In an unprecedented move, Sports Interactive has announced that the next installment in their popular football management simulation series, Football Manager 25, has been delayed until March 2025.
Marking the first time in the franchise’s 20-year history that such a delay has happened, this move is actually the second overall delay for Football Manager 25 alone.
Initially set to make its standard September 2024 release window, the game was first pushed back by roughly two months, its new shelf date landing in November 2024.
However, on October 10th, the studio would announce that, due to needing “more time to deliver the best possible experience for this first installment in a new era of Football Manager,” the series’ next entry would now be releasing in March 2025.
“This additional time has not been sufficient to ensure the game quality and experience meets your expectations and our very high standards,” explained Sports Interactive in an official statement. “Timelines were already tight and, as rightly pointed out by many of your recent comments, we were simply rushing too much and in danger of compromising our usual standards. This has put an enormous amount of pressure on everyone working across the studio, who are all passionately committed to delivering the best game possible.”
“FM25 is the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation,” the developer added. “We simply cannot compromise the delivery of this crucial juncture in Football Manager’s history by rushing to release it in November.”
In further compounding the game’s issues, Sports Interactive also confirmed that fans will be bereft of any new gameplay footage for some time, as its release has also been postponed to January 2025.
Unsurprisingly, fans aren’t happy with this news, particularly due to the fact that if FM 25 is launching in March 2025, that would mean that players will only be able to launch their own campaign when the real football season is nearly over – and there is little point in beginning a save so late into the season that many clubs are already preparing for the next one.
In response, some fans have begun to call for Sports Interactive to just scrap FM25 all together instead either release its inevitable follow-up earlier next year or push out a squad update for the already-existing FM24.
“Focus on FM26 then, we can still play FM24,” fan @FMGaruda said on Twitter in response to the news. “You just need to release a transfer update, the official one.”
Another long-time fan and player of the franchise added to the sentiment by saying, “This is undoubtedly a representation of the loss of a season for us as players. After so many years of following its strange,… but I only see one logical solution good for both parties: Official Update FM24 as soon as possible, Drop idea of FM25 (that doesn’t make any sense!!!), [and] super launch FM26 earlier @ august/september when most seasons start, aftermarket moves, then roll out with feedback.”
One fan called out Sports Interactive studio director Miles Jacobsen, sarcastically asking, “Anybody seen Miles ? Asking for people to pre-order knowing the game is nowhere near ready is a disgrace.”
Even more unfortunately for Sports Interactive is the fact that this next entry in the rich history of Football Manager was facing controversy even before the first delay announcement, as fans of the franchise were dismally told that the some of the more popular features from previous installments weren’t coming back for the latest game, including touchline shouts, create a club, fantasy draft, and more – and that’s to say nothing of the frustration felt towards the thus far complete absence of any substantial gameplay footage.
However, perhaps the most vocal issue for fans of the series is the fact that FM25 not only includes women’s football teams, but is heavily banking on this feature in its marketing, as many fans felt that this was unnecessary pandering being done at the expense of the game’s quality.
This feeling was perhaps best summarized by Twitter user @sambamaj, who opined “It is a nice addition. However, I will never use it. The decision to scrap previous content (international football) on behalf of new features makes me really sad. Won’t buy the game this year. I fear the decline has begun for FM.”
