that’s what has to happen if the game is going to continue long beyond me because whilst I’m a massive part of the game, I’m not the only part of the game. We’ve got 280 people at Sports Interactive and pretty much all of them are way more talented than I am at what they do.

We’ve got to make sure that we’re set up for a future. And that’s the same for everyone in the studio. We’ve got to make sure that there are people who can step into Kev Turner’s shoes. He’s one of our senior engineers. We’ve got to make sure that there are people here who can step into Marc Vaughan’s shoes. He’s the director of Football Manager Mobile. The same with Marc Duffy. Everyone here, we have to have a succession plan. Just in case anything goes wrong for any of us.

Yeah, it’s the dilemma that a lot of business owners and CEOs face and I’ve been facing it for a while. It’s not something I really like talking about because, and the reason I don’t like talking about it is one, every time I do, people could turn around and go, ‚Wow, he’s an arrogant prick because I’m talking about the job that I do.‘ And secondly, I’m talking about the fact that I’m going to die at some point. And no one really wants to hear that, right?

Well, actually, there are loads of people in our community who probably want that to happen quickly looking at what they tweet me. But yeah, it’s one of those things that we just have to do for the long term of the studio because I want the game to be here for 50 years, for 100 years. You see so many entertainment companies succeeding for a very long time. We want to be one of those. We don’t want to be a moment in history. We want to carry on making history.

To not end this interview with speaking about death … I have another question regarding FM26.

(laughing) Yeah, thanks for that, Tery. It was going so well, and then you throw the death thing in.

Expectations for Football Manager 26

You spoke about FM26 being the stepping stone into the future for the studio. What can people expect from the game? Is it a better version of FM24? Is it maybe a little cautious step into the future? What is it?

It’s not FM24. It’s not a better version of FM24 or a worse version of FM24. It’s FM26. It is the first step, as you say, into the new series.

I think we’ve been pretty clear with everyone that you can’t expect 20 years‘ worth of quality-of-life features from a UI to be there in a brand new UI that no one’s ever used before, right? It’s going to take time for those things to come back.

But for a first version of something, it’s an incredibly feature-rich first version that includes things that are way better than we’ve had in this series before. The animation’s fantastic. The UI once you get used to it is great. There are so many things. The tactical side of things is so much better. It is that ’new but familiar‘ thing.

But we’re not sitting here, and we never have sat here and said everything from FM24 is going to be in 26. We’ve said quite the opposite all the way through the last two years when we’ve been blogging stuff.

And if that makes people unsure, and I will get told off for saying this by our PR team, but if that makes people unsure, we will be releasing a free demo of the game on the day of release. If you don’t want to pre-order and you don’t want to buy it upfront and you want to try it first, I’ve got no issues with that. Go for it.

But if you trust us for the games that we’ve delivered for the last 30 years, you’re going to love what we’re doing.

Miles, thank you very much for your time. We really appreciate it. All the best for you and the studio on these exciting days and weeks and yeah, we can’t wait to start playing FM26.

Well, thank you both for taking the time to do the interview as well. Not just to do the interview, but to be such great ambassadors for the game in Germany. Thank you to you and your community. Maybe in a few months I come back when you’ve got more questions about the game. But thank you for having me and cheers.

Cheers, Miles.

 

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