‘Football Manager 25’ – Should They Scrap It Now?

The makers of Football Manager find themselves in a tough spot. Unable to complete a huge overhaul of the game in time for its usual October/November release, the game has now been pushed back to March.

Some fans are now questioning whether the game should even be released at all, or whether all the development team’s energies should be funneled into Football Manager 26.

Let’s explore the tough decisions that the game’s makers face as they decide what to do next.

Football Manager 25: What Went Wrong?

Football Manager 25 was always going to be a tricky launch. Sports Interactive announced over a year ago that this would be the first version of the game to adopt a new Unity-based graphics engine, and also the first to include women’s football. Two enormous changes to a game that is practically locked into an annual release cycle.

Sports Interactive has clearly been working on the new Unity engine and the inclusion of the women’s game for far longer than a year. Work on integrating women’s football began in earnest in 2021, and the shift to Unity was confirmed in 2023, although it’s likely work started well before then.

Yet, despite the lengthy run-up, it’s not been long enough. The Sports Interactive announcement confirming the March delay admitted that the planned November launch (already a slight delay in itself) was “simply rushing too much and in danger of compromising our usual standards.”

The fact the company hadn’t shown as much as a screenshot of the new match engine, just seven weeks before the November launch date, suggested it was the new graphics that were causing the biggest headaches.

The Problems With March

So, Sports Interactive has bought itself time, announcing the game will now launch in March, with gameplay reveals “towards the end of January”.

However, March is far from an ideal time to launch a new football game. Part of the excitement of a new Football Manager release is the data update, being able to play the game with all the summer player transfers at their new clubs and all the teams in the right divisions, at least for the European leagues. March, on the other hand, is at the tail-end of the European season. The “new” data will be outdated within a couple of months of release.

Many of the game’s fans have been pressing for a data update to Football Manager 24 to compensate for the FM25 delay, but in an announcement this week, Sports Interactive said that won’t happen. It’s not the simple spreadsheet refresh that some of the developer’s harsher critics believe it is. It involves haggling with licensors, back porting changes made to the database, and adjusting competition rules, all of which make it a “substantial undertaking which would take critical resources away from developing FM25,” Sports Interactive claimed in a statement.

A March release could have been an opportunity to hook the game on one of next summer’s major international football tournaments, not least the women’s Euros, which coincide neatly with the arrival of the women’s game in Football Manager. But there’s a problem here too: international football was dropped from the feature list for FM25 earlier this year because it wasn’t up to scratch.

Adding it back in now would seem risky, and it’s unlikely to be a huge sales driver anyway. Sports Interactive admitted that only around 5% of players even bothered with international management in the first place.

Wait for Football Manager 26?

All of which makes the case for scrapping Football Manager 25 and focusing on a fully polished launch for FM26 stronger.

There’s no doubt it would be a financial blow for Sports Interactive and publisher Sega. According to Sport Interactive’s latest published accounts, Football Manager sales were worth almost £32 million ($41 million) for the year ending March 2023, while staff salaries and associated costs were creeping toward £17 million ($22 million).

Then there are licensing costs to pay for the rights to use real player/team names, photos and kits in the game. For FM25, Sports Interactive had signed a deal with the English Premier League for the first time, which were likely acquired at considerable cost. Taking a year out, therefore, would likely cost the company well in excess of £50 million ($65 million).

Then the annual release cycle has to be considered. Will fans pay full price for FM25 in March (assuming the new deadline is met) and then again in October if FM26 returns to schedule? Admittedly many players now get the game via an Xbox Game Pass subscription, which removes that up-front cost, but regular buyers may decide to skip FM25 and wait for the revised data and extra six months of polish that FM26 should offer.

History Repeating

Sports Interactive might take heart from the fact this exact scenario has happened before to Football Manager, albeit a very long time ago.

Back in 2002, when the game was still called Championship Manager, the game was moving to a new 2D match engine for the first time. The company struggled to get it working on time for the fall release, and so Championship Manager 4 was delayed until — yep, you guessed it — March 2003. It went on to break U.K. video game sales records.

However, it was far from perfect. The game was beset with bugs and many players complained that the new 2D match engine didn’t run smoothly on their PCs. The buggy release certainly didn’t do the franchise any long-term damage, but it’s worth bearing in mind that this was before the era of social media. Today’s players are much less forgiving, and much more vocal, about substandard games.

The Pressures Of Management

There’s no easy solution for Sports Interactive, no path forward that’s not going to upset some fans of the game, who are already frothing with anger on the company’s forums.

Much like the constantly under-fire football managers the game simulates, the developers need a big result to turn around a tricky season.