Nomad has created a new visual identity – inspired by the manager’s technical area – for Football Manager. The hugely popular game makes its much-anticipated return next month, after its original 2025 launch was postponed.
Nomad has been working with the Football Manager team since 2021, evolving the brand through slight tweaks year-on-year.
But Sports Interactive – the studio which makes the game – wanted a bigger rebrand to mirror the major changes coming with the new release.
Football Manager 26 has new licenses with FIFA and the Premier League, includes women’s football for the first time, and is now built on the Unity engine.
“It’s very much a strategic moment for us, so we didn’t want a soft refresh,” Sports Interactive’s marketing director, Alan Granger, explains. “We felt for a while our brand has lacked distinctiveness. It made sense to align the new brand around this new era for us, and this next-generation product.”
Nomad’s new identity for Football Manager
While Granger and Football Manager brand marketing manager Kamal Miah challenged Nomad to push boundaries and take a “holistic look at everything,” everyone involved knew that they had to be mindful of the franchise’s huge and devoted fanbase.
“People absolutely love this game, and so change was not something we treat lightly,” says Nomad co-founder Terry Stephens.
Their existing relationship emboldened Nomad to challenge the client and make suggestions, such as the need for a new logo, which wasn’t initially part of the brief.
As the game continues to grow with international audiences, many of whom don’t speak English, Stephens says that “a universal symbol that sits at the heart of the system felt like a smart thing.”
For the new mark, Nomad worked with designer Miles Newlyn to create a symbol inspired by a three-panel football, with ‘F’ and “M’ rendered in a fluid, abstract style.
“It can adapt to these different markets, but it also to the future ambition, to create a short-form symbol that will hold up in 20 or 30 years,” says Nomad design director George Edwards.
Miah says they considered many iterations of the design, and every tiny detail was considered. “Where we landed is very intentional in showcasing the movement of the ball,” he says. “It’s tilting forward to show progressive energy.”
The way the logo is used actually changed between the aborted 2025 release and the new one. Granger says they reviewed all the design decisions made last year – because both “football and gaming are constantly changing” – and they wanted to ensure the work was right for the new context, 12 months on.
“One of the key learnings was that we weren’t being confident enough with the symbol in isolation,” Miah explains. “It was actually impacting the legibility because we were shoehorning it into places where it didn’t really work.”
The main building block of the new visual system is inspired by the managers’ technical area – the two rectangles either side of the half-way line where bosses direct their players, berate the officials, celebrate goals and bemoan defensive mistakes.
“It’s a gift,” Stephens says. “It was one of those things where we were like, ‘Why didn’t we think of this before’?”
Nomad used the rectangle as a design device to bring “focus and intensity” – it’s used in both static and motion assets, vertically and horizontally.
“That’s a manager’s domain, and where their destiny is defined,” Granger explains. “It’s so simple, but that’s when branding’s at its best. It’s a really ownable symbol for us.”
It also influenced the motion design principles, as a starting point from which the visual assets could flex. “That’s where the game is won and lost,” Miah says. “So the motion principles open up from that device, transitioning from there so it doesn’t feel enclosed.”
Edwards says other parts of the motion design were inspired by the ebb and flow of football matches. “They are built around anticipation – these longer, drawn-out build-ups with sudden drops of excitement.”
And the technical area also shaped the new key art for the game’s packaging. Managers – both male and female – are shown in their technical areas, with the action unfolding behind them, “so that our USP as a management simulation was clear from the artwork,” Miah explains.
For the typeface, Nomad commissioned the Pangram Pangram foundry to create FM Universe. Edwards says the new type had to “do two jobs” – riffing off the sharp edges of the technical area, while also reflecting the “tapering nature, smooth curves and pinches” of the symbol.
The type was an integral part of increasing the confidence and ownability of the new brand. “We used to throw logos literally everywhere, on every asset,” Miah says. “We wanted other visual assets that could represent the brand, and the new font helps a lot with that.”
The brand’s use of purple was one of the only things that had to remain – usefully purple is not associated with any big football clubs, which might enrage rival fans. But the shade of purple was updated, and it’s used in different combinations in the new identity.
Nomad’s new type for Football Manager, created with Pangram Pangram
Miah says that previously, their designers sometimes hit what they came to call “the purple wall,” when they had to use lots of brand colour in place of imagery from licenses they didn’t yet have. With the new agreements in place, a refined colour balance will work across the much wider range of imagery they now have access to.
With the launch of the new game now just a couple of weeks away, Granger says the new identity is already proving its worth.
“The biggest compliment I can pay is that normally at this point, us brand marketers are absolutely fed up with seeing the brand,” he says. “But we don’t feel like that. We haven’t really scratched the surface yet of how we can use it, and how we can flex it. And that’s tremendously exciting.”
That long-term ambition is why the project became so broad, Stephens explains. “It’s about putting the component parts in place so the brand can communicate coherently for years to come.”
Nomad’s new identity for Football Manager
Nomad’s new identity for Football Manager