Welcome to the first of our Feature Focus articles for Soccer Manager 2027! For those who didn’t catch our articles last year, these articles cover the new features coming to the Soccer Manager series in a bit more detail than our other posts. If you want to find out all about what we are adding to the game and a little about the process behind how we made them, then read on to find out more about the all-new Squad Planner and UI improvements.
Planning for Victory
For a while now, we have received requests to add a way to plan out your squad in the long-term. The game previously did not provide any functionality for this and you were instead left to manually keep track of your players, their ratings, how old they are, and a whole lot else. This is a lot of information for someone to keep track of and led to requests for a more streamlined process – enter the Squad Planner!
The Squad Planner is one of our headline features for Soccer Manager 2027. It is an entirely new system, built from the ground up, that displays lots of vital information about your squad in one single screen. You can access the planner by heading to the squad tab and it is located on the bottom of the left-hand bar.
When you enter the Squad Planner, you will be able to configure it how you want. You can set the desired formation in the bottom left corner, add your lineup to it, and add your backups for each position by clicking on the position and using the menu on the right. You can also use the autofill function to take care of this automatically and then tweak it to your ideal settings from there.
The Squad Planner is an incredibly powerful tool for keeping track of your team. You can order players by rating, value, age, and many other parameters, allowing you to see particular weak points and act accordingly. For example, if you have three players able to play the FC position, you can order them by age and see which you will need to replace the soonest. This can also be effective at planning your youth development; you can see if you have a promising young option as a backup and structure your transfer business around developing them into a starter. You can also change the formation and use this to see if you can switch formations or if the change will leave you with some gaps in your team that need filling.
Everything in the Squad Planner happens independently of your established tactics. This means you can move players around in here and experiment with what your team might look like without worrying about breaking your existing tactic. You will also receive recommendations for players you can purchase in the bottom of the screen when you click on a position, along with a hefty discount to their usual price.
An Improved User Interface
As with every year, the UI has undergone a refresh and now has a fresh coat of paint and plenty of quality-of-life improvements.
First up, the colour scheme is now a much cleaner & more modern blue, green, and white pallete. There is now greater contrast between the background, UI elements, and text, which should make for a much more pleasant viewing experience, particularly over longer sessions. Not to mention, the colours look very nice too!
On top of the usual visual spruce up, there are also plenty of tweaks and changes to how things are displayed throughout the game. You’ll notice some UI elements on the home screen in particular have been moved around to make things clear. Chief among them is that the inbox has been moved from the left-hand bar down into the corner. You will still get a full preview of each inbox message, but now it takes up less real estate on the screen. This, in turn, has allowed us to spread out the UI elements a little more and improve the overall balance of how the home screen looks.
There are lots more little improvements here and there throughout the game for you to discover, along with a generally improved experience. There have been some backend improvements to various UI elements throughout Soccer Manager 2027 that result in a more responsive, smoother experience. All in all, we have worked hard this year to make sure that the UI is the best that it has ever been.
Wrapping Up
Thanks for taking the time to read this week’s Feature Focus! We’re going to have plenty more of these in the runup to the launch of Soccer Manager 2027, so make sure you stick around if you want to find out more about what will be arriving later this year. Speaking of, we will also be announcing a release date over the coming weeks, so make sure you don’t miss that either!
