The minimum PC requirements for Football Manager 26 start so low that 15-year-old CPUs are good enough, though your graphics card will need to be a tad newer

Even though the game was announced barely a month ago, the makers of Football Manager 26 have already spilled the beans about what kinds of gaming PCs will be able to run the next entry in the two-decade-old series. And the good news is that the entry requirements to a world of obsessing over stats are so low that your grandmother's bargain bin laptop will probably be fine.

Football Manager 26's Steam entry has just appeared, barely a month after publisher Sega first announced it and roughly seven months after the shocking cancellation of Football Manager 25. Along with a first-look video of what to expect, the Steam listing also includes two sets of PC system requirements, the usual 'minimum' and 'recommended'.

The Football Manager series has a long history of running fine on basic PCs, though the switch to using Unity as the game engine for FM 26 might lead you to think that something more potent would be needed. Well, you've got absolutely no worries on that count.

First of all, it's great that the developers, Sports Interactive, have recognised just how much of its player base runs Football Manager on laptops. For most games, you normally have to do a bit of mental arithmetic to convert the desktop specs into suitable mobile requirements.

I'm also impressed that the minimum hardware requirements are very low by today's standards, with CPUs from 15 years ago and graphics cards released in the past decade setting the entry bar. If you want to know just how low, well, the Core i5 530 is a dual-core, four-thread chip that can't even reach 3 GHz, and the HD 530 GPU is so feeble that calling it a GPU is a bit of a stretch.

(Image credit: Future)

If you're hoping to try and run the game on hardware even older than this, it's important to note that the central processor must support two specific CPU instruction sets: SSE4.2 and SSSE3. Windows 11 24H2 also requires the former, so if you're using that operating system, then you'll be fine, but any Intel processor prior to 2008 and any AMD chip older than 2011 will probably not work.

It's a similar story with the GPU. GeForce GTX 960s and Radeon R9 380s were potent things 10 years ago, though not right at the top end, so you might think you'll be able to get away with something that's a fraction older. However, the minimum VRAM requirement is 512 MB, and all the listed GPUs support Shader Model 6.4 or newer.

That leads me to suspect that something like a GeForce GTX 580 probably can't run the game, because while it has more than enough VRAM, it only supports Shader Model 5.1, which doesn't have the same feature set as SM 6.x.

The 'Recommended' specs are understandably a lot newer, but still more than acceptable. You're looking at a gaming PC with a CPU with six cores and six threads, from 2019, paired with 12 GB of system RAM and a budget graphics card from the same era as the central processor. VRAM requirements aren't stated, but all the listed GPUs sport 6 GB, so it's safe to assume that this is what you'll need.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

All to be expected, of course, as it's Football Manager. The developer understands its audience well enough, and I reckon that if there was any meeting where somebody dared to suggest 'ray-traced blades of grass', they would have been punted out of the nearest window, meme-style.

Our hardware overlord, Dave, is somewhat of a Football Manager fiend (he says, as diplomatically as possible), so I have no doubt that he'll be pleased to see that Football Manager 26 will run on just about anything and everything computer-based [I'm definitely happy that it'll run on integrated laptop GPUs from ten years ago! -Ed]. And while he's buried neck-deep in stats, we'll just run amok and see what things we can set fire to from overclocking.