Hello & welcome to the first Soccer Manager 2026 Deep Dive! This week, we will be taking a look at the all-new objectives system coming in this year’s release.
In the buildup to the launch of SM26, we will be publishing a Deep Dive every week on different areas of the game. To begin with, we want to spotlight the work that has gone in to improving the objectives system this year. Previously, objectives were entirely tied to your save and didn’t give the greatest rewards. With the redesigned system coming this year, you will have daily objectives to fight for across all of your saves, in addition to the usual save-specific Club and Seasonal objectives.
The Design
When we set out to rework the objectives system, we had two goals from the start: make the system easy to understand, and make it worthwhile to engage with. We also had the overall philosophy of introducing new ways to play that help keep the game fresh and exciting. There are countless examples of needlessly complicated objectives systems or systems that don’t give rewards that are worth the effort it takes to get them. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t fall into either of these categories and worked hard to design a system that was fun and rewarding to interact with.
With the objectives system that was already in place, we had a solid foundation to build off. We wanted to take all of the best elements of what we already have and expand on it to make it into something more exciting. With that in mind, our first step was to outline a whole new category of objectives: daily objectives.
Daily objectives are brand new and work differently to anything that we have had in the Soccer Manager series before. These objectives are not specific to a single save but instead carry over across the entire game. If you make progress towards them in your create-a-club career, then switch over to your Man City save, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off. This is a whole new way to earn rewards that we have never had before in the series. These objectives will give you gold, XP, and other rewards that make them really worth aiming for. Every day at midnight, you’ll receive a new set of daily objectives, giving you new challenges to work on tackling.
With Club and Seasonal objectives, the design work was a little bit easier. These already exist in the game in some capacity, but with Soccer Manager 2026, we’ve revamped them – both behind-the-scenes, and in how you’ll see them in-game. Our annual UI refresh has also been applied to the objectives screens, making them easier to find & understand than before. We’ve also listened to some of the feedback we’ve received over the last year and made the rewards for these objectives more generous, with rewards like gold now up for grabs.
All in all, there are now over 100 types of objectives in-game, including 27 brand new daily rewards. We went through ones that already existed, simplified them, and added whole new ones to keep things fresh.
Implementing the New System
As with any new system, once we designed it and settled on what we wanted it to look like, we had to overcome some technical hurdles to get it into the game. We spent weeks implementing and refining this system. Developers from across our programming and design teams worked to get a rough first version of the system in place and then it went through two further refinement passes to get it into the state that it is currently in.
A major part of our focus for Soccer Manager 2026 as a whole has been to improve the stability of the game. In short, this means reducing crashes and fixing bugs, including long-standing ones that previously have been very difficult to sort. With the major overhaul coming to objectives, this was a great opportunity for us to go that little bit further and tackle some of the long-standing issues that we have seen you reporting. You should now notice fewer bugs than ever before with your objectives thanks to some of the foundational improvements made whilst working on the redesign.
The Future of Objectives
Our work on rewriting the system wasn’t just to solve bugs. The system has been restructured to make adding new objectives into a seamless process. This means that, going forwards, we can add more and more objectives to the game to up the variety on offer and give returning players new things to work on. If you have any ideas for objectives you’d like to see in the game, head over to discord.gg/invinciblesgames and let us know your ideas!
Wrapping Up
Thanks for reading through our first Deep Dive! We hope that this gives you a better idea of how objectives will work when you update from SM25 to SM26. We’re working on more Deep Dives that will be released over the coming weeks. Next week, we’ll be taking a deeper look into the new Manager Traits system, so keep an eye out for that!
