Design System
Football Manager is a deeply realistic football management simulation played by 14 million people worldwide. Players handle tactics, transfers, and team management with incredible detail and immersion. Its vast database and authenticity have influenced real-world football, from scouting to analytics, leaving a huge footprint within football culture.
With studio ambitions of creating a coherent cross platform title across PC, Console and mobile, and in the dawn of a new era on the Unity game engine, I led the design for a number of high visibility features, most notably the International Management game mode.
I joined the design team halfway through the Football Manager 25 development cycle, right as we were overhauling the game across all platforms and creating a new design system.
As the design system evolved, introducing new interaction models and a completely overhauled information architecture, the number of design tasks grew to over ten times that of the previous year’s cycle.
Development capacity and ultimately incomplete game quality led to untimely cancelation of Football Manager 25, resulting in huge external and internal pressure to deliver a polished title for Football Manager 26.
Initially the sole UX designer on the international management squad, I delivered the project from inception to design sign-off in just 12 weeks. It was a high-volume, fast-paced phase that typically took six months.
Implementation was folded into the design workflow, requiring hands-on skill development in Unity’s production processes in order to help engineering get over the line in time for release.
In an intensive delivery focussed cycle, I leaned on previous experience of designing components for editorial products to efficiently expand the design system for the game’s internal football news aggregator.
I led the art direction to build a scalable library of news imagery to enhance the game’s editorial immersion, collaborating closely with the studio’s Match Art and Licensing teams to mitigate legal conflict for the use of assets.
I led the IA audit for International Management in order to understand the scale of the design tasks, resulting in conversations with game system designers, senior producers and lead engineers to outline requirements and ticket specifications.
With the high volume of design tasks for International Management I brought another UX designer into the squad, managing their workload in order to keep the churn of tasks efficient and sustainable.
I regularly reported into the studio’s design lead with updates on the project momentum, while also leading presentations to the Studio Director to gauge progress and ultimately get sign off for designs.
During the implementation phase of the cycle I leaned heavily on internal QA and external play testers, in order to gather the insights to iterate effectively on the UX on the areas of the game I was leading.
In the final 8 weeks before the release, I stepped into a more engineering based role to increase the capacity of the development team, submitting changes and fixing high severity UI bugs to improve the game quality.
The news aggregator within the International Management game mode allows users to immerse themselves in major international tournaments like the FIFA World Cup 2026.
FM26 was the most preordered title of the series, becoming the highest selling title across all platforms with unique players reaching a record 20 million globally.
The improvements and future vision of the International Management game mode aided in securing the license partnership agreement with FIFA to secure image rights, allowing Football Manager to use the branding for the FIFA World Cup, Women's FIFA World Cup and the World Club Cup.
International Management in FM26 went on to see a rapid increase of 67% of users completing an international tournament compared to 21% in the previous FM24 title.
This development cycle opened my eyes to the impact project scope can have on the business. A one year project to design and ship the next Football Manager title on Unity turned out to be a two year highly focussed delivery effort. The cancellation of the FM25 release put a lot of emphasis on delivering an even better FM26 that would exceed the expectations of a passionate user base. The pressure to deliver forced me to become extremely efficient and adapt in ways I didn’t anticipate when first joining the studio.
Made in the North West, UK