Esports Manager 2026 Review - Lack of polish hurts otherwise fun time

I need an AWPer.

I, John Rdygg, need an AWPer for my team. I open up the scouting page and search only for AWPers, and because of my low budget as a new start-up team, I’m only interested in free agents.

I filter by the star rating, that is shamelessly ripped off from Football Manager (though in FM you actually need to at least have some knowledge on the player - I’ll get to that), and find a three-and-a-half-star AWPer, who is a free agent, not retired. Perfect. Just what I need.

And then I check the name.

It’s symptomatic of the lack of polish on Esports Manager to see Fifflaren as a tier one or two AWPer in the 2026 version of the game. In fact, that he’s retired, but I can’t sign WorldEdit because he actually is retired in-game, is similarly symptomatic.

You might be asking why retired players show up in the search at all, if one cannot sign them. I don’t have an answer for you, I’m just acknowledging that you might be asking that.

I’ll be honest, I probably have too high standards.

I’m not just a long-time FM player, I’m not just a long-time CS player, I’m a former employee of Sports Interactive, who make Football Manager. I’ve played more Football Manager than 99% of people on the planet, and while you think that’s probably the reason I’m being so strict on this is because of that, I worked on the mobile game.

And… that’s closer to what Esports Manager is. Though at that price point - I paid around £12 - can one really complain about that? It was, in retrospect, insane to expect anything approaching FM.

What makes FM the greatest simulation game of its kind is that database. FM has not only the most extensive, world-spanning database of footballers in the world, it’s also remarkably accurate. Details about players nationalities, height, weight, positions, strengths etc. There’s kids in non-league who you have never and will never hear of who have their strengths and weaknesses at least roughly represented in the game.

Now compare that to Esports Manager, where MSL - who, if not still active, has played for a top team at a time we can all remember - has a score of under 5 for Leadership and yet over 15 for Skill.

Not even MSL’s mom thinks he should have a 15 for Skill.

The database is important for three reasons. Authenticity - the game breaks immersion constantly with its weird ratings. Fairness - you should be able to climb towards better and better players over time and feel progression. Fun - the game is more fun when players feel like themselves.

Now, I realise that expecting that degree of accuracy from an indie game in its infancy is absolutely bonkers, but some of it is just bizarre. There wasn’t anyone on the dev team who thought it weird that CoJoMo, a Davenport University player-turned-YouTuber, is as good as FL1T, the star rifler of a Major-winning team?

I don’t want to sign CoJoMo. I want to feel like I’m getting better and better players and moving onto FL1T, who should be a marginal step-up from my T3 rifler, or even a T2 rifler. I want those marginal gains, not just signing a YouTuber who is as good as top tier pros.

These aren’t the only issues; a very amusing bug (?) where male players were joining female teams has happened three times at least since I’ve started playing. Now, not to be too woke or anything, but I’m not sure we should be predicting transitions of real people in the video game.

(Obviously I know that’s not what is happening here).

On my team, I have a player whose bio claims he is retired (his in-game bio!) and yet he is not considered retired by the game. Players who are not AWPers are listed as AWPers. Random no-name staff are just floating around with 4.5 star ratings ready to be signed, which is pretty immersion breaking. Vitality and a few others have ‘Pro Evo’ names (bad fake names due to licensing issues, for those not as old and into football as me). And the player just has too much info.

I went weeks without a scout and could still see an approximate star rating of every single player in the world. Is my ball knowledge just that good?

Well yes, but I should be rewarded for my real ball knowledge, not given all of the info for free. Even if the player can see every stat, let them make their mind up on how good that makes the player.

I know that’s a big ask for what is, quite clearly, a casual game. But the reason I’m being so picky is because the bare bones are there for a genuinely good game.

Despite all of these flaws, despite everything I’ve just said and will continue to say about the match engine, I had fun while playing this game.

Building a team from scratch, seeing the events go by with FOMO setting in scrambling around free agents trying to make deals, scrolling through the database and thinking ‘corrr remember him?’, your first couple of games… these things are, despite the flaws, enjoyable experiences.

I built a team of uncs, because I’m 30 years old and they were still playing when I was young and attractive and cool. I could play the game more optimally and sign the young players, or the best free agents around, or look for the best stats, but I wanted to make a team that felt like my own, and I think it’s beautiful.

I mean it’s terrible. But for some reason nafany and MSL are both fraggers in this game, and suNny has been carrying me.

