Throughout the year, one issue that I’ve been experiencing in Football Manager 26 has to do with injuries. It isn’t so much that they’re more frequent than in previous years, but more so that they seem to come in groups. In past years, injuries could certainly stack up, but they rarely came in clusters. However, this year, injuries seem to come in groups of either 2 or 3. And now, other players are starting to notice.
A new Reddit thread has FM26 players comparing war stories — and not the on-pitch kind. One virtual manager posted a screenshot showing four first-team players going down injured in the same training session, sparking a wider community discussion about whether Football Manager 26‘s training model is a little too punishing this year.
Football Manager 26 Players Can Only Laugh At The Pain
The post quickly filled with jokes (“Introducing the squad to Fight Club might have been a mistake”) but the jokes didn’t hide a growing pattern: training injuries feel more common, more clustered, and occasionally outright bizarre.
Multiple commenters shared similar experiences, including sudden flu outbreaks taking out half a squad, freak accidents during gym sessions, or even players getting injured on scheduled rest days. One user noted that the quality of training facilities seems to correlate with injury spikes this year. Others pointed to staff issues: overloaded coaches or poorly balanced assignment workloads leading to sloppy session execution.
Plenty of veteran FM players chalked it up to the series’ classic “dice roll” nature, but some believe FM26’s revamped training logic may be more aggressive, especially when combined with higher intensity schedules. A few even blamed assistants who either mismanage intensity behind the scenes or, in one story, fired an entire staff due to expiring contracts, leaving players unmonitored and overworked until replacements arrived.
Whether these clusters represent bad luck, harsher tuning, or emerging balancing problems is still unclear. Sports Interactive hasn’t formally addressed training-related injury rates in the FM26 patch notes, even ahead of the release of Content Update 1, which is scheduled for wide release next Monday.
For now, the community consensus is a mix of caution and comedy: keep an eye on training intensity, rotate workloads, double-check assignments, and expect that even the safest “Low” load day might still randomly send your star winger into the physio room.
