Summary
- Sports Interactive canceled Football Manager 25 after multiple delays, citing player experience concerns.
- Football Manager series is known for its high standards and industry-leading databases.
- Football Manager 25 intended to move to Unity engine, features cut prompting community controversy.
Sports Interactive has confirmed that it has canceled Football Manager 25 after multiple initial delays. Football Manager 25 was planned to be released in March 2025, after being pushed from the series’ usual October to November launch period, but even this has proven to be too ambitious for the studio.
Ever since its debut with Football Manager 2005, the series has established itself among the best sports strategy games around. Sports Interactive’s annual titles have always upheld a high standard, even if innovation has arguably been stifled in recent releases. The databases in the games have been considered industry-leading, with several examples of soccer teams using them to inform real-life decisions. Sports Interactive has released a Football Manager game every year since the series’ inception, until now.
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In a new development update posted online, Sports Interactive confirmed that “following extensive internal discussion and careful consideration with SEGA, we have made the difficult decision to cancel Football Manager 25 and shift our focus to the next release.” Football Manager 25 had already seen several delays, the latest of which pushed it to March 2025. However, right now, “the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be,” and the studio is “unwilling to go beyond a March release as it would be too late in the football season to expect players to then buy another game later in the year.”
The studio does highlight that releasing the game in its current state is “not the right thing to do.” Pre-orders had already opened for Football Manager 25, and players are able to get refunds for the title “in full if purchased through an official SEGA-approved retailer.” In the meantime, there will be no Football Manager 2024 data update, with Sports Interactive describing this as a “substantial undertaking” and claiming it would “divert critical resources away from the development of the next release.” Players can instead take a look at the hardest Football Manager 2024 saves to get through until FM26.
Football Manager 25 was intended to be the most significant step forward for the franchise in years, moving away from a proprietary engine to Unity, giving Sports Interactive a blank slate to work with. Development updates for the game so far indicated that several features available in previous titles had been cut, leading to some controversy in the community. The idea of short-term pain for long-term gain seemed to be on the agenda, even more so now that the game has actually been canceled. While this news is sad now, gamers must hope it’s necessary for Football Manager to remain among the best simulation game franchises.
Simulation
Strategy
Sports
- Released
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March, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Sports Interactive