After seven deep dives showing the game in bits and pieces, Sports Interactive has finally published what a lot of people were asking for: more than five minutes of uninterrupted FM27 gameplay, from an early October development build, with everything working together. Two more announcements landed the same weekend: FM27 Touch has a date on Apple Arcade, and France’s top women’s league is now licensed.
We watched the video from start to finish with subtitles, paused on the screens that matter and read what the community said on the official forum and on Reddit. Here is what is new and what simply confirms what we already knew.
(Image: Sports Interactive)
If you missed any of our earlier FM27 articles, here they are:
- New interface and clearer navigation
- A deeper, more immersive football world
- Release date and a more spectacular match day
- Tactical Tweaks and a more realistic match engine
- Revamped training and the new Tactical Effectiveness
- Manager creator, newgens and accessibility
- 2D in the spotlight and the new In-Game Editor
- Beta, pre-orders and old saves: what SI confirmed
A different kind of video
It is presented by Chris Groves from SI’s community team. The point is not to reveal new features, but to show how the ones already announced fit into a real save. SI says the build is close to the launch version, with polish still ongoing, which is why the Development Build watermark is always on screen.
The save is a modest one, and that is a good thing: AFC Wimbledon in Sky Bet League One, in November 2026, with a relegation battle as the objective. We see the week before an away game at Leyton Orient, then top of the table, the match itself and what happens after the final whistle.
Preferences: the game opens where you want it
The first stop is Preferences, and there is a detail here that had not been shown before: a Landing Page for each section. For Portal, Squad, Tactics, Recruitment, Training and Club you choose which screen opens when you click the menu. In the video, Squad opens straight on the First Team, for example. You can also choose which screens show up when you press Continue, and keyboard shortcuts can be changed.
(Image: Sports Interactive)
The other visible change is attribute colours. There are eight tiers, from Elite to Unsuited, each with its own threshold (20, 18, 15, 12, 10, 7, 4 and 1) and its own text, background and border colour, picked from a palette or by RGB value. Below that, the position suitability colours (from Poor to Unconvincing) can be changed too, something SI had not even mentioned. If you like to glance at a squad and see straight away where the quality is, you will spend a good few minutes here.
(Image: Sports Interactive)
As for the detail levels for big monitors, the story is the same one we already told you: they only appear on QHD and 4K, and SI says it is looking at bringing them to 1080p monitors.
Portal, bookmarks and the new News Home
Portal tile swapping and reorderable bookmarks had already been shown in the first deep dive. The video shows them in use and confirms that the bookmarks bar can show or hide labels, with arrows to change the order.
The most interesting part is the News Home screen. At the top, the day’s biggest fixtures. Below, four columns: For You, with what matters to your club and league; Around The World, with the big stories elsewhere; Transfer Overview, with transfers and loans; and the Competitions Hub, with the tables of the leagues you pick. It is the first time FM really tries to make you feel there is football beyond your club without opening competitions one by one.
Training and Tactical Effectiveness in a real week
From Training, which now sits in the main bar, the video shows planning built around the tactic, with a Balanced focus and sessions such as Free Kicks, Defensive Engagement or Penalties the day before the game. Match Preparation has seven options (from Press Avoidance to Corners) and each session shows its impact on injury risk, condition, fatigue, sharpness and happiness. Copying and pasting a whole week, which we had already seen in the training deep dive, appears here in action.
(Image: Sports Interactive)
Tactical Effectiveness appears with Wimbledon’s tactic (a cautious 5-2-2-1 counter-attack) and its four gauges: tactical understanding, player ability, player buy-in and next match information. Each one lists the factors that matter, such as relationships with the manager and between team-mates, or the quality of the opposition report, and there is a toggle to see everything player by player. The gauges link straight to scouting and recruitment, so you can fix what is wrong.
(Image: Sports Interactive)
Match day, from the squad screen to the final whistle
Before kick-off, the squad screen also gets swappable tiles. The menu shown in the video gives an idea of what you can put next to the player list: dynamics, captains, discipline, hierarchy, medical centre, promises, squad feedback or squad numbers, among others.
Then comes the match. It starts in daylight and ends at night, as promised in the match day deep dive, and Chris takes the chance to mention the motion-captured animations: skill moves from high-flair players, jockeying from top defenders and smarter movement in the box. Honestly, the highlights shown are too short to draw conclusions, and that was the main criticism (more on that below).
