v0.6.0 - Gegenpressing

FMMatchLens now brings live match animation and key event replays to the Tactical Board. Watch players and the ball move across the pitch, or turn on the new Pitch Control overlay to explore how each team influences the space around them.

Player information is more complete, too. This update adds pre-match condition and season statistics, uses the shirt names and numbers worn in the match, and brings team colors closer to the kits you see in the game.

✨ Highlights

Watch the Match on the Tactical Board

The Tactical Board now has a Live mode alongside the existing Events view. When connected to a live match, the animation follows the game's speed. When watching an archive, it follows the playback speed set on the timeline.

Live animation is still an experimental feature.

See Who Controls the Space

Match animation opens the door to more advanced analysis. It gives us a way to bring ideas from football research into FMMatchLens, including views that FM itself has never offered.

The first of these is Pitch Control, an optional overlay available for both live matches and archive playback.

It uses player positions, movement speed and direction, and distance from the ball to estimate each team's influence across the pitch. The result appears as a layer of team colors:

• Stronger colors indicate a stronger advantage in that area
• Areas where the teams are evenly matched remain transparent
• The overlay updates as players and the ball move

Pitch Control uses an approximate model to help you explore positioning and the shape of a match.

Because FM's match engine behaves differently from real football, the overlay may not always reflect which team has the upper hand in the game.

Research reference: Wide Open Spaces: A statistical technique for measuring space creation in professional soccer

Replay Key Moments

The Tactical Board's Events view now lets you replay key moments. Click a supported event point and the board loads the surrounding match data, then plays the action as an animated clip.

The first supported events are:

• Dribbles — Watch the dribbler, nearby players, and the ball move through the action, with a trail showing the dribbling route.
• Shot chains — Click the first event in a chain to watch the full sequence and see how the attack develops.

More Complete Player Information

Player profile cards now show the correct pre-match condition, match sharpness, and morale.

The player-data table also lets you switch between the current match and several season views:

• League, cup, and club totals
• International appearances and international totals
• Friendlies, other competitions, and an additional category whose meaning is still unknown

Season data includes minutes played, goals, assists, disciplinary records, passing, defending, shooting, expected goals, and more.

Player labels now favor the shirt names and numbers used in the match. This makes lineups, tables, and animations easier to match to what you see in FM, while leaving more room in the panels. Player names also follow your in-game localization settings automatically.

Colors That Feel Closer to the Match

Match kit colors are now included when choosing team colors, making it easier for the dashboard to match FM's own presentation. The dashboard still takes your theme into account and picks colors that remain easy to tell apart.

Other visual improvements include:

• Goal outlines on the Tactical Board
• A brighter purple in the Opta-inspired dark theme, with separate team colors for dark mode
• Simpler momentum-chart tooltips
• Refined xG timeline tooltips and repositioned totals for easier reading

Epic Support Joins Steam and Xbox Game Pass

The plugin now recognizes supported Epic builds alongside Steam and Xbox Game Pass. FMMatchLens now supports all major Windows storefronts for the game.

📦 Archive Format and Compatibility

This update introduces .fmlens archive format 2.7. New recordings preserve pre-match sharpness, season statistics, shirt names and numbers, and team kit colors.

They also record player positions, speed, and facing direction at each match tick, along with the ball's position and height. This is the data behind match animation and event replays.

The new format stores movement more efficiently:

• Player positions are recorded to the nearest centimeter, with later positions stored as changes from the previous frame
• Total distance covered is rounded to whole meters, with changes stored separately
• Speed, facing direction, and each part of the ball's position are only written when they change
• Direction changes are stored compactly, including when a player turns past the 0°/360° boundary

In compression tests, re-encoding 2.6 archives with the new frame encoding reduced their size by around 48%.

New 2.7 recordings contain more data: player coordinates are now read correctly, and player speed, facing direction, and ball coordinates are included. Even with those additions, average archive size in the tests was 1,911 KB, using around 14% less disk space than 2.6 recordings.

The reader continues to support archives in formats 2.1–2.6.

⬆️ Upgrade Instructions

Download and update both of the following packages:

• FMMatchLens-plugin-v0.6.0.zip
• FMMatchLens-dashboard-v0.6.0.zip

Extract the plugin archive into the Football Manager 2026 game root and allow it to overwrite the existing FMMatchLens files.

It is recommended to extract the new dashboard into a separate directory so that its assets files are not mixed with files from an older version.

Full Changelog: v0.5.0...v0.6.0