And so, another soldier falls. The bullet was fired a while ago, rippling through the months in slow motion, moving with an agonising certainty, primed at the heart of its target and its eventual, inevitable kill. Football Manager 25 is no more. Worse than no more – it never was. After delay and delay, missed deadline and missed deadline, the game is officially calling time on its ambitions. Like Arsenal, they’ve decided that next year will be their year.
In this specific scenario, I think it makes sense. With no Saka, no fit striker (at least not one who can score goals), and having been dumped out of both domes- oh right, Football Manager. Yes, in this case, it makes sense. When they didn’t hit their targeted launch date of November 2024 (which is when all the recent games in the series have launched), it was fighting a losing battle. November is still a decent way into the football season the game is built for, and the deeper you get into said season, the less relevant the game is. Better to call time now and make the next game even better. We’ve been here before.
Pretty much every game used to be an annual series. When I was growing up, my favourite games were Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Tomb Raider, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Crash had a game every year between 1996 and 1999, taking 2000 off before returning in 2001. Including handheld games, Spyro had a run from 1998 to 2008. Tomb Raider, now enduring its longest ever drought between mainline games at seven years and counting, had a mainline game every year from 1996 to 2000, then two years of handhelds, then another mainline entry, followed by two years off before hitting us with another three year streak from 2006-08. Tony Hawk’s kept the combo streak between 1999-2007, and even then landed with a revert manual into DS game Motion and peripheral game Ride in ’08 and ’09.
Any child of the ’90s can probably point to their favourite childhood games and spot a similar pattern. As games have gotten bigger, more graphically intense, and made with higher budgets under more pressure, development times have ballooned. I believe these will soon curve down and plateau, but yearly releases will be rarer and rarer. Though sports titles still manage it (and Football Manager is a sports title, so its failure is a little surprising), we’ve seen many games throw in the towel on yearly launches to reach the level fans demand. Assassin’s Creed is probably the most high profile example in recent years, but any non-sports or Call of Duty game with a yearly cycle is now a very rare beast.
But again, Football Manager is a sports title. One with a lot of inner complexities, and on a smaller budget with a smaller team than a behemoth like EA FC, but still. It has the year in its name. Football Manager 25 is not the 25th version of the game, it is the game for the year 2025 (which, confusingly, was therefore set for a late 2024 launch). This may be a blip and we will see FM26 followed by FM27 and… well, you know how numbers work. It might just be that this specific team got this specific game wrong in a way that warranted kicking the can along the road so far it made sense to change the number on the can.
However, it feels like a symptom of modern gaming where studios and players demand more in the same time for the same price. Something has got to give. Long term, I believe this will be fan expectations and we’ll settle for the same sorts of games made significantly faster rather than ever bigger games made on increasingly impossible timescales. But how do you make a game like Football Manager ‘bigger’? Allow me to introduce you to the elephant in the room.
Football Manager 25 was set to be the first game in the series to include the women’s game, which is a far more significant undertaking to adding it to EA FC (where it arrived in FIFA 16) because of the extra statistical depth required and the far greater ambition shown in Football Manager’s attempt to incorporate the game wholesale, rather than a few select international teams and superclubs.
So, are the women to blame? The answer is very simple – whatever you believe, you can keep on believing. There are some football fans who simply do not like the women’s game. They consider it insulting that it is put on the same podium as the men’s game, and use all sorts of lazy buzzwords like ‘agendas’ to describe how they feel. The people who feel this most strongly are probably annoying to be around, but they have a point – when I see a headline ‘Arsenal Sign Striker’ and I click to see it is neither Alexander Isak nor Ollie Watkins, but a female player for the women’s team, I feel I have been misled. The women’s game is not as popular as the men’s game, and adding it to Football Manager will have taken up extra resources.
On the other hand, there are some football fans who love the women’s game, and make a point of including it with the men’s game – the sorts of people who tell you that, actually, England did win the Euros recently, thank you very much. They feel the women’s game is unnecessarily disrespected by people seeking to denigrate women as a whole and use sport as an acceptable guise. The people who feel this most strongly are probably annoying to be around, but they have a point – when a male goalkeeper makes a mistake (see: David Raya in the League Cup semi-final), he’s a moron. When a female goalkeeper makes a mistake, the whole game is a joke and they should use smaller goals and there’s no way this is real football and so on and so on until one error becomes emblematic of the women’s game overall.
As far as Football Manager goes, it’s designed to be a complete database of world football, and while the women’s game is not as popular as the men’s game, the women’s leagues in England, Germany, Spain, and the USA are significantly more popular than many of the lower or more obscure leagues included in the game. There is no one playing in the Malaysia Super League who is more famous than Alex Morgan.
The truth is, we will never really know. In order to completely capture world football, it’s understandable that women were set to be included. It’s also a reasonable assumption that adding essentially an entirely new sport to a game with fairly limited resources may have been a factor in its delay. But it does feel as though annual releases as a whole are going to be a thing of the past. Today Football Manager, tomorrow the world.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
83/100
- Released
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November 6, 2024