The appeal of these types of games is often that they are a sandbox, and that’s true here. If you want to play as Falcons, sign whoever you want, build the best team of all time and chill out, you can. If you want to play as Falcons and destroy them from the inside, you also can. If you want to start your own bedroom org with no money and try to climb the ranks, you can - though be warned, this is a looooooong journey and seems to be extremely difficult.

Because there’s not loads in the way of manipulating the match engine (though there is one amazing feature), it’s hard to ‘beat the odds’. Vitality will just beat your bedroom org. So will NIP. So will 3DMAX, if you start with 10k. I started with 100k which let me build Unc FC, but progression will be glacial. I did have to reject a bid for MSL already, though.

The aforementioned feature, that I think is the best thing about the game, is the tactic builder.

Much like Football Manager (there’s a theme here), you have the ability to run custom tactics. Want to start slow with four players mid and one lurking B? Sure, entirely possible. Want to start outside B, throw a fake and then go A? Yep, you can do that.

There’s a lot you can do and it’s genuinely quite fun and interesting to do. Seeing CS from a macro perspective and actually dragging players into position and telling them what to do is a unique experience that should test your game theory and knowledge.

The only problem is that the game engine kinda ruins all that.

It’s ostensibly fine for a £12-15 game, because that’s mobile game territory. The things you change, the tactics you run, the maps you choose etc have some effect on gameplay - probably, though it can be hard to decipher - but not to the granular level you’re desperately hoping for. FM is brilliant because even the smallest changes in your tactic can be seen quite easily, and have knock-on effects. When I created my tactic and ran it, it didn’t play out as I’d hoped because the players seem to have a mind of their own (except, in a bad way) and want to all just end on the same bombsite, like silver players.

Or VALORANT players.

My team kept three mid here for like 15 seconds. I was going ballistic. The one time I wanted them to all end on B!

Or VALORANT ones.

Just like VALORANT players, too, the CT side seems to have an immersion-breaking level of information - either that or they just violently overrotate. Mid-round, they’ll just rotate four to B and all be there as the T side hits, and yet if this happened in a real game:

• You’d think they were cheating
• They’d win the round 95/100 times.

In this game, it still seems like a coinflip. There doesn’t appear to be any way to ‘outwit’ or outthink the opposition, and so the whole tactics thing ends up feeling a little shallow.

A lot of the positioning and decision making is incredibly odd, too. So many tactics start with three on A on Overpass, and… just look at this set-up. I hate it.

Players stand in molotovs sometimes for no reason, there’s no ability to customise what an execute looks like, overrotations, players not saving… it’s not a terrible visualisation of a Counter-Strike game, but it needs a couple of iterations to feel anything close to authentic - which is true for large parts of the game.

The main difference between winning and losing does just seem to be whether or not you have better players, which in fairness, is quite accurate; but it does feel a little bit hollow. It’s nigh-on impossible to get an upset over a big team because they just all rotate to the right place and kill you. There doesn’t seem to be much nuance, though it’s possible we’re just not as smart as apEX.

This makes progression very linear; over time, you’ll just get better players as you grind through the sponsor objectives - another part of the game that is supposed to build immersion, but ends up being just another screen to click through. The training - the other way to get better players - feels very similar. A bit of a tiresome clicking exercise.

Everything in this game feels like there’s a good idea there, and the bare bones are there, but right now it’s unpolished, buggy, unfinished. There are simply too many issues we have with the match engine, the scouting, the progression, the database to ever truly, in good faith, tell you that you should buy this game.

It’s a 6.2/10. It’s nowhere near ready to be the Football Manager of CS, but it’s a good attempt at Football Manager Mobile of CS. The tactics don’t have enough impact, the database is a bit screwy and there’s a lot of pointless systems. The fact that a game with so many issues still gets over a six should tell you how much I did, legitimately, enjoy playing it.

You might have fun. You might honestly love this game, and we wouldn’t blame you. There truly is a lot to like about it, and if you just want to be the manager of NAVI and sign m0NESY back and win everything there is to win, you’ll have a blast for a bit, and for the price we’re not going to say it’s a must-avoid either.

Just don’t try and play as Vitality.

But the whole game, the progression, the ‘lower league management’ that makes Football Manager the brilliant sandbox it is just isn’t there yet. It’s an impossible thing to get right, and FM has had 25 years to do so and a much bigger team, so I don’t want to be mean. I really don’t.

I just really, really wanted this to be fantastic - and it’s not.