The beta version of Football Manager 26 is out. The arrival of the new match engine, alongside a slight bump in required specs, might have Mac owners wondering whether the new game will play well on their hardware. Here’s how it performs on a Mac that just scrapes past the recommended requirements.
Football Manager 26 Required Specs For Mac
The minimum required spec for Football Manager 26 on Mac is as follows:
Processor: Apple M1 or Intel Core M
Memory: 4GB RAM
Graphics: Apple M1 or Nvidia GeForce GT 750M or Intel HD Graphics 5000 or AMD FirePro
The recommended spec bumps that up slightly to:
Processor: Apple M1
Memory: 12GB
Graphics: Apple M1
In other words, it looks like you really want to be on any Apple Silicon Mac to get the best chance of running Football Manager 26 smoothly.
The Spec Of My Test Machine
I’ve been testing the game on an M1 MacBook Pro from 2021, so one of the earliest Apple Silicon machines there is. It has the following spec:
Processor: Apple M1 Pro (10-core)
Memory: 16GB
Graphics: Apple M1 Pro (16-core)
So, the test machine is a step above the recommended requirements, but not massively so.
How Does Football Manager 26 Run On The MacBook Pro?
In short, very smoothly. With the move to the enhanced Unity match engine, I was fearful that it would prove too much for the M1 MacBook Pro, or that there would be a lot of lag and stutter during game action. But if anything, the match engine in Football Manager 26 runs more smoothly than the one in Football Manager 2024.
I’ve tested using both an external widescreen display (3,440 x 1,440) and the Mac’s own internal display and the game action has been very slick on both, with very few dropped frames or glitches. Perhaps the more modern graphics engine is better optimized for the Mac’s graphics hardware than its predecessor was.
Likewise, the new in-game UI is relatively slick on the MacBook hardware. There’s a lot of online criticism about the design of the new UI, with many early testers complaining about glitches and poor layout (some of which is justified), but in terms of raw performance it’s slick and responsive.
Occasionally, it takes a while for a screen to draw. The fixtures list is particularly prone to this problem, but having watched streamers such as Kevin Chapman playing on high-end PC hardware, this appears to be a game-wide bug, not an issue that is a result of relatively low-powered graphics hardware.
In short, overall Football Manager 26 performance on a Mac is very impressive. Unless you have a M1 MacBook Air/Mac mini with only 8GB of memory, which is beneath the spec I tested, I’d be confident the game will play on your Apple Silicon Mac without any problems.
Widescreen Support In Football Manager 26
As I mentioned my widescreen display, I thought it was worth touching on widescreen support in Football Manager 26.
There’s a lot of online noise about the game not exploiting widescreen displays, but that’s only partially true. Yes, the game’s main UI does not fully expand to take full advantage of widescreen displays. That means you get blank space on either side of the UI, which goes to waste.
Sports Interactive studio head Miles Jacobson has said he wants to make the new UI fully adaptive in time, but it seems unlikely that’s going to happen in the lifespan of Football Manager 26.
However, the new match engine does stretch right across the expanse of a widescreen display, so you do get a more immersive experience during match highlights. Granted, in-game highlights make up a relatively small proportion of the total time you spend in Football Manager and it is disappointing the main UI can’t take advantage of the extra space, but it’s not quite the case that Football Manager 26 doesn’t offer widescreen support.
