The annual release of a Football Manager game is a comforting part of the natural progression of time, even as someone who has never played one, nor ever will. Originally called Championship Manager, first released in 1992, there has either been a new game or an annual update disk every year since, changing names to Football Manager in 2005 after a switch from Eidos to Sega but never missing a season. Until now.
Developers Sports Interactive has put out an official notice that, following missing the usual fall release window in 2024, Football Manager 25 is never going to happen. A 32 year streak, ended.
“We know this will come as a huge disappointment,” says Sports Interactive over the surprising announcement. “Especially given that the release date has already moved twice, and you have been eagerly anticipating the first gameplay reveal. ”
As a Brit living in Britain, what the U.S. so quaintly calls “soccer” has always been an unavoidable aspect of life, despite my absolute lack of interest and dislike of so much of the culture that surrounds it. I would imagine, not least because of its confusing name, Football Manager isn’t quite such a staple of North American gaming life: just think of it as the ultimate fantasy football league, but association football, not your peculiar game of rugby-chess. Every year a new game would be released, sneered at by awful people like me as “a spreadsheet simulator,” but become the obsession of millions.
The franchise has had enormous influence on real-world soccer. A manager of one of the biggest teams in the world got started by playing FM games in his childhood, while agents have been alleged to try to bribe the games’ developers to improve the stats of their clients.
As time’s gone on, Football Manager games have obviously become far more complicated and elaborate, with the most astonishingly accurate recreations of the international sport, with eye-wateringly detailed specifications for each and every player from every team in every league, allowing you to be the manager of your favorite team (or imagined one), controlling every aspect to an obsessive degree.
You might think making a new game is just a case of plugging in the new data to last year’s spreadsheets, but the series’ ambition far exceeds this. FM25, originally due to be released in early November 2024, was intended to be a huge overhaul and a new step forward for the game. This proved trickier than hoped, leading to two big release delays, and now the entire cancellation of the game.
“Due to a variety of challenges that we’ve been open about to date, and many more unforeseen, we currently haven’t achieved what we set out to do in enough areas of the game, despite the phenomenal efforts of our team,” says Sports Interactive in the statement. “Each decision to delay the release was made with the aim of getting the game closer to the desired level but, as we approached critical milestones at the turn of the year, it became unmistakably clear that we would not achieve the standard required, even with the adjusted timeline.”
Overall experience and the interface have not reached a point where the developer or its publisher feels comfortable releasing the game, and despite having found a new focus to improve things, “we’re too far away from the standards you deserve.”
Just the nature of the football season itself means there’s an unmoveable deadline after which releasing the game at all would be folly. SI says that’s March, “as it would be too late in the football season to expect players to then buy another game later in the year,” and isn’t willing to release the game as is by that point. “We could have pressed on, released FM25 in its current state, and fixed things down the line—but that’s not the right thing to do.”
This means 2025 will be the first season not to see a CM/FM game in over 30 years, but also that SI has an extra eight or nine months to beat the new format into shape, updated with the 2026 season’s statistics. Anyone who pre-ordered the game will be automatically refunded, says SI, and as for why this announcement has come so very, very late in the day,
Due to stakeholder compliance, including legal and financial regulations, today was the earliest date that we could issue this statement.
There are also no plans to release the modern equivalent of an update disk for 2025, as SI says “this is a substantial undertaking” and wants to keep all focus on getting the game finished for the following football season. Finally, when it comes to the various subscription platforms that host FM24,
We are currently in discussions with our various platform partners and licensors and hope to extend our FM24 agreements. We will provide an update on this in due course.
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