(Image: Sports Interactive)
The match screen in detail
The match screen is where you learn the most. Between highlights, each tile has a menu to choose what it shows: dugout, Action Zones, latest scores, match events, Match Momentum, match stats, pass maps, Heat Maps, average positions, shot map and the xG story. Match stats already include progressive passes, clear-cut chances and OPPDA, a measure of pressing intensity. If you want, you can drop the 2D view and fill the screen with data.
(Image: Sports Interactive)
With Wimbledon 2-0 up at half-time, the video also shows Shouts (Chris gives the team a Well Done) and Tactical Tweaks in the second half. Nothing new compared to what we covered in the match engine deep dive, but it confirms you can have several active at once, for the team or for a single player, for as long as you like.
After the match: the competitions menu
The video ends in the competitions menu, which puts every competition you are in on a single page: the league, the FA Cup, the Carabao Cup and the EFL Trophy, each with your objective, current status, the round’s fixtures and the top performers. It is the kind of screen that in FM26 meant going through several menus.
(Image: Sports Interactive)
FM27 Touch arrives on Apple Arcade on 10 November
On 20 October, SI confirmed that FM27 Touch arrives on Apple Arcade on the same day as the other versions, 10 November. It runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, and if you already have FM26 Touch you do not need to do anything: the App Store listing updates itself to FM27 Touch on that day.
There is good news for Touch players. You can continue saves from previous versions, and progress carries across devices through the cloud. As for new features, SI has only said there are changes to the iPhone skin, recruitment and match preparation, with more details before launch. Watch out for a common mix-up: FM27 Touch is the Apple Arcade version; on iOS and Android phones, the full mobile version is still a Netflix exclusive, as we explained in our FM27 news round-up.
Arkema Première Ligue fully licensed
On 19 October, SI announced a deal with the French Football Federation to license the Arkema Première Ligue, France’s top women’s division. In FM27 the league will have official club logos, kits and player photos. In FM26 it was one of the few playable women’s leagues without a licence, so the difference will show.
It is a league with weight: it has existed since 1975, has been fully professional since 2024 and features OL Lyonnes, eight-time European champions, plus internationals from France, the Netherlands, Spain, Nigeria, Canada, Norway and the USA. SI had already said in the seventh deep dive that FM27 brings two new licensed leagues. This is the first one to be announced. The other has not been officially confirmed yet.
What the community is saying
On SI’s official forum, the video’s thread already runs to two pages, and on Reddit SI’s post had 273 upvotes, 91% approval and 274 comments when we read it. Reactions split into two clear camps.
On the positive side, many praise the customisation, which some see as the best the series has ever had, and some say the game looks much better than FM26 and that this format, showing the game actually running, is how the deep dives should have been done from the start.
On the critical side, the most upvoted comment on Reddit, with more than 500 votes, notes that custom attribute colours and swappable tiles existed before, and that it is odd to see them in a video called “new features”. Others point out that the video says high-flair players do skill moves without showing any, that the Shout is given and the video cuts before you see its effect, and that Tactical Effectiveness is still explained rather than shown. On the forum there are repeated requests to improve player interactions, AI squad building and goal sounds, and complaints about PC fans spinning up like they did in FM26. Some also spotted truncated team names in tables, an issue that goes back to FM24.
What comes next
SI promises more information on FM27 across platforms before launch and has a livestream announced, with no date yet. The Launch Preview, formerly the beta, starts one to two weeks before 10 November for those who pre-purchase the PC or Mac version.
Our take
This video does not bring big revelations, and the criticism that half of the “new features” are returns is fair. But it shows something the deep dives did not: the game flowing from screen to screen without FM26’s stumbles. Landing pages, the new News Home and the competitions menu are small things that, added together, make every game week quicker.
What is still missing is the essential part: whether the match engine responds credibly to Tactical Tweaks and Shouts, and whether Tactical Effectiveness really weighs on results. Only the Launch Preview will tell. In the meantime, the French league licence is good news for anyone who plays women’s football, and Touch on Apple Arcade with cloud saves solves an old headache for anyone who plays on several devices.
Watch the gameplay video
Sources
- Gameplay Preview: New Features & Upgrades in Action | FM27 (YouTube)
- The video’s thread on the official Sports Interactive forum
- SI’s thread on r/footballmanagergames (u/SI_CommunityChris)
- FM27 Touch launches on Apple Arcade November 10 (footballmanager.com)
- Arkema Première Ligue fully licensed in Football Manager 27 (footballmanager.com)
