Welcome to this week’s Soccer Manager 2026 Deep Dive! This week, we’re digging in to the hugely overhauled manager traits system coming in this year’s new release.
The manager traits system has always been one that we felt had the potential to be massively improved. In a game like Soccer Manager, the ability to customise your manager and play to your own strengths and those of your team is hugely important, and the traits system is a big part of that. Building on the flexibility of the traits system and providing a whole new level of depth was our aim from the start with the new trait trees.
How does it work?
The manager traits system in SM26 is now very different to how it worked in previous instalments. All of the traits are now organised into three distinct trees – Training, Suit, and Tactical.
Within these categories, there are now fully-fledged “trees” for you to progress down. A major focus for us was to provide a better sense of progression during your career, giving you a sense that your manager is improving over time as you level up. The tree organisation helps with this, giving you a clear path to progress down in three distinct areas that help you in different ways.
In the Training tree, you’ll find perks that give you advantages in – you guessed it – training. These range from improving the impact of each of the training drills, through to adding extra training slots and improving your veteran players or youth prospects.
In the Suit tree, there are traits that will help you manage your club as a whole. If you have an eye for a deal, you’ll want to go down this path first. There are traits in here that make contract renewals cheaper, improve the price paid by other clubs for your players, and make your club more attractive to new signings.
In the Tactical tree, you’ll find traits to boost your on-pitch performance. These perks improve the potential of your youth players, boost the chemistry of your team, and more.
Across the three trees, there are dozens of traits available for you to work through. We’ve also built the system in a way that allows us to add more traits in a flexible manner, meaning that future updates to the game could contain exciting new abilities for you to work towards. If you have suggestions for any new traits, feel free to let us know over on Discord!
Levelling Up to Infinity and Beyond
Maybe not quite infinity…
As part of our work on the traits system, we’ve raised the manager level cap from the measly 25 that it used to be all the way to 500 – with the potential to keep going. This means that you’re no longer locked out of earning rewards when you hit level 25 and you can keep going for a whole lot longer than before.
This was an important change for us to do as we also made a major alteration to how traits work. Instead of your manager traits being applied across all of your saves, any attribute points you spent will only apply to that save file. Our intent behind this change was to give you additional flexibility in trying out new builds; for example, if you wanted to quickly max out your Tactical perks in one save and see how they play out. To balance this, every level will give you attribute points, meaning it shouldn’t take you a very long time to level up through the trees on your different saves. Flexibility was always the name of the game here.
This system is also set up to give you the gold and boost rewards too, so it’s a hugely expanded way for you to earn these currencies for free and keep your saves going. We heard from a few of you that you felt like you had to reset your account to keep on earning gold once you hit the old cap of level 25, so the new cap of 500 should keep you stocked up for much, much longer! As mentioned as well, we have designed this new level system with the ability to raise the cap even further if lots of you end up maxing out, so even level 500 might not be the end of things…
Wrapping Up
The overhauled traits system is one of the biggest new features coming to Soccer Manager 2026 and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on it. Improving your ability to customise your manager and building on the storytelling potential of the Soccer Manager series is set to be a big focus for us going forward and this is our first step towards it.
Next week, we’re going to be looking at the improvements coming to the Match Motion engine – including some all new features that we haven’t shown off yet. Make sure you check back next week to find out more!
