Welcome to the penultimate Deep Dive on the new features coming to Soccer Manager 2026! This week’s focus is on all of the improvements making their way to the Match Motion engine in this year’s release.
Match Motion is the engine that powers the matchday experience in the Soccer Manager series (and our other in-development titles!). Everything you see on the pitch comes from Match Motion, as do all of the behind-the-scenes calculations that turn your selected tactics into the actions of your players. It’s an extremely complicated system, and this year, it’s having one of the biggest sets of improvements in our history.
Night & Day
Straight to the point – one of the most requested features from our community is returning to the Soccer Manager series this year. You will once again be able to have those famous European nights under the lights once again as night time matches return to the Soccer Manager series.
We’re really excited to be able to get this into the game in time for launch. For the past couple of years, this has been top of people’s lists of requests and it’s always exciting for us when we get to deliver one of those big-ticket items. Members of the Soccer Manager 2026 will be able to access these night matches before launch.
The system is more than just setting certain matches to night or to day. To futureproof it and make sure the game is as accurate as possible, we’ve set it up so that the time of day system uses the co-ordinates of your team’s stadium to accurately calculate the appropriate lighting settings based on the time of the match. For example, teams in countries closer to the equator will see more daylight matches than those who have longer night times. Little touches like this are important to immersion.
Smoother Than Ever
We didn’t just stop at the lighting for matches. For Soccer Manager 2026, we spent a LOT of time working on player animations. For us and how we work, this consists of two major bodies of work:
The animations themselves
The system that selects animations
In order for players to look realistic, you don’t just need high-quality animations for them. You also need a solid, behind-the-scenes system that selects appropriate animations. You could have the smoothest, most beautiful animations, but if your players were for some reason doing overhead kicks when the ball was passed along the ground to them, the game would look strange to say the least.
With that in mind, this backend system was a prime focus of our work. Whilst the idea of picking the right animation might sound quite simple, there are a lot of variables that go into the choice. Our Match Motion team have been working hard to make sure as many of these variables as possible are accounted for to help improve the accuracy of the animations that are chosen. We are still working to expand the library of animations and to improve the selection process, but we’ve made good progress on it in SM26.
We didn’t just focus on that backend part of the equation though. Our animation team have been working hard to add new animations for the following:
Shots
Passes
Dribbles
Slide Tackles
Keeper Saves
With these two major bodies of work blended together, the action on the pitch has never looked smoother. Time and again, we heard feedback from the community that you wanted players to look smoother and we’re pleased to say that we’ve taken some big step forwards on this front with SM26.
Lights, Camera, Action
The improvements don’t even stop there though! What good are night-time matches and smoother players if you can’t see them in all their glory? A big body of work has been to work on the in-game cameras to make sure that the action is more visible than ever before.
We have updated the “Stand” and “TV” cameras to provide better views of your tactics unfolding on the pitch. Now, the Stand camera will chase the ball. The intent for this is to give you a really close-in, granular view of your matches. The “TV” mode has also been updated to be much more responsive. The framing of the TV camera has also been changed to be a bit tighter, again giving you a closer view of the action. Now, regardless of your camera selection, you should be getting a better view than before of your players.
Defending the Title
As part of our laser-focus on delivering the features most-requested by the community, we also spent considerable time working on defenders and defensive behaviour as a whole.
Key to our work here has been to improve the ratings calculation for defenders. One of the biggest complaints across the course of SM25 is that you could keep a clean sheet and absolutely dominate your opposition, yet your defenders would still come out with sub-par ratings. In SM26, this should now be resolved, giving your defenders the credit that they deserve for keeping the ball out of the net.
Visuals for defenders have also been improved. As mentioned, there are new slide tackle animations, but we’ve also done some extra work to make your defensive actions look better than before. Defenders would previously have been hesitant to challenge for long balls and crosses. In SM26, defenders will now actively engage with attackers – knocking the ball to safety more consistently. Two players challenging for the same ball comes down to a combination of strength and skill, so consider running more physical training drills! This change adds more fight for the ball, rather than every touch looking a bit too clean-cut for a realistic game of football.
Goalkeepers have also received plenty of love from the Match Motion team this time around. With the new animations in place, we’ve also done a pass over the animation choices and AI for keepers too. They will now dive more realistically and recover better from the dives. Again, keeper behaviour has been a point of contention for the community for a while, and we’ve made big strides on this front for 26.
Polish & Finishing Touches
With a system as complicated as the Match Motion engine, it’s the fine details that really bring it all together. The smallest of things can break your immersion and lower the overall look & feel of the system. We went through the entire game and found as many edge cases as we could to polish up and ship out in SM26.
First of all, your players will now run over and pick the ball up in deadball situations. If you win a corner or a free kick and the ball rolls away, it’s not going to just teleport to the spot. Your players will go, grab it, and bring it back. It’s a minor feature that might never even crop up in a match, but is a fine example of the little finishing touches we’ve been looking at this year.
The referee will now also behave much better. Sometimes, his position could be a little random and out of place during matches. The positioning of the referee will now look a lot more natural and just generally be more sensible in the heat of the action.
There have also been a lot of bug fixes here and there. Ever had a player get injured and the physios very rudely leave their bag in the centre circle for the rest of the match? That’s been sorted this time around. We have also fixed a lot of issues with things like pitch rendering issues, collision detection with the pitchside hoardings, and issues where players would move out of position for seemingly no reason. There’s also been a big optimisation pass to get the engine performing smoother than ever before.
The Future
We aren’t just stopping work on the Match Motion system with the release of SM26. Post-launch, we have some exciting plans and the engine will continue evolving for years, come rain or shine…
…Speaking of…
Very important for us to make clear that the weather effects will not be in for launch but we expect them to get to you shortly afterwards. We’ll have more to share on them soon…
We’re also planning significant work on how the Match Motion engine blends animations together as we know this is an area where we could improve. This blending system will incorporate work around multi-touch animations and a full implementation of inverse kinematic targeting. This is a system that ensures that when a player’s foot is planted, the point is preserved, which reduces the times where players look like they’re sliding. This will be a big body of technical work though, so stay tuned to hear more!
Wrapping Up
A lot to get through there! The Match Motion engine has been one of our top priorities for SM26 and the visual difference between now and last year is absolutely massive. Our key focus has been making it look smoother, adding in much-requested community features, and on improving the look & variety of goals in matches. The next few weeks will be spent putting the finishing touches on the system, but we’re very excited to get it into your hands when the game launches.
