25.03.2025 - It’s been a few weeks since the news broke. Sports Interactive will not be releasing Football Manager 2025. It’s an anomaly, for sure. Every year for decades, we’ve had Championship Manager or Football Manager released annually. After two delays to this title, the brand has decided to close production on the 2025 edition and refocus all efforts on Football Manager 2026. What does this mean for the brand and game series?
Why was the game canceled?
After two delays, the game was officially canceled, and no versions were ever released. The official line is that between the last delay and February 2025, development encountered more problems, and a game of any quality that the FM community deserves could not be created, prompting the canceled title. Subsequently, they shifted their focus to FM26.
Whether fans and players will get more information on these challenges and problems is uncertain. However, it is likely to be due to the vast amount of work this title required. For the first time in 20 years, the game changed its engine to Unity, which will undoubtedly require a lot of grafting.
The entire game's graphics and animation were supposed to be significantly updated to be more realistic and graphically pleasing, including the much-criticized Newgen aesthetics.
The gameplay was also going to have a major addition: Women’s Football would be included in various leagues with the same level of detail as the men’s game, which has been part of the series for decades.
All of these updates and modifications must have taken their toll on the Sports Interactive team, which eventually stated that these desired improvements were not realistic for the 2025 release. Anyone who pre-ordered the game has been refunded and asked to wait patiently for FM26.
FM26 has to be a belter
Sports Interactive promised so much for FM25; therefore, it hurt a lot more when it was canceled. It wasn’t a run-of-the-mill release; it was the upgrade that vowed to take the gamer series to the next level.
Given their terrible luck with release dates for FM25, nobody has dared to provide a firm date to mark on the calendar for the 2026 game. However, when it does come out – it simply has to deliver on everything expected of FM25 and beyond.
Skipping one cycle might be better than a delayed release.
When Football Manager was delayed, it was stated that the game would be out in March 2025. While this or the reality of no FM25 is terrible, there would have been specific fears if they had released a game in March. It’s in the middle of the game lifecycle, which is troublesome. Especially if Football Manager 2026 was released on time, Sports Interactive would have been asking players to buy one game and then another in quick succession.
Sports betting tie-ins within the game
Football Manager has long been loved by its players for its ability to emulate the real world surrounding football. In recent editions, this simulation of the football ecosphere has media outlets and even pregame odds from the best offshore sportsbooks for US players available for all to see.
The game’s main information feed populates news stories on upcoming games relevant to the user’s team, like match previews. These articles are accompanied by a betting odds section, much like real-world sports articles.
Other sections encompass sports betting sections, like the season preview screen, which resembles a sportsbook website. This is because the game predicts the competition winner, assigning title odds and other speculative markets like the competition's top scorer. Some of these odds were ‘presented by’ a sportsbook company based on the end user’s location. This would have been a sponsorship revenue source from some gambling firms – although such income will be lost for the 2025 edition.
The drop-off in players
While Football Manager's culture lends itself to data collecting, adapting databases, and updating various strands of football imagery, some players don’t get involved in zip files and creating new subfolders in the game’s deep mechanics.
They don’t want to have to install updates, so they buy the game every year. This is not only for the updates to the game's aesthetic and mechanics but also for the refreshed squads with the new season’s kit and all the right players moving around the football clubs.
Not having this in their lives for a calendar year will expose them to other pastimes. Some players may not return to Football Manager 2026, having gone without the game for a year; they have used that opportunity to reevaluate what they do with their free time.
