Hawk-Eye and Sports Interactive team up to power Football Manager’s New Era

Football Manager 26 will take fans closer than ever to the beautiful game thanks to a trailblazing partnership between Sports Interactive™ and Hawk-Eye Innovations, a Sony Group company.

The Football Manager Match Engine has been elevated by the integration of Hawk-Eye's skeletal volumetric data from multiple global football leagues.

Taken from in-stadium cameras, this data is converted into animations that are combined with SI’s bespoke motion capture. This blend creates more natural and authentic gameplay across every Men’s and Women’s match in FM26.

This partnership evolves further in FM26, developing from the real off-the-ball animations that debuted in FM24.

FM26 pairs those movements with a vast suite of on-the-ball animations, with transitions between the two elevated by significant improvements to SI’s own animation technology.

In FM26, players now change their running style to move more naturally on the pitch, creating seamless transitions between off and on the ball animations. With this added smoothness and the increased graphical fidelity provided by the studio’s switch to Unity, FM26’s match action is rendered in greater detail than ever.

FM26 is released worldwide from Nov 4 across platforms. Further information on the various editions of FM26 and the platforms it’s playable on is available on the Football Manager website.