Football Manager 25 Cancelled

Growing up, you learn that certain things are immutable facts of life. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, everyone dies eventually, and Sports Interactive releases a Football Manager game every year.

While there is no apparent change to the other items on the list, Sports Interactive has announced it is skipping a year for the first time since 1994.

The fateful announcement went up on official Football Manager social media channels, with a brief explanation that “following extensive internal discussion and careful consideration with SEGA,” Sports Interactive has “made the difficult decision to cancel Football Manager 25.”

The abortive sequel to the football coaching classic has had a rocky history before its cancellation. Last year, SEGA president Shuji Utsumi explained that Football Manager 2025 had been delayed due to a quality issue.

Until today, players (many of which had already pre-ordered the game) were expecting Football Manager 25 to launch in March, instead of the original November 2024 release window.

The Sports Interactive statement says the decision took so long to be communicated because of “stakeholder compliance, including legal and financial regulations” that prevented the company from going public before today.

Football Manager fans had raised concerns over the franchise’s latest installment after two successive delays, but there was still anticipation over a gameplay reveal.

In its marketing campaign last year, Sports Interactive had claimed the game would bring the Football Manager franchise to new technical and visual standards, bringing it up to date with the current generation of games.

The cancellation statement says “the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be”, and advances that consumer playtesting validated that the game is “too far away from the standards you deserve.”

Time constraints also weighed in on the decision to bin Football Manager 25. By delaying the game until March, Sports Interactive backed itself into a corner where either the game came out perfect, or people would skip it outright.

Releasing a seasonal football game with a couple of months to go until the end of the European football season, by far the franchise’s biggest focus, posed a risk to the eventual release of Football Manager 26 which should come in November.

Sports Interactive now has a long 9 months ahead to earn back the players’ trust, and cook up a game that is worth playing upon release this November. If they fail, it might be the beginning of the end for one of football gaming’s pillars.

As for players, outside of waiting for refunds, all that’s left is downloading the season update mod for Football Manager 2024.