It was yesterday that I was writing about the stasis that major sports games find themselves in, with annual updates so minimal it's getting increasingly tough to see what's changed year to year. One sports game--Football Manager--had been looking to buck that trend in 2024, but sadly it has now suffered two major mishaps in quick succession.
The first came on September 4, when developers Sports Interactive announced that the game's international management mode--where players can not just manage a club side, but a national team as well--was being canned so that they could get the main game out on time.
Now, today, they've said that Football Manager 25 itself, which should have been out very soon, won't be out until March 2025. That's not a huge delay for a normal video game, but for a sports game, where so much of the appeal is based on featuring the latest rosters and teams, it's a colossal blow.
The reason for both moves is pretty major: for the first time in a long time, Football Manager 25 was rebuilding itself from the ground up. New engine, new menus, new layout, the works. It was a bold decision to make, but also a necessary one; like the sports games I wrote about yesterday, Football Manager was starting to feel a bit stale, its sluggish menus and dated presentation making it look increasingly tired.
This delay will be a huge deal for the game and for its sales, because March is nearing the end of the European football season, which normally wraps up in May. Traditionally, like other football games, Football Manager would release towards the end of the calendar year, which was early enough to still play out most of the current season (which starts in Aug-Sep), while also allowing the game to be on shelves (physical or otherwise) in time for the holidays.
Nevertheless, I think this is great. Unlike other major sports games, Sports Interactive recognised their game's advancing age, made a bold decision to get with the times and stuck to it. It hasn't entirely panned out, sure, but a move like this isn't made for just one year, it's made for years and even decades to come, and so even if Football Manager 25 doesn't really come together--and let's be real, given this delay there's a chance it may not come out at all--everyone involved in this decision still deserves an enormous amount of respect.
Especially when you consider how frank the team are in the announcement post, writing:
In the previous blog we explained that it has been a difficult development cycle for the studio. Many things have been moving slower than we had predicted – despite everyone in the team working at an incredible pace to try and get everything done.
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. We simply cannot compromise the delivery of this crucial juncture in Football Manager’s history by rushing to release it in November.
Of course, this is not where any of us expected to be seven weeks out from our release but, in the spirit of our studio values, we always consider the bigger picture – and the bigger picture here is that we need this additional time to deliver a game that we can all be proud of.
Whatever happens to Football Manager 25, I'm a lot more optimistic about Football Manager 26 and 27 than I am about any other big sports game